Two striking examples of challenging performances that 'shouldn't' work but do.

An overview of the wide variety of creatively transgressive performances available on the Challenging Performance website, challengingperformance.com.

Wondering how many different performances a classical musician could give of the same score, I asked friends and colleagues what they thought might be possible...

Ella Marchment (Helios Collective, director), Leo Geyer (conductor, composer) and I (as dramaturg) developed a reading of Purcell's 'Dido & Aeneas' score which made new, coherent sense of the text and the music, addressing themes of our time. Watch THE VIDEO at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h38DMVBi9IM&t=475s

In current opera productions the stage and music directors work alongside each other using completely different and incompatible belief systems. As we’ve seen, there is no good reason not to reread the score just as radically as the text, opening up the intriguing option of performing the score in such a way as to tell the same story as the staging...

The results of a questionnaire among the performers of 'Dido & Belinda' finds most happy with both the process and the outcome, some to their great surprise.

The 'Dido & Belinda' audiences' questionnaire suggests that the audiences we can already see emerging with new venues and new forms of presentation are likely to be sympathetic to much more creative interactions with texts from the past. There are real possibilities here for generating new work and new audiences for adventurous young musicians.

Why does classical music figure so infrequently in media that regularly discuss art and theatre at a sophisticated level? GIven a working environment supportive of creative, topical interpretation, performers can readily enable scores to speak of contemporary concerns, attracting more diverse audiences eager for insight.

In the much more varied performance culture envisaged here, evaluation of performance need be no harder than it has always been: performances are made to engage, to stimulate, to excite, to fascinate, to challenge, to move, as ever.

In performance one seeks to accomplish many things as well as moving and engaging listeners: these include creating benefits of various kinds, practical, social, financial, psychological, health-related, even in a broad sense political.

The UN Human Rights Council advocates ‘the right ... to freely ... contribute to artistic expressions and creations'. This the classical music business does not currently permit. There’s no excuse for such a high-profile, high-status embodiment of Western cultural values not to be in conformity with its (now) foundational statement of ethical and political values. And no need either.