The BBC’s recent celebration of American composer John Cage included his ‘seminal’ work, 4’ 33”, which consists of four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence. One of Britain’s greatest composers, Sir Malcolm Arnold, would have been grateful if the BBC had included even four minutes, thirty three seconds of his music at The Proms during 2001 – his eightieth birthday year. Or the previous year. Or the following year. Arnold has never been forgiven by some of the classical music world’s snobbier incumbents for writing Oscar-winning film scores like Bridge Over The River Kwai. Yet he also composed nine symphonies, nineteen concertos and numerous chamber works, some of which – like his Fifth Symphony – rank alongside the finest British music of the last hundred years. The critical abuse heaped on the Fifth Symphony is typical of what Arnold had to endure. Reviewing its premiere at the 1961 Cheltenham Festival The Times critic described it as the work of “a creative personality in an advanced state of decay”. It must be scant reward for Arnold, now 82, that the critical pendulum has begun to swing his way as his near-suicidal despair has been widely documented.
As the BBC Symphony Orchestra limber up for yet another Birtwistle, sorry, Berio – Birtwistle is due later this year – ‘retrospective’ at the South Bank Centre it falls, as usual, to London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show to give Arnold his due. This autumn they will screen a two-part warts-and-all film on his life and music by director Tony Palmer. Expect harrowing viewing.
The rumour that WH Smith was about to discontinue selling classical CD’s has proved untrue. How disappointed the harbingers of doom must be! But they shouldn’t have to wait too long to e-mail through their obituaries. After all, why should anyone bother going to their local high street to buy a classical CD? The chances are the shop won’t have the music – or the performance of it – you want and the CD could have been ordered on the internet and delivered to your door for no extra cost and a lot less hassle. Yet, despite all the tired predictions of the classical record industry’s demise, there are more versions of a far wider range of repertoire available than ever before –but it is impossible for the chain stores to stock more than a handful of them. Increasingly they will concentrate on mass-market ‘lifestyle’ CD’s, tailor-made for the sort of impulse buyer who chucks a Charlotte Church or Russell Watson CD in their shopping basket to accompany their guacamole and sun-dried tomatoes. My pre-Christmas visit to a Wal-Mart’s in America revealed their best-selling classical CD was entitled ‘Classical Music For People Who Hate Classical Music’. Rarely have I flipped over the plastic receptacle with such anticipation! Which Luciano would ‘people hate’ – Berio or Pavarotti? Disappointingly, I found only the usual suspects – Clair de Lune, Four Seasons et al. The end may well be nigh for classical CD’s on our high streets but, for those of us who want ‘Classical Music For People Who Like Classical Music’, both mail-order and the internet have a lot of life left in them yet.
I am happy that BBC Music Magazine has dealt so openly with my criticism in this column of their cover-mounted CD’s. They made my concerns about giving away recordings of complete symphonies and concertos for nothing (I think composers, and their performers, are worth more than that) the subject of their next editorial. If only such open debate had been tolerated by the close-ranked, claustrophobic, musical establishment of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties – who constantly championed such ‘avant-garde’ composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis, while dismissing melody and harmony as ‘old hat’. Had composers like Malcolm Arnold, Samuel Barber and William Walton been encouraged instead of continually disparaged, maybe – just maybe – classical CD’s would have survived a little longer on our high streets.
