The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

For some time now, it seems that classical music has been in crisis. Books published by a well-known music journalist and blogger under such titles as Who Killed Classical Music? and The Life and Death of Classical Music have fuelled the flames of such a perception. And recent funding cuts and threats to a number of performing organisations – from ORF’s Vienna Symphony Orchestra (now saved), English National Opera (still under threat, with swingeing cuts to its orchestra underway) and the BBC Singers (who earned a temporary reprieve) to a swathe of smaller but highly-valued regional groups – have only deepened a sense of fatalism among many music lovers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the very future of large-scale indoor music events such as opera, choral and symphony concerts seemed under threat, and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis has hardly helped the recovery of such undertakings, with audience numbers struggling to get back to pre-COVID levels.

With classical music seemingly under threat from all sides (including the greater public appeal and commercial heft of more popular music genres), the future may look bleak to performers, behind-the-scenes arts workers and audiences. While the genre has always been in a state of change (contrast today’s concert programmes with those from fifty years and a century ago), the changes which the sector now faces might well appear existential. Big-name productions at major opera houses, concert halls and festivals can no longer guarantee ‘bums on seats’ – the combined effect of the recent events already listed plus the dominance of ‘director’s opera’ which alienates more traditional opera lovers.

On his recent appointment as the next music director of the Berlin Staatsoper (in succession to Daniel Barenboim), Christian Thielemann suggested that allowing audiences to ‘dress down’ for certain performances might widen the genre’s appeal. This will seem like applying a sticking plaster to a gaping wound to many operagoers in the UK and United States where – with the exception of gala nights and certain country-house operas – casual attire has long been accepted by the majority of audiences. The growing trend to tolerate and even embrace applause between movements and numbers (shock horror!) has irritated a significant minority, and can sometimes be a double-edged sword depending on the music being performed and the intensity of the performance, yet is not without historic precedence even up to the early years of the 20th century. (The peer pressure for absolute silence is probably quite a recent development, dating from the postwar years when broadcasts and live recordings were expected to match the ‘sterile environment’ of the recording studio.)

In response to some of our past musings on this subject, readers have suggested that classical music has weathered such storms before, and that its appeal to older audiences means that a steady stream of new audiences now in middle age will come to appreciate it in the near future. Yet the expectation of perpetual renewal by a steady supply-pool of new ‘oldies’ is dangerously complacent. The likelihood is that, in order to attract increasingly diverse audiences (in terms of nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, political outlook, etc.), music will have to embrace that diversity. It’s not an insurmountable challenge, given that performers and backroom staff themselves have always been a gloriously diverse bunch, more so now than ever. In this context, the recent expansion of the repertoire to include greater numbers of black and female composers is a hugely positive step.

Yet it remains the case that the balancing of innovation and tradition is enormously tricky, and that there’s a long way to go before classical music is more representative of the diversity of 21st-century society as a whole. The repertoire needs to develop, but it also needs to appeal to existing audiences while attracting new ones. This requires often bold and challenging decision-making by those with real knowledge and vision, not a new generation of bean counters, however trendily they might speak or dress. It also requires the support of agencies such as the Arts Council of England, which has pulled the rug from under far too many performing organisations, both large, high-profile ones and (even more disturbingly) from smaller ones already committed to bringing music to newer, wider and more diverse audiences.

Record companies also have their part to play, even if younger audiences are rather more attracted to streaming and downloads than physical discs. The perpetual ‘reinscribing’ of the canonical repertoire – ever-increasing numbers of recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Dvořák’s 'New World' Symphony, and the operas of Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner et al. in often middling performances – may keep the tills turning over, but they do the wider repertoire a disservice. (Sadly, not everyone who tackles Bach’s Goldbergs, for instance, is in Vikingur Ólafsson’s class…)

A recent letter from the composer Edward Lambert to The Guardian highlights the potential for operatic renewal (and wider audience reach) in the genre of chamber opera. While some scaled-down versions of operatic classics can work extremely well (Jonathan Dove’s rescoring of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, for instance), the wider genre of chamber opera – aside from such classics as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Weill’s Threepenny Opera, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy – remains desperately underrepresented on disc. Yet the recent success of Lampe’s 1737 burlesque opera The Dragon of Wantley on the Resonus label suggests that there is an appetite for the smaller-scale genre, and its modern successors should provide a boost in the arm for regional and touring ensembles which are more ‘lithe and nimble’ (Lambert’s words) to develop a repertoire that looks further afield than the few dozen canonic works from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries keeping the typical large-scale opera company afloat. And, who knows, they may even lead (as they did in Birtwistle's specific case) to a rejuvenation of the larger-scale repertoire too.


Recommended recordings:
Rodwell - Jack Sheppard RO010
Macfarren - The Soldier’s Legacy RO009
Gagnon - Nelligan ACD22814
Lampe - The Dragon of Wantley RES10304
Partch - Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion WER68712
Phibbs - Juliana RES10290