Brochure of the month

I've often complained about a classical-music marketing syndrome that might be called John Adams Conducts Respighi: the tendency to advertise concerts in a way that actively conceals new or unfamiliar works, as if they were mistakes to be covered up. If you want to bring audiences round to non-standard fare, you need to own it, take pride in it. So it was a pleasure to pick up Carnegie Hall's 2016-17 brochure, emblazoned with the words "Come Hear," and find that on many pages it is the new, unusual, lesser-known, or ostensibly "difficult" piece that is highlighted and briefly explicated: Vivaldi's Juditha triumphans, Webern's Pieces Opus 6, Adams's Gospel According to the Other Mary, Cage's The Seasons, Benjamin's Dream of the Song. In an inversion of the usual practice, a Boston Symphony program containing the "Eroica" is singled out on account of Gunther Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. More of this, please!