BOOKS & ARTS
Music
The decade the music died
Norman Lebrecht
For much of the past half-century, Lon-
don has been the world’s orchestral capi-
tal. Not always in quality, but numerically
without rival. Five full symphony orches-
tras and twice as many pint-sized ones kept
up a constant clamour for attention. Each
month brought new recordings with pre-
mier artists. Every orchestra had its own
ethos, history and thumbprint. The Philhar-
monia was moulded by Karajan and Klem-
perer, the London Philharmonic by Boult
and Tennstedt, the Royal Philharmonic by
Beecham, the BBC by Boulez and the Lon-
don Symphony Orchestra by its high spirits.
Tales abound of maestros departing with a
punch on the nose and beer bottles rolling
in rehearsal.
All of which added greatly to the sum
of human happiness. London musicians,
always cheap, learned to be quick. They
became the best sight-readers on earth, able
to soundtrack a Hollywood film in six hours
flat. Abbey Road, round the corner from
where I live, had an orchestral pantechni-
con out front seven days a week. Record
royalties enabled orchestras to be daring. I
once shocked a future head of the Salzburg
Festival, telling him that London was put-
ting on simultaneous cycles of Schoenberg
and Shostakovich. ‘That could never hap-
pen here,’ he sighed, enviously.
There was a buzz around our concert
halls. Principal players turned down fat
orchestra jobs in Germany, half the work
for twice the pay, because London was too
exciting to leave. Every hot conductor came
to be tested in the London furnace. Compe-
tition sizzled between the bands.
And then it died. The record industry
faded out first, at the start of this decade,
crushed by self-repetition and YouTube.
Film work migrated to Prague. Newspapers
shrank concert reviews. The BBC dumbed
down. Orchestras began playing safe. The
capital is in danger of turning provincial.
Big batons stopped coming, except on
whistlestop tours with their own ensembles.
When the Proms last year were offered
Kirill Petrenko, Simon Rattle’s dazzling
successor at the Berlin Philharmonic, the
BBC declined because they hadn’t heard of
him. Strapped for cash, London is losing the
plot. Two of its music directors live in Ber-
lin, a third in Los Angeles. Easy to see why:
that’s where the action is.
The Barbican and South Bank are play-
ing at 20 per cent and more below capacity
for classical concerts. The energy one feels
at Vienna’s Musikvereinssaal or the Paris
Philharmonie before the start of a concert is
made impossible in London by empty seats
and nodding, grey heads. The public-funded
arts centres seem to be ashamed of classical
music. On the South Bank’s website, music
is pushed to the margins, somewhere below
restaurants.
Among all the factors at fault for this
fall, public funding bears the heaviest
responsibility. The Arts Council used to
dish out its dosh two weeks before Christ-
mas, adding a frisson of anxiety to the scene
as one orchestra rejoiced while three others
whined. Now, in pursuit of deadly efficien-
cy, orchestras are corralled into a ‘National
Portfolio’ and funded triennially. Worse, the
new rules dictate that all orchestras shall
have prizes, regardless of merit.
The LPO and Philharmonia each receive
£2,042,222 a year, on the assumption thatthey are exactly as good as one another and
subject to no ups and downs. The LSO gets
a tiny bit more — £ 2,206,050 — to reflect
a couple of extra of concerts while the poor
old RPO, long out of the loop, is down to
£946,394, much of it earned on education-
al junkets to deprived parts of the country.
The RPO was last heard of making a cover
album of 1970s punk songs.
The inertia of state funding, allied to
the lack of imagination of arts centres, has
sapped the fizz from London’s halls, like
champagne bottles left uncorked for too
long. Where once we were cocks of the con-
cert walk, audiences in Munich and Milan
cannot tell one London orchestra from the
next. That’s how low we have sunk in five
short years.
So what’s to be done? A half-billion-
pound new hall and a mop of Rattle hair
will not bring back the buzz. What’s need-
ed is new thinking. Orchestras must start
thinking for themselves again, not as part of
some National Portfolio. They need to get
competitive — about what they play, where
they play and what they charge. In Glasgow,
the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is letting in
under-18s for free next year. In Manches-
ter, the Hallé is experimenting with robots
in partnership with Siemens. In Liverpool,
the music director goes to home matches
at Anfield and writes a column in the pro-
gramme. In Birmingham, the players pickedOn the South Bank’s website,
music is pushed to the margins,
somewhere below restaurantsExhibitions
The good, the indifferentand the simply awful
Martin GayfordQueer British Art 1861–1967
Tate Britain, until 1 October‘There is only one thing worse than homo-
sexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor
was once heard to declare at a private view
in the 1960s. ‘And that’s heterosexual art.’
It would have been intriguing to hear his
views on Queer British Art at Tate Britain.
All the more so since it includes several of
his own works, including a fine line-draw-
ing study of the playwright Joe Orton, com-
pletely naked except for his socks — which
he kept on because he felt they were sexy
— and reclining somewhat in the manner of
Manet’s Olympia.
In fact, many of those included might
have had reservations — Oscar Wilde, for
example, one of whose characters observed,
‘The only artists I have ever known who are
personally delightful are bad artists.’ There
are quite a few of those included here. Then
again, strictly speaking Queer British Art is
not about art at all, but defined by law, and
those who fell foul of it.
In other words, it’s concerned with a
clandestine and persecuted group. Its para-
meters are the abolition of the death pen-
alty for sodomy in 1861 and the legalisation
of sexual intercourse between consenting
adults in 1967 (Oscar’s fate is grimly docu-
mented by a cell door from Reading Gaol).
The result, from the artistic point of
view, is a lot of promiscuous mingling of the
good, the indifferent and the simply awful
(though sometimes, as in the case of Glyn
Philpot’s paintings, also quite fun). Frankly
dreadful items such as Walter Crane’s enor-
mous, pallid, silly ‘Renaissance of Venus’
(1877) get in for the sake of a good story.
Apparently, on first seeing this canvas Lord
Leighton exclaimed, ‘But my dear fellow,
that is not Aphrodite — that is Alessan-
dro!’ He meant that the body was that of
Alessandro di Marco, a successful male art-
ists’ model.
The received explanation for this — if
the picture really was painted from life rath-
er than being simply a blend of Botticelli
and whimsy — is that Crane’s wife forbade
him from using female models. The cata-
logue, however, prefers to interpret it as a
case of gender fluidity, quoting with approv-
al the comment of the painter W. Grahammouth, Claude Parent’s Rafale in Rheims,
Jean Dumont’s Tripode at Nantes. The world
must be cleansed before it is renewed, again.
Back to zero, again. Result, same again.
Jonathan Meades’s film on modern churches,
The Absentee Landlord, will be shown on 4
June at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of a
retrospective of his television work. His ‘anti-
cookbook’, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, is
published by Unbound on 20 April.
a music director who was under 30 (not to
mention female and brilliant). And in Lon-
don it’s same-old, same-old, same-old. Time
to change the music, along with some of the
executive directors. And no time to lose.