Today's Polished Musicians

These days performance of classical music is all surface. Techniques to enhance gymnast-like mechanical abilities abound. There is no sense that beauty is anything other than mere effect. Even the idea of substance is relegated at most to some arbitrary outpouring of supposedly intense emotion...Can it be that that same art that produced the Ninth Symphony dedicated to Schiller's call for a universal brotherhood of mankind has now become so trivialized and debased? Wagner inflicted his hateful compositions upon the world a century and a half ago...I'm afraid the musical world has never recovered.