awalterj: Revenge of the Nerds = complete...?
Seriously though, I think it's a perfectly ok development. People want to hear that stuff and it's not just video game soundtracks but movie and anime soundtracks as well that are highly popular in orchestrated form.
I don't see a risk of classical music performance dying out because of this. And let's not forget that what we commonly worship as classical music nowadays is an elitist selection, the cream of the crop of centuries past. Most of the stuff regular people listened to has sunken into obscurity and the same will happen to most of our contemporary popular music.
+1
The composers won't get to be any more dead and this music is so well documented, that there's no danger of it being lost which cannot be said about the more common music in the less elitist circles of this time indeed.
As someone who has been working in the high profile classical scene for many years (opera, philharmonics, etc...), I can only say, that it would actually benefit this music if th "tradition" would stop for a while, since it's very narrow minded, not evolving anymore and in many cases surely false interpretation of how the music was meant to sound anyway (different instruments, different tuning, sometimes more clean intervals, less strict rhythm, etc...).
To quote the famous Gustav Mahler here:
"Tradition ist die Weitergabe des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche."
"Tradition is the spreading of fire and not the veneration of ashes."
[Original quote goes back to Thomas Morus (1478-1535)]
