Tag: Classical concerts

More classical music is the way to level up our state schools

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Joanna Lumley, the actress, campaigner and all-round Good Egg, is practically perfect in every way. The latest example of her ability to bring a light touch to a serious subject is a podcast with her husband, the composer and conductor Stephen Barlow, which launches tomorrow. Joanna & The Maestro explores their joint passion for (mainly) classical music, inspired by their concern about its dwindling accessibility and apparently inexorable decline into a niche subject for a mainly elite audience.

The Government’s National Plan for Music Education, set out in 2011 and reissued last June in a “refreshed” version, announces its “clear ambition to level up musical opportunities for all children, regardless of circumstance, needs or geography”.

But in the decade between versions, that ambition has not been realised: music A-level entries declined by 39 per cent; GCSE entries are down 31 per cent, with students in affluent areas far more likely to study the subject than those in deprived areas.

The star cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a shining example, with his equally talented siblings, of the excellence that a state music education can offer, seems likely to become part of a vanishing minority.

It was not always thus. My love of music began at my very ordinary state grammar school, where I took music GCSE, seriously considered music A-level and still stumble through Beethoven piano sonatas from a 19th-century edition of the complete sonatas given to me by my music teacher.

The Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for an extended maths education is apparently based on the belief that it will encourage financial literacy. Somehow, I manage my finances with a mere GCSE maths, but without the love of music nourished by my education, I’d be an entirely different person, with a hinterland stripped of the lifelong curiosity, resilience and delight that a musical education supplies.

Lumley is right: classical music is too important to be wasted on the elite. 

How to beat Satanism

The bad-boy allure of Satan, poetically illustrated in Milton’s Paradise Lost, may explain the rising popularity of Satanism recorded in the last census, with an increase of 167 per cent since 2011 in the numbers of Satanists in England and Wales. Meanwhile, Christianity became a minority religion for the first time in the history of the census.

Amid the shrinking congregations is a curious anomaly: the growing popularity of choral evensong. Writers with an interest in church matters have sought to explain the phenomenon, citing the allure of free music, and free entry to cathedrals that generally charge for the privilege. But there is a less venal explanation: humans crave the numinous, and choral evensong is the one service from which the beauty and spirituality of language and music has yet to be stripped.

The fact that beauty is a crucial element of belief has been obvious to every generation of Christians except our own. The connection between the decline in congregations and the hideous corporate-speak in which the Church of England largely chooses to conduct its worship is painfully evident – though not, apparently, to those in charge of such matters. For now, we should cherish choral evensong while we can, before that, too, is incorporated into what Private Eye used to call the Rocky Horror service book.

How classical music said thank you to the Queen in 2022

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In classical music, as in all the arts, 2022 was supposed to be a new dawn, a joyous surging back to life after the dismalness of two lockdown years. In the event, it was – but only up to a point. 

Numerous events were curtailed or hampered because of illness, and the Proms lost two headline artists, Jonas Kaufmann and Freddie De Tommaso, to bouts of Covid. And the return of audiences to live events has been tentative. Only for the biggest names have venues been able to fill every seat, and most orchestras report audiences are still about 15 per cent down on pre-pandemic figures. 

Brexit continues to exert a huge drag, imposing maddening bureaucratic delays and costs on anyone who wants to travel to the EU to perform – and vice versa. The ­Russian invasion of Ukraine was another blow, as organisations rushed to disinvite Russian soloists, give back tainted Russian money, and cancel concerts with Russian music (though there was also an upside, in the rush to programme fine Ukrainian composers we’d never heard of).

These headwinds were expected. What was not expected, and came as a nasty shock, was the sharp dec­line in listeners to the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, which lost one in six of its listeners in the third quarter of 2022. Commercial stations Classic FM and Scala Radio were also sharply down, by 6.5 per cent and 9.5 per cent respectively. There was much anxious speculation that just as listeners were losing the habit of going to concerts, they were also losing the habit of turning on the radio, as well.

Underneath the temporary choppy seas of rising costs and falling revenues run deeper, less vis­ible currents of social and cultural change, to which musicians and organisations must adapt. Classic FM now offers playlists organised by “mood”. In a nod to younger listeners’ preference for spiritually “immersive” music, Radio 3, once the home of strenuous high-mindedness, has invited Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds to curate his own series, Ultimate Calm, which explores “how classical, contemporary and ambient music can soothe the soul”. The fact that some musicians still talk in terms of musical experience as a effortful “going on a journey”, whereas others now see it as a lucid, thoroughly wide-awake process of following the unfolding logic of a piece, shows that there are competing visions of what classical music is or should be.