Why I'm a fan of Amadeus Leopold

Classical music expresses the full range of human emotion, yet we choose to dress it up in this very restricted form. It is also very gender normative. Men wear tuxes, women wear dresses. It's virginal, it's boring, it's desexualized. 

Amadeus Leopold (Hahn-Bin) does a couple things here. The music, while unchanged, is packaged differently than before. It captures the attention of those for whom classical music has flown under the radar. He subverts the ideas of classical music as this old, stodgy, DEAD thing, and reinvigorates and injects life into it through the visual spectacle. Spectacle though it may be, the audience cannot escape the music that immerses their senses during his concerts. They're paying attention, like they never did before.

Secondly, he upsets pre-existing gender normative roles. He's a phenomenal musician, and he's saying, "Fuck convention, I can play like a badass while wearing a fucking dress. I can show some leg while doing it, and if you don't like it, well, up yours."

And this is why I think, while the institution of classical music may be slow to accept him, that the work he does will, at the very least, start to chip away the old redundancy of classical music.