War on waste

No wonder we have a problem with classical music in this country.

The week started in celebration. The stats are in and it turns out that Radio 3’s breakfast show has enjoyed a rise of some 64,000 listeners — a not-to-be-sniffed-at11 per cent increase on last year. Meanwhile Classic FM’s listenership is also up significantly, including a startling 43 per cent rise in under-25s. Champagne (or perhaps something a little less effervescently elitist) all round.

Why are all these new people tuning in? Musical diversity, apparently. That and a preference for music over chat, for radio that offers an escape from the emphatic, combative everyday of John Humphrys and his ilk over on Radio 4. Escape. Retreat. These are the words that come up again and again with classical music — a general perception of the genre not as part of the world but a haven from it, something pleasant but other, unreal, like Disney, Playboy or Center Parcs.

That fantasy is, of course, part of the problem. People don’t listen to classical music so much as use it: to medicate their mood (why pop a pill when a string quartet, taken twice daily, will do the same job?), to soundtrack lives or workplaces into perceived sophistication, to wrap themselves up in like a big aural slanket.

This is why, while radio figures are up, live performances are still in trouble. Classical music has rebranded itself as a tool, and now struggles to persuade as a destination, an event in its own right. That’s partly a marketing problem but it’s also, as two very different concerts this week made clear, a lot to do with what people find in the concert hall when they actually get there.

Exhibit A should have been part of the case for the defence: a sold-out, much-talked-about performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs by Jonas Kaufmann — the highlight of the superstar tenor’s year-long residency at the Barbican.