As for business and athletics, China has been a growth market for Western-style classical music in recent years. (See my previous post, "Piano Fever" in China.)
But choral pieces with sacred (usually Christian) texts are now banned there, as the Academy of Ancient Music found when it was invited to sing Handel's Messiah in Beijing (they still performed, but the concert was changed from open-to-the-public to invitation-only).
The Sinfonica Orchestra di Roma had planned to perform Mozart's Requiem in Sichuan, where so many thousands were killed in the earthquake, but they had to change their program.
Read the London Telegraph article here.
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