Leon Botstein
Twenty years ago, Leon Botstein started the annual Bard Music Festival. This year the festival focuses on the Viennese modernist Alban Berg. Botstein pitches Berg’s difficult, dissonant work to audiences who normally can’t stand 20th-century music. He tells Kurt that music suffers from “masterpiece syndrome”, which keeps attention off of lesser-known artists — and prevents audiences from understanding them.
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