“The main problem with classical music” pronounced the observer’s Sean O’Hagen “is its audience……anyone who still think classical music is not elitist should take a look around them when they next take their seat at a live performance”. Commenting on a recent Prom when John Eliot Gardiner commandeered the service of the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble to play with his English Baroque Soloists he continued “Even in the case of the surreally wonderful Soueto String Quartet (sic) – the number of black performers exceeded the number of black audience members.”
But why should classical music always take the rap when that dread word ‘elitism’ rears its ugly head? Maybe I’d have had a problem sitting next to the white, middle class & obviously (as he’s attending a classical concert) elitist O’Hagen. Especially as I think he needs to get out more. To Glastonbury, perhaps, where a friend of mine attended all four days of this year’s festival and noted that the crowd was “at least 97 percent white”? Or maybe O’Hagen should in a football match where he will find “the number of black performers” regularly exceeds “the number of black audience members”?
The obvious, inescapable conclusion is that black people still feel uncomfortable amongst loads of white people. And white people still feel uncomfortable amongst of black people. After all, no one enjoys being racially abused. Only recently I was astonished when a Chinese friend of mine was taunted when we went to a football match. So perhaps its football – with its copious emphasis on prawn sandwiches, let alone its sky high ticket prices – that should assume the white, middle class, elitist tag. Either way to dump this social dilemma onto classical music is, frankly, ludicroces as I can assure both O’Hagen & my Chinese friend that they are considerably less likely to suffer racial abuse in a concert hall than virtually anywhere else.
“Pop Goes The Planet” screamed the front page of the Independent on Sunday – and they weren’t wrong. BBC I’s summer orgy of pop began with Glastmbury, continued with Live earth and encompassed the Diana tribute concert at Wembley which, we were told was a reflection of the Princess’ taste in music. How odd, then, that only a few minutes – out of a concert lasting many hours – managed to escape the tyranny of the beat. For Diana was a keen classical pianist. Good enough to be able to sit down and play part of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto to a group of Australian school children on a battered old upright a moment memorably captured on many TV news reels at the time. The princess herself told me that the Rachmaninov was one of her favourite pieces of music and, sure enough a CD of the concerto showed up on the list of personal effects that Paul Burrell supposedly nicked from Kensington palace.
A young pianist like Chinese showman Lang Lang would have wowed that Wembley audience. What a missed opportunity to show the world that, musically speaking, Diana was more than the Princess of Pop.
