This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
It may now be hard to believe, but there was a time, not so long ago, when classical music was cool. Sort of. We can date it to 1980, when Simon Rattle, a Liverpudlian percussionist, who had shown considerable promise as a conductor with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Glyndebourne’s festival orchestra and his home-town’s philharmonic, was appointed principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He was 25, tousle-haired, charismatic and seriously good. He was also a brilliant communicator, on the podium and off.
The first classical concerts I attended, as a teenager, were those of Rattle and the CBSO, within the neoclassical intimacy of Birmingham’s Town Hall. It was not an intimidating space to enter: Rattle’s predecessor, the underrated French maestro Louis Fremaux, had nurtured a youthful audience, 45 per cent of whom were under 25 — and it was cheap.
Without any formal musical education whatsoever, I had no real idea what was going on. I knew that Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, among the first works I heard performed, was based on a work by the Tudor composer (I’d read it in the programme) though it took me an age to track down a recording of Tallis’s original Psalm-setting of Mathew Parker.
Mahler, a Rattle staple at the time, was newly fashionable. When I later moved down to London, Esa-Pekka Salonen, another magnetic young composer, was doing something similar with his Philharmonia Orchestra at the South Bank. Mahler again was the key. Modernist enough to be challenging, but packed with melodies and marches and occasional menace, all wrapped up in a tragic biography that fitted the Mitteleuropa obsession of an age when Picador and Penguin Classics were front of house at WH Smith.
London in the 1980s was alive with classical music. The ENO’s “Power House” of conductor Mark Elder and producer David Pountney were casting their spell, especially in Wagner. Whilst Aussie expat David Freeman’s Opera Factory was shocking audiences at the South Bank — and Channel 4 television — with copious nudity and an eclectic embrace of the genre from Cavalli to Mozart to Ligeti.
Rattle, Salonen and their generation had benefitted, too, from the CD revolution, which trickled into existence in 1982 and boomed soon after. The classical musical industry cashed in. The huge profits made by big names with back catalogues, most notably Herbert von Karajan and his Berliners, funded the early recording careers of a new generation. The repertoire expanded, surprise hits took off — Gothic Voices’ recording of the music of Hildegard of Bingen, a Feather of the Breath of God, on Ted Perry’s brilliantly innovative Hyperion label, became an unlikely hit, as did Arvo Part’s setting of St John’s Passion on the ECM label, hitherto home to icy European jazz composition.
It was all the same to me. I suppose I was fulfilling Thomas Beecham’s stereotype of the British classical concertgoer: that most don’t really like music — they just like the way it sounds. But I wanted to know more than that.
I had listened to the first classical LPs I borrowed from the local library — a Barenboim recording of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was, I think, the first — just as I listened to the outer edges of rock or jazz; did I like the sound it makes? Well, often yes. But the experience was inchoate. I needed a pattern, provided by experts, who could explain the intentions and aims of the composer and performers and who could place it within historical context. I had entered the world from the wrong door, one opened by Boulez, Stockhausen — the first opera I saw at Covent Garden was not La traviata or La bohème, but Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus licht. But where had that come from?
The answer arrived somewhere between waking and sleeping on a Saturday morning after a heavy night of clubbing. The transistor was tuned to Radio 3 and an authoritative voice was comparing recordings of a Schubert late piano sonata; whether it was D959 or 960 I can’t remember. I do recall the sheer transcendent beauty of the melodies, its delicacy, its foreboding, the sublime death-rattle of arguably the greatest composer of all, from whom, in the words of Paul Griffiths, music simply flowed like water. It was a BC/AD moment.
Building a Library, the focus of Radio 3’s Record Review, became a focus from then on for decades. Every Saturday morning was awaited with anticipation, the wonders of a work, often great, sometimes merely good, revealed, as were its finest exponents and the reasons why they excelled.
That balanced ecology has been shattered in recent years
It mattered who was performing. And it had a commercial purpose. I was not alone in heading down to the shops following a CD recommendation. I was hooked, as were many, and our addiction supported a golden age of classical music. The BBC launched its own monthly Music Magazine as a specialist classical music publication — with a CD on the cover. Classical music was for everyone: the Three Tenors sold out Hyde Park. And Radio 3 was the place to go for those who wanted to push their interests further, Classic FM for those who didn’t. A balanced ecology that worked.
That balanced ecology has been shattered in recent years. Not by Classic FM, which does what it does well. It is Radio 3, the nation’s chief educator in classical music, to whom I and many other owe so much, that has changed.
Record Review, with its Building a Library, abridged, now occupies a graveyard slot: 2pm on Saturday (just when the football’s on). Its capacious morning slot is now occupied by Saturday Morning (the originality) a celebrity fest presented by Tom Service, a capable broadcaster clearly under orders to swap analysis for the regular use of the word “Amazing”. Everything on Radio 3 is amazing, which tells you everything you need to know about the lack of confidence with which it approaches classical music. This is followed by Earlier… with Jools Holland (geddit?), in which lots of boogie woogie and blues is mixed with utterly decontextualised passages from great and not so great classical composers. One learns nothing, other than that Radio 2 has metastised into the core organs of Radio 3.
The channel’s other supremely educational pleasure, Composer of the Week, presented every weekday with quietly sublime authority by the peerless Donald Macleod, has similarly been shifted from its prime position — once lunchtime and early evening — to 4pm, a scheduling no-man’s land.
I listen to Radio 3 less now than I have done for 40 years. Recently, with space in my life due to illness and bereavement, I put it on in the background for what is termed, somewhat loosely, Essential Classics. Extraordinarily, three of the four times I turned it on, quite at random, the broadcast was of something perfectly, pleasantly sub-Brahmsian. Each was the work of the now ubiquitous Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, by whose work the station appears obsessed.
Indeed Radio 3 appears now to operate a playlist. As well as works by Taylor-Coleridge, one will hear with banal regularity Peter Maxwell Davies’s dirge-like Farewell to Stromness (big at funerals, I presume); Gershwin’s sprightly and inconsequential Walking the Dog; and Arvo Part’s Spiegel im spiegel (Bach without the theological trappings).
Oh well, this former member of the working class is now sufficiently remunerated that Glyndebourne, Longborough, Munich and many other centres of musical excellence are regular haunts. None of which would have happened had it not been for the joyous but rigorous schooling offered by the experts at Radio 3, the very essence of the Reithian ideal.
Thanks to identikit manager “Sam” Jackson, Radio 3’s current controller — you don’t need to see his picture, you know exactly how he looks — the emphasis is now less on enlightenment than “relaxing” to the new Radio 3 Unwind stream, a blueprint for the channel’s future. Again, utterly without context, anachronistic, facile, it is where a culture ends when it can no longer discriminate between Beethoven, boogie-woogie and Bartok.
The courage to judge, to canonise has gone. It’s just one thing after another. Radio 3’s task is no longer to educate, inform and entertain, but to send us to sleep. A musical Dignitas.
