The best of times for classical music here

People who love classical music have been wringing their hands for decades over its imminent demise. Like Armageddon, the end is always near.

The fretting over classical music usually centers on the age of the audiences. But unless the Mayans were right about 2012, there's always a new generation coming of age.

Another constant fear is that the centuries-old repertoire will somehow become outdated, but culture is additive, not zero-sum. A new symphony by Philip Glass does not mean that one by Mozart has to be tossed out to make room.

All you need to do is to look around eastern Connecticut in this winter of 2012 to witness the vitality of classical music. It's new, it's young and it's spreading.

We now have chamber music series in five separate towns, three resident opera companies along the shoreline and even a burgeoning community orchestra in New London in addition to the venerable Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra.

On the big stage, ECSO Music Director Toshi Shimada has shaken the cobwebs from the music stands with a steady stream of new music. In January, he performed the world premiere of a symphony by a 35-year-old woman on the same concert program that featured a fresh-faced Yale sophomore as a soloist. Seeing the composer, Svitlana Azarova, in the audience was a pretty compelling argument that composers are not extinct - and neither is the symphony as a concept.

Down the road at the Musical Masterworks chamber music series, each concert this year seems to include a young musician who performs not only Beethoven, but music of his own composition, flavoring the traditional conservatory structures and harmonies with everything from blues to bluegrass. Young musicians, like the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, hear all music outside the window, and savor it all without abandoning their musical refinement and training.

The gene pool appears well-stocked with young talent to both perform and create new music at a high level. And just as important to us here, we have more music presenters now than at any time that I can recall.

When I arrived in New London more than 20 years ago, there were a few major music series, the 800-pound gorillas perched in their seasonal lairs. In 1991, we had the ECSO, Summer Music in the park in Waterford, Connecticut College's august Concert & Artist series, the springtime Early Music Festival with Igor Kipnis still at the helm, and the Chorus of Westerly.

These series met different fates. Summer Music grew fast, outpaced its support and withered away. Concert & Artist, which brought the world's biggest stars to New London for 50 years, changed its focus and ceased its dedication to classical music. The Early Music fest changed hands and became sort of a cultish, academic exercise after the precepts of the early music movement went mainstream.

But the Chorus of Westerly grew stronger and expanded its offerings, as did the ECSO. New London's orchestra blossomed in the renovated Garde Arts Center and grew from four programs a season to six and added annual programs for schoolchildren.

The loss of Summer Music, with its orchestral concerts by the Sound, was painful, but Summer Music was as much about picnics as piccolos. The dedicated music audience here has found many presenters stepping forward to fill the calendar.

Musical Masterworks has grown from a sort of a four-concert private party to a robust 10-concert season, tapping the best New York talent.

Want more chamber music? The venerable Chestnut Hill series migrated eastward to The Kate in Old Saybrook with a well-established, four-program summer series with ties to the Boston Chamber Music Society. The Essex Winter Series, led by pianist Mihai Lee (with her own strong connections to the Chestnut Hill gang), revived from its slumber a few seasons back to present stars like Dawn Upshaw and Frederica von Stade. And there's Sundays in the Parlor in Norwich, where pianists Gary Chapman and Laura Hibbard have musical fun with their friends.

Even more remarkably, we've had two new opera companies put down roots here, staging an aggregate half-dozen operas a season. The Salt Marsh Opera has piggy-backed on the audience built by the Chorus of Westerly to stage fully produced operas in the Chorus's hall, and the Connecticut Lyric Opera, which began less than a decade ago with bare-bones productions in a church, has leaped onto the Garde stage and expanded to three other venues, making it the largest opera company in the state. And the wonderful Connecticut Opera Theatre continues to stage one a summer in Clinton to break the August drought.

We even have more classical music on the radio now. In addition to the music programming on WNPR in Hartford, WSHU in Fairfield has spread its signal eastward, WMNR in Monroe has beefed up its broadcast area, and a commercial classical station, WCRI, popped up in Westerly. You can now channel-surf as you drive, something unheard of not long ago.

It's starting to feel like the best of times here.

Last Friday, I sat in the mostly student-age audience at Connecticut College and listened to the estimable Brentano String Quartet perform a program of works it commissioned in which contemporary composers responded directly to music by the likes of Bach, Schubert and Haydn. The audience was old and young, the music venerable and brand new, the performance compelling. Who says you can't have it all?