Culture

Since the birth of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster in the late 1990s, the record industry has been the unwilling poster child for entire businesses being overthrown by the march of technology. The major labels, once all-powerful, now stand Ozymandias-like, looking out over their barren empires; an ailing HMV, long ago diagnosed as terminal, is finally in its death throes; and it looks increasingly unlikely that music will ever be paid for again. An industry that’s resorted to The X Factor is an industry in trouble. Michael Breidenbruecker is the co-founder of the music streaming and recommendation service Last.fm, one of London’s big tech success stories. ‘When we started in 2000,’ he says, ‘there was no market.

All my life I’ve wanted to be able to write confidently about orchestral performances and I think I may have cracked it. So forgive me while I show off for a paragraph. In the last movement of Bruckner’s Seventh, Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra capture the jauntiness of the opening theme; there’s a twist of Haydn amid the grandeur. But it takes a long time for the brass and woodwind to settle down, and when Bruckner gathers his forces for a climax the conductor leans heavily on the gas pedal, as if he’s nearly missed a turning. No such problems with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, where from the first bar the sheen of the violins tells you that every twist of the score has been mapped out, not to say ironed out, well in advance.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a bit sorry for Mike Harding. The long-serving host of BBC Radio 2’s ‘folk, roots and acoustic’ show was given the heave-ho last month, and the far-from-underemployed Mark Radcliffe took his place last week. One might ask what Harding had done wrong, and indeed Harding has been asking it repeatedly. He says he was sacked by phone and given no sensible reason for his dismissal. Ah, the freelance life! I have been sacked so many times from so many supposedly cushy numbers that they all meld into one vast megasacking, but as far as I remember, they rarely give a reason, or at least they almost never give the real reason. On one occasion, though, someone did.

Come December, I often find myself writing a lot of quizzes. Not that I’m complaining: I love writing quizzes, and I really love being paid for writing quizzes. There’s a definite skill in crafting a decent question, and therefore considerable satisfaction in getting it right, tempered only by the unceasing fear of getting it completely wrong. (Like all writing, therefore.) All of us who toil in the quiz mines are naturally aware that we have our favourite subjects, our home territories if you like. I could go on writing increasingly abstruse questions about cricket or pop music far into the night, but I don’t, because the audience simply isn’t as interested in those subjects as I am. If you are a quizmaster, your job is to entertain people.

Attached to the ménage of every artistic outfit these days will be an employee who believes there is a magic formula which,  once found, will bring in millions of everything: fans, column inches, money. Perhaps all artists secretly believe that what we do must have universal appeal: our insights are simply too significant to be overlooked. The only reason why other people don’t come to our concerts, buy our discs, or otherwise frequent our places of high culture is that it hasn’t yet got through to them that we exist. They only have to be drawn in by the right kind of publicity and everybody will love what we do. To find this publicity is the job of expensive professionals who spend their lives identifying the perfect image or coining the irresistible slogan.

Record companies: if you insist on sending CDs to my home address without so much as a covering note or a press release, well, that’s just fine by me. West Hill Radio Archives, I can’t say I’d heard of you, but the discs of Toscanini and the BBC Symphony Orchestra that landed on my doormat last week were a lovely surprise, in more ways than one. Toscanini refused to allow these concerts at the Queen’s Hall in June 1935 to be recorded, but thank goodness HMV ignored him. In the case of Elgar’s Enigma Variations the result is a revelation.

The Wharf is an unpretentious venue in Tavistock which offers a menu of entertainment whose criteria are difficult to fathom but are probably linked to the fact that Tavistock is near Plymouth and therefore miles from anywhere and quite an arse to get to. I saw a fat girl in an anorak screaming out loud with excitement at a poster advertising The Wurzels, so there isn’t too much going on for the under sixties. The venue stands 300 and seats about 30, which is pretty much what Hugh Cornwell would have been playing to when the Stranglers first drove their van around pubs in Guildford. All those years ago. He was old then. As a teenager doing A-levels I remember being more shocked by the fact that he was 30 than by the fact that he shouted out the word clitoris on Rattus Norvegicus.

Do you have a mysterious and slightly embarrassing musical blind spot? One of mine is for Dvorák, whom I don’t need to be told is a great composer. Maybe it was overexposure to the New World Symphony as a child; or maybe I’m unreasonably irritated by his Czech bounciness, just as some people write off Vaughan Williams because he reminds them of that jibe about the ‘cowpat school’. Anyway, it’s a problem. One way to tackle a blind spot is to listen to a superlative recording of a work by your ‘difficult’ composer. So, a couple of weeks ago, I bought a CD of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto played by Pieter Wispelwey and the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Ivan Fischer.

It is 0422, pitch black outside and pouring with rain. The candles are being extinguished one by one as the last of the congregation leave the chapel. They look tired but determined. I notice that, for the first time in my adult life when awake at this hour, I am sober. We have just sung the night Office of Lauds, which began at 0400, in the chapel of Keble College Oxford. Matins, which we sang at 0100 in Christ Church, is already a dimming memory, soon to be further overlaid by Prime, Terce and Mass, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, each sung at its traditional time throughout the 24 hours. Since those times are spaced, punitively, at approximately every three hours for 22 hours without ceasing there is going to be little chance for sleep.

If you want to make yourself unpopular with a classical musician, bring up the subject of performance anxiety. You can ask soloists how they remember tens of thousands of notes, so long as you make it sound like flattery. But don’t ask how they do it in front of an audience of strangers and critics without dying of fright. Because some of them nearly do. And they don’t like to talk about it — their own nerves, that is; other people’s are fair game. The world of classical music can be as Darwinian as the tennis circuit. Memory lapses are not forgotten. The Wigmore Hall holds a special terror, because it’s often the venue for an artist’s first big recital.

The third concert I went to at Lucerne last week was under two aegises: first ‘Faith’, the theme of this year’s Festival, and second ‘Pollini Perspectives’. Maurizio Pollini coined this phrase or concept several years ago, as indicating his project of giving concerts in which he combines music we know and love with music we don’t know and hate — not that he put it in those terms, but that’s what it amounts to. The latter is always in the first half, naturally. At Lucerne it was not Maurizio, but his gifted pianist son Daniele who took part in the first half, which was the first performance of Carnaval Nos 10, 11 and 12, by the distinguished Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.

Faith is the theme of this year’s Summer Festival in Lucerne. Not that I would have guessed it from the three concerts I went to in the Concert Hall on consecutive evenings last week. But the programme books insist on it, and there are, besides the musical events, lectures and discussions on Faith, with a cardinal and theologians participating. Why the need to justify having a festival, inflated prices for tickets, hotels, etc. being taken for granted by the majority of the well-heeled patrons? And how many of the patrons are led to reflect more intensely than they normally do on the nature of Faith, or of their faith if they have one?

Eternally fresh. That’s how Grieg’s Piano Concerto is described by programme notes, Classic FM, etc. Though, to be honest, eternally stale is nearer the mark. No 19th-century warhorse has been submitted to such regular thrashing since it was written in 1868. In the early days of the Proms, where I heard it last week, they would sometimes schedule it twice in one season. Don’t get me wrong: the work is a masterpiece. Edvard Grieg’s only masterpiece, indeed, which is sad, considering that he composed it at the age of 25 and produced nothing of comparable stature in the remaining 40 years of his life.

Do rock stars buy life insurance? If so, there must have been payouts aplenty this summer, as several more breathed their last. Levon Helm of The Band croaked in April, followed in May by Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch of the Beastie Boys, the famed session bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, and Donna Summer, no longer feeling love, or indeed anything very much. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it was the turn of Jon Lord of Deep Purple, whose terrifying white ponytail I once spotted at a River Café quiz. Although his team didn’t do very well, you could see that he was the sort of person you would want to have on your side.

The Myerscough report about the future funding of the BBC, entitled Delivering Quality First, is another classic in the long-running serial about how everything will be much better once the Corporation has made further cuts to its staff and programming. This one, which follows on from another published what seems like just the other day, is the direct result of the BBC having acquiesced in freezing the licence fee until 2017 while taking on new costs, such as the World Service and the switchover to digital services. Two thousand jobs must go and this time the funding of the Performing Groups — the five full-time orchestras and the BBC Singers — is not protected.