I find myself asking precisely what 'unintellectual populists' might be? The underlying asumptions are:

(a) that 'popular' music cannot be 'intellectual' (everyone from Bob Dillon to Miles Davis can evidence the stupidity of THAT assumption, and

(b) that music that does not fulfill a destiny as a flypaper for some pioneering intellectual conceptual analysis is somehow the lesser.

I'd like to think that millions will prick the pretentious bubbles someday soon and cry 'no clothes on the Emperor' but I fear they'll rather LEAVE the concert halls instead. Better still should they leave the critics.

To me this is self referential narcissism pure and simple. Because THEY cannot concieve or understand music or art beyond the quite narrow pale of it's serviceability to provide THEM with opportunities to deflect boredom, or write original copy, they universalise this so that, frankly, any music they can't PROFIT from (usually by unimaginatively sticking labels about its 'place' in development) becomes 'irrelevant'.

Concert music is a holistic experience, emotional, intellectual, situational, sometimes even downright spiritual ... there's a very wide remit of validity in 'absolute' terms. It'd never occur to me to think of Ormandy as 'lesser' ... Boulez got the same treatment ... which is why I think that broadcasting, and filmscoring etc. will eventually prove far better concert-pullers for the Classics than these 'fleas in the marketplace' we call critics. Too many reviewers have been fundamentally dishonest and self-serving.