Edward Elgar and the significance of talent

The first two qualities a great composer needs are talent and technique; the first you either have or you don't, the second you can learn. But these two aren't enough - otherwise Saint-Saens and Glazunov would have been great composers, along with a host of other journeymen you've never heard of (and any musical biography like Michael Kennedy's Portrait of Elgar, which I've just finished, will mention in passing a host of half-forgotten names).

The third quality in this non-exhaustive list is the ability to write memorable and distinctive material - it's the quality of the invention, stupid. But there is a fourth quality which is equally a sine qua non, and it's a hard one to articulate. You have to have the right kind of personality; because ultimately its the kind of person you are that limits what you can achieve. Beethoven, for example, exhibits himself as someone with a vast emotional and intellectual range, passionate about humanity, nature and God, with a variety and range of output to match. This is also true of Mozart and Brahms. For other composers the situation is more complex. Mahler's range is much narrower, in my view, perhaps pithily summed up by the sentence, "I'm dying". This is also true of Shostakovitch ("Stalin was horrid to me") and a host of smaller figures. It seems to me that the true measure of the classical greats is not that they had so much talent, but that they had so much to say. When in the 30s Sibelius felt he had nothing more, he stopped writing. Nielsen died, but I suspect had a lot more to give. Berlioz could have gone on forever.

What about Elgar? The Worcester genius has, like Vaughan Williams, been criticised for nostalgia, but I think this is unfair. The Lark Ascending isn't about a dead bird after all, and Elgar wasn't mourning the disappearance of the pre-1914 world - much of his best work dates from before the war, Enigma from 1899, for example. But undoubtedly Elgar was a bit of a professional whinger. He whinged about his low social status, about the indifference of the British public, about the meanness of his publishers, the poor standard of performance he had to endure and about his health. He complained about America (when he was engaged on sell-out tours there to conduct his own music). He complained when a lesser-known composer's work was given equal rehearsal time to his own. He walked out of a dinner because the organisers forgot about his Order of Merit and put him on the wrong table. He was constantly threatening to give up music because of its indifferent reception (and this was a man given a knighthood and befriended by the King). Elgar's first symphony was given over one hundred performances in the year after its premiere; but that still didn't stem the litany of complaint.

These characteristics should, and do, tell us quite a lot about Elgar the composer. He is very very good at complaining, musically, and if one had to generalise about the tone of his work it would probably be fair to say that it laments that things are not as they should be. To be fair, this lament is often couched in music of the utmost beauty, subtlety and radiance; but there is quite a high proportion of lamenting going on. When you sit down to listen to a piece by Elgar it is rare to be surprised by the tone. This explains both the appeal of his music and the limitations of that appeal, and that's why my favourite Elgar pieces are the Introduction and Allegro (simple, artless, energetic, poignant, and as Kennedy says, amongst the best half-dozen string pieces ever written), and the Cello Concerto. The Concerto in particular, a late work given a poor first performance and slow to make its way into the repertoire, is a masterpiece, sui generis, unique in form, economical in proportions, terse, and balanced perfectly between haunted emotionalism and rumbustious high spirits. If there is a work which better demonstrates how to orchestrate a concertante piece I don't know of it - there is only one tutti (the last few bars), yet there is plenty for the orchestra to do; the instrumental writing is full of colour and variety, yet the soloist can always be heard. There is no wallowing in the emotion, and the music is for once with Elgar entirely devoid of sentimentality (for any artist a quality as seductively fatal as heroin).

If these pieces are the best of Elgar, it is partly because they contrast with the less-good, of which the worst is perhaps The Music Makers, a setting of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode by turns self-pitying and self-indulgent. I once played the fiddle in a performance of The Music Makers at the Barbican. Ted Heath was in the audience; I hope he enjoyed it more than I did. As Kennedy and others have pointed out, it's not Elgar's fault that the poem is so bad. It is however Elgar's fault that he chose to set it, and it is entirely in keeping with what we know about Elgar's personality that he thought the poem good.

For Elgar had another quality beyond the ones I've mentioned above. He thought (correctly) that he was a much better composer than most of his contemporaries; he was unrepentant about this, and unashamed about expressing it publicly; his musical personality was to a significant extent based around the failure, real and imaginary, of Britain and the rest of the musical world to give his talent its due. In fact the overwhelming majority of people sufficiently driven to call themselves composers would have given their right arm to have had a career like Elgar's, and his failure to realise this marks a failure to understand the world as it really is. And it is an artist's capacity for understanding of the world which is the ultimate test. A sense of personal entitlement can be a spur to effort, but carried too far into a composer's work it is limiting, and I personally think it limited Elgar.

That Beethoven, to give only one example, was a greater man may be seen not only from his refusal to bow down before the onset of deafness (an infinitely greater trial than anything Elgar had to put up with), but also the refusal to allow his affliction to dominate his work. Rather than greater raw talent or technique, it's the personality which this ability to rise above one's circumstances exemplifies that makes Beethoven a greater composer.

the schlock of the new

Two recent visits to the Opera - one Opera North, the other at the RNCM - have had me thinking about novelty in art. Samuel Barber's Vanessa is a late-romantic melodrama in which the eponymous heroine, having waited twenty years for her lover to return, finds herself competing with her niece for the attentions of his son. Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Portrait, on the other hand, concerns a struggling artist who compromises himself for fame and fortune, with disastrous results; Weinberg, a friend of Shostakovitch, is enjoying a resurgence, although on the face of it it's hard to see why - his opera I thought badly structured and paced, the music of uneven quality.

The two pieces had one thing firmly in common. They both sounded dated. Of course the Barber, first produced in the early 50s, was firmly out of step even at the time - a lush mixture of Strauss and Berg, with even some Puccinian flourishes at the emotional climaxes. But the Weinberg, much more aggressive and modernist in tone, had suffered just as much: I found myself thinking, "Ah yes. This kind of musical language", and without much pleasure.

The BBC producer John Walters once said that he ceased to be working class the first time he tasted an avocado. Thus the transforming power of novelty. But what did Walters think the second time he tasted one? Or the third? There's an old story of an 18th century gent showing a friend round his newly landscaped grounds. "The theme of my garden, sir," he says, "is one of surprise". His friend, a wag, replies, "But what, sir, is the theme the second time one walks around it?"

For the new is only new once. When it is no longer new, we are left with a thing's inherent qualities, be they avocado or opera. I didn't enjoy the Weinberg much. Once I might have been knocked backwards by its novel savagery. But now the music-loving public has heard a fair bit of this stuff. Shostakovitch did it better (and even Shostakovitch wrote some dross). The Barber, for all the muddiness of its plotting, I enjoyed a lot more. For my taste, it is over written and over-orchestrated, but Barber has a compassion for his characters (which I am afraid I find hard to detect in Britten) and an ability to write memorable music which suits their predicament. I can still hum some of the tunes 36 hours later.

Bernard Keeffe, my old conducting teacher, used to say that what makes music last is the quality of the invention. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, I prefer a more utilitarian explanation. Music lasts if people will keep on paying to hear it. Newness and originality are not on their own enough. On this score, dated or not, Barber's music will survive; but Weinberg should enjoy his day in the sun.

walton #1

The Irish composer conductor Hamilton Harty would have been surprised to discover that, 70 years after his death, he is best remembered not for his own pieces, but for an arrangement he made of bits of Handel's Water Music. The original suites are long, fragmentary and scored for a small orchestra of string section plus a few winds and brass, so Harty made an arrangement of his favourite bits for full symphony orchestra (minus trombones) lasting 16 minutes. It suited professional orchestras of the day, short, full of good tunes, and is still often played now; in fact we performed it at Halifax last night.

Another minor claim to fame of Harty's is that in the mid-thirties he gave the first performance of William Walton's Symphony No 1. Actually Harty gave, paradoxically, two first performances, one with the LSO of the first three movements, when Walton had struggled for the inspiration needed to complete the work, and the second with the Halle when he had finished the job. At Halifax we were unaware of the Harty connection when programming both the Handel and Walton for last night's concert.

There was another poignant connection for me - HSO's first trombonist, Frank Mathison, played bass trombone on the record of Walton 1 I had as a teenager, played by the LSO under Previn. I liked the piece then, for its grim Sibelian severity, swept aside by the exuberant finale, but hadn't heard it for years - it isn't often played - and was curious to rediscover it; and to rediscover whether I liked it.

On the whole, no.

The musical world of the 1930s was a divided one. From Europe, and from Vienna in particular, came new sounds and structures which alienated as many as they attracted. For the Anglo-Saxon wing (remember that America is now an important part of this equation) there was one composer who stood as an antidote to the new cacophony - Sibelius. By any standards the Finn was a great composer, and, vitally, he showed it was still possible to write great music in C major. In Britain critics and composers looked to Sibelius for inspiration. The final chapter of Constant Lambert's wonderful book Music Ho!, published in 1934, is entitled Sibelius and the music of the future; as late as 1944 Vaughan Williams dedicated the 5th Symphony to Sibelius. Until Benjamin Britten's star burst onto the London musical scene in the late 30s, British music-making set its face against developments in Central Europe, and looked north.

If it's not surprising that the young Walton, embarking on his first symphony, should look to Sibelius for his model, it is surprising that he should borrow so wholeheartedly. It's not just the long pedal points, the harmonic tics (for example the major chord IV in minor key passages) or the brass chords emerging from the orchestral texture to end up dominating it; Walton steals whole melodic ideas, from the Lemminkainen Legends amongst others, but most egregiously from the Fourth Symphony (a tune in tritones in the scherzo, but also the unison string notes which close the Fourth's slow movement, and which Walton uses to open and close his own slow movement: so slavish is the copying that Walton even uses the same pitch, C sharp).

Does any of this matter? Perhaps not - there's a lot of Haydn in Mozart, for example, and a lot of Beethoven in Brahms. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, can anyone say they really enjoy hearing one person flatter another? The imitation is so sincere, particularly in the first movement, that Walton's own musical personality is very largely effaced, emerging strongly again only in the finale. Moreover, it is only Sibelius's outward manner that Walton is aping. He shows no taste for or understanding of the truly distinctive features of the Finnish master's style, nothing of his economy, or capacity for transforming and connecting musical ideas. Instead we get big brassy fanfares and interminable ostinati, taken from Sibelius and fed steroids, but without any understanding that in Sibelius these are merely external manifestations of a process, not the process itself.

I have conducted some Bruckner, a composer notorious for rambling and semi-coherent structures, and felt that by the time the concert arrived I had got to grips with the direction of the music. With Walton 1 I was no wiser after weeks of rehearsal - particularly in the first and second movements.

There are four problems. The first is that Walton does not know how to write a climax; or rather he does not know how to use a climax. By definition, a climax is a point set apart from surrounding events; by definition these surrounding events must be of a different character. In music you show these differences by technical means - contrasts of volume and orchestration, for example - and by the character of the music itself. But Walton bangs on, particularly at the end of the first movement, with almost permanent orchestral tutti, the high points emerging rather like Dartmoor tors, pimples on a drab landscape, rather than mighty alps, amidst a musical affect of near-continuous angst. The effect is wearing.

Secondly, at nigh-on forty five minutes the symphony is simply too long. Again, the first and second movements are the chief culprits. At the start of the piece Walton says nothing after the first ten minutes that he hasn't said already in the first ten minutes. So why carry on? The scherzo, a dancing gremlin of a movement, does its stop-start, bang-crash, pp / ff business (very much derived from the scherzo of Sibelius 1) for five minutes or so; and then just carries on doing the same thing for a few minutes more. There is no emotional or psychological conclusion or development towards the end - for all its jittery jumpiness, after a while it is just boring.

Thirdly - and this is perhaps another aspect of the same fault - Walton has no idea how to do pacing, that most elusive of the musical arts; in other words how quickly to make the music move on from one passage or area of feeling to another, the instinctive dramatic grasp of when the listener will have heard enough of a particular section and want to continue to the next, when to make the music stop, when to make the flow continuous so the listener is caught up in its momentum. In part this is because the first three movements of the symphony always inhabit pretty much the same area of feeling; so how can he move on when the music is largely always saying the same thing? But within this continuous mood there are differing areas of tempo, and the first movement spends too much of the middle five minutes marooned in a tasteful angst-ridden torpor; the pace quickens for a couple of pages, then - and my heart sank every time we played it - back comes the second subject, slower, a wide-intervalled tune, usually in the horns - and at a stroke the momentum is gone again.

Lastly, orchestration. There is a moment, towards the end of the scherzo, where Walton has made up his mind that, having said all he has to say in this movement, he is going to say a bit more of it anyway; here a simple rhythmic idea is bounced between the woodwind and the strings. The ear greets this easy juxtaposition with a sigh of relief. For once Walton has written a simple open texture, devoid of doubled melodic lines, without complex divisi strings, without rampaging brass. But this is a rare moment, for I have never conducted a piece so over-orchestrated, so determined to be complex when being too simple would have been better (and to be sometimes simple and sometimes complex would have been better still). There are reams and reams of notes in this symphony which could simply have been erased. No one seems to have told Walton that sometimes it is better to withhold - because by witholding something its reintroduction is itself an effective musical ploy. If you want a climax, work out where that climax is going to be, then distribute your musical forces so that they have maximum impact at the moments when you need them; then start taking them away again.

All of which brings us back to Hamilton Harty. His Water Music arrangement is wildly anachronistic in this day and age; it bears little relation to Handel's original, and even given the early 20th century full-orchestra premise, there are some bizarre moments capable of making the modern musician gape with appalled wonder. And yet here was a man who knew how the orchestra works, and understood the psychology of the listener. The textures are spare and clear; the different orchestral groups are used for contrast rather than relentlessly mixed. The trumpets are cunningly held back to the last movement so their introduction comes as a thrilling fillip. You might even call the orchestration Sibelian. No wonder people still want to play it.

As for Walton, for all its pacing problems, in the last movement the composer does at last cast off his Sibelian shackles, with some glorious brass writing, a few poignant pages of tenderness amid the mayhem, and an over-the-top conclusion complete with ringing tam tam and cymbals.

Perhaps after the first first performance Hamilton Harty had a word with him.

in the shadow of the wizard

During the interval of a concert on Saturday, my mother came across a crusty old battleaxe she knows from her weekly French class. This lady, starchy, faintly condescending, played the fiddle professionally in various London orchestras thirty or forty years ago. They agreed that it was a fine concert - they'd just heard a performance of Mozart's magisterial Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K364 by the Athenean Ensemble - and after praising the soloists, Jonathan Martindale and Lucy Nolan, my mother's friend singled out the conductor, who had apparently done a fine job too. For Mum, fifty odd years of disappointment fell away in a moment, all the effort and sacrifice of parenthood made worthwhile by the open goal now facing her. "Actually, he's my son", she said.

I have conducted the Sinfonia Concertante once before, in a half-empty Victoria Theatre in Halifax. But here in Didsbury every seat in the church was taken, and there were people standing at the back; at the end, a kind of roar went up from the audience, the sort of response you very rarely get at a classical concert, and one I don't think I've ever heard whilst conducting (and I've done some rabble rousing stuff, from Bruckner to John Williams and back via the Dambusters March). What an exceptional piece K.364 is, and what a privilege for me, Lucy, Jonathan and the players, to walk, for the half an hour it took to play it, in the long shadow of the Salzburg wizard.

brassed orf

Retaining an endearing capacity to surprise after nearly 20 years in the post, my wife - born Hampshire, educated Portsmouth, Oxford and Bar School, London - has recently exhibited a passionate enthusiasm for brass bands. On Saturday I volunteered to go with her to the Bridgewater for a Brass Band Gala Concert featuring Brighouse and Rastrick, Black Dyke and Fodens (Q - What is the difference between between a Concert and a Gala Concert? No, I don't know either).

Some miscellaneous impressions from a neophyte:

1. The audience was even older than the average Halle audience.

2. Judging by the repertoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that modernism had never happened. On the downside this meant that some of the repertoire was woefully unambitious and footling. On the upside, the amount of new repertoire, enthusiastically played and greeted, showed that Brass Band culture is alive and well, unashamedly directed at the enjoyment of both players and audience, and entirely free from the stifling intellectual navel-gazing that acts as a thick layer of cobweb around modern classical music. In particular, Peter Graham, Professor at Salford, has evidently written some very skilful and breathtakingly exciting band music.

3. The actual sound of the ensemble is surprisingly mellow, at least to those of us used to wincing as orchestral brass comes crashing boisterously into the room. I'd attribute this to the preponderance of tubas, both large and small: a rounded and almost woolly timbre, comforting as hot cocoa.

4. The only bandsman/woman not wearing a lurid military tunic was a percussionist with Brighouse & Rastrick, who turns out to be one Minesh Patel, a percussion teacher resident in Leicester. What a player Mr Patel was, but could the chaps (all chaps in B&R) not club together to buy him the proper outfit? But perhaps Patel needed his arms unencumbered for his unrestrained and witheringly accurate assaults on the xylophone.

5. My tastes must be getting lower and lower - a favourite moment was an arrangement of a Mario Lanza tune. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is", wrote Noel Coward.

6. Judging by the hairdo of Aussie conductor David King, the mullet has not yet become taboo down-under. And please don't tell me he was wearing it ironically. Or, worse still, that it's making a come-back.

A right load of Kok?

Another interesting night at the Proms, with Rattle and the Berlin Phil's Viennese evening. No, not Strauss and Lehar, but Wagner, Strauss R, and the Second Viennese School.

First, you can knock Rattle for some of the musical decisions he makes, but not his means of executing them - every gesture considered and to the point, even in the more complex stuff. Valery Gergiev please note: enough with your gurning and flailing already.

As for the repertoire, I am afraid that I am no friend to the Second Viennese School. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not admired, and I just don't like listening to this music enough. I can see that it's very well done for what it is (and Berg in particular was clearly a supremely talented musician); I imagine it would be fun to conduct, and perhaps fun to play. But to listen to I find it ugly, restless and cold.

Schoenberg and his disciples would no doubt have told you they were broadening music's expressive range, and in some of Berg's work that's true (the Violin Concerto; but I can't think of anything else). What they were really doing, however, was chucking the baby out with the bathwater - there's more emotional and psychological contrast in Mozart's simple major and minor triads than than in this music. By excluding tonality more or less completely (and later on by excluding regular rhythm), it painted itself into a very small corner indeed.

Some of the quieter episodes have a kind of chilly beauty, but aside from this what else is there to enjoy? The routine crunching dissonances? Not for me. There is a desperate narrowness of affect; I find the music lacks breadth and contrast, the ability to present the listener with a variety of emotional and psychological landscapes. Even in these early pieces serialism's tell-tale constriction was there - already the reliance on timbre as a means of imparting life and contrast. But timbre is not enough as a constructive device, and there is a meandering quality to the music that I think due to lack of harmonic direction. Harmony without poles lacks magnetism; hence the reliance of legions of 20th Century composers on texture to get them to the finishing line. Hence the ever expanding orchestras and esoteric instruments.

I've always felt too that there was little mileage in the argument that this music was a necessary response to the political times. After all, war, famine and pestilence were not new things; they have always ravaged Europe. And modernism had reared its head in the form of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's Elektra long before the Archduke Ferdinand was shot. It was a period in which composers were finding Romanticism unsatisfactory, and looking for other means of expression: Sibelius had already used a simpler, subtler style in his 3rd Symphony (1907); the darkness of his 4th (1911) is attributed to a diagnosis of throat cancer rather than fears of war. Strauss himself put expressionism behind him with Rosenkavalier (1911), and never went back.

No, the truth is surely that the human desire for novelty in the context of what looked like a worn-out idiom was as much responsible for Berg and Webern's experimentation as anything going on in the fields of Flanders; that and a desire to scandalize the conservative Viennese bourgeousie (surely the dreariest of motivations any artist can experience).

Whatever musicologists might say, there is no prescribed correct response to the times you live in. Each of us is free to respond in the way we like. The American critic Joe Queenan once wrote that he had personally responded to the threat of nuclear annihalation by listening to more Bach. I'm with Queenan on this.

In a way the most instructive thing associated with the evening (apart from the sublime Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, which sent me scurrying to the internet to look out the score), was the interview Rattle gave to the BBC in the afternoon. In it he recounted Felix Kok's story (Kok was for many years CBSO leader under Rattle) of turning up one day in 1948 to an orchestral rehearsal in, I think, the Kingsway Hall, London. The players had no idea what they were going to play or with whom. Then the door opened and in walked Wilhelm Furtwangler and Kirsten Flagstad. The music on the stand seemed to consist of four short orchestral pieces. There was no title, and no composer's name on the handwritten parts. However Kok said that as they began to play and Ms Flagstad to sing, they knew they were in the presence of greatness; and as millions of ordinary people have since discovered, the music was by Richard Strauss, and now bears the title Four Last Songs.

emotional tourism

Writing in today's Guardian, Martin Kettle bangs the drum for Rattle conducting Mahler 1 at the Proms tonight, thus calling to mind Frederick Delius's famous quote. "Now it is Sibelius", wrote Delius - this was in the 30s, I think - "and when they are tired of him it will be Mahler or Bruckner".

And lo it has come to pass. Why Mahler now? My answer would be that we live in an age of rampant individualism, and what Mahler serves up is a brilliantly realised justification of the self, with all its inward-looking narcissism. He offers listeners the sense that their lives are full of passion, drama, heroism, struggle and grief. But this is a partial truth at best, a distortion at worst. Most of life involves more quotidien activities like going round the supermarket, washing up, making sure your children have done their homework. Opportunities for glory and heartbreak are, perhaps fortunately, relatively few and far between for most of us.

Our lives are not like Mahler imagines them, and to sit and listen to one of his symphonies is to experience a form of emotional tourism. It makes us feel more important, but that shouldn't blind us to the essential falseness of the experience. I wouldn't quite go along with Aaron Copland, who compared listening to Mahler to watching a very great actor walking along the street pretending to be a great composer, but do I see what he was getting at.

This is not to say that Mahler was not an outstanding musician, nor that the 6th Symphony is not a perfectly realised piece, nor that he was a very great orchestrator (but parts of Das Lied are horribly overscored and in general Mahler leaves no pudding under-egged). It merely means that judged by the very highest standards, in contrast to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or the Salzburg Wizard, what Mahler is saying panders to an unattractively self-centred aspect of humanity which currently dominates western cultural traditions. The essential hollowness of Mahler's vision is embarrassingly clear in the finale of the 7th (even, I would say, in the finale of the 5th). Only a virtuoso conductor can make Nos. 2 and 8 sound anything but rambling and incoherent. Virtually all of his symphonies could have been half an hour shorter without being any worse.

Sibelius has much more to say about the relationship between man and nature; he also has the gift of writing profound and subtle light music, which Mahler (and virtually everybody else) lacks. The Dane Carl Nielsen has much more to say about what it means to be a person, and how to live your life with courage and dignity. He also said it a lot more pithily, and having said it, shut up about it.

None of which means that I won't be listening tonight. It merely means that I'll be switching over every now and again to watch England -v- Bulgaria on ITV. Now that promises to be an emotional roller-coaster.

Ignoring the critics

A review by Andrew Clements of James Macmillan's trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun has put my back up.

 Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".

 It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.

Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?

Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.

As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.

But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class.  Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?

Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."

 If only it were so easy.

Barry Manilow and the decline of classical music

A couple of recent conversations, both with educationalists, have filled me with gloom about the future of classical music in the UK. The distinct impression gleaned from both is of the slow death of classical instrumental teaching in schools. "My school used to have half a dozen outstanding musicians at any one time", one said to me. "But now they all want to do electric guitar or drums". Another lamented the death of the local youth orchestra. "They lost the endangered instruments first, oboes and bassoons, and then they just didn't have enough players and had to shut it down". What, I asked, was the prospect of finding a good local young soloist to do a concerto? Much shaking of heads. "You might find someone, perhaps in one of the private schools. But I'd have to put out feelers. I can't think of anyone off hand." This autumn a local University renowned for its music department, one told me, had no string players in its new intake of students.

It is a cliche that things are not what they used to be, one widely mocked because we all know that things have a tendency to remain exactly the same; but let me record one way things truly were different in the 1970s. I had violin lessons till I was 17, but hardly had I got into double figures when I realised that girls had an irrational weakness for boys who could play the electric guitar. So the violin was a chore (enjoyed playing, hated practising), whereas the guitar was a pleasure to be indulged whenever there was a free moment. The school had a visiting guitar teacher, but the kids who had lessons were universally useless at rock and roll. That's because you cannot teach someone to play it. You have to work it out for yourself. Classical music requires technique, and if you can acquire one it will take you almost to the highest level, where only the last few percentage points of musicality marks the difference between Alfred Brendel and a journeyman. But rock and roll is not like that. In a discipline which prizes above all else the ability to improvise, every player has to find their own way: after all, the great masters of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Richard Thompson to Tom Verlaine, have styles so divergent they might be playing different instruments.

Not only were lessons useless, but they were given by adults. Pop music was ours, the music of the young, and we would no more have let them teach us about it than they would have known how. You may say that the slow death of classical music (if that's what it is) is just a natural consequence of an art form's obsolescence. Perhaps. But is not that also true of pop music? Is it not the case that when a medium is taught in schools, when there are exams you can take in it, when Phd students pore over the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, the medium's time is up? When my children know more about the Beatles and AC/DC than I do, when the latest in electro-pop (Lady Gaga, La Roux) is just the 80s revisited, when pop is condemned to rehash the cultural stylings of its heyday for a new generation, when the X-Factor churns out singing strippers who would make perfectly capable cruise-ship chanteuses in another life, isn't that the sound of a dead horse being flogged? When will the new punk come to sweep it all away? And if it does, will it just be a re-hash of the old?

Kids do not need adults to tell them about pop. They will spend their youth discovering it and making it for themselves. But they do need adults to tell them about classical music. Why? Well, because although it's amongst the greatest art the West has ever produced, because although once discovered it is an emotional and psychological resource for life, most kids won't find it on their own: they are put off by the language and the lack of surface glamour which most pop music strives assiduously to cultivate. There are other reasons for the decline of classical music in Britain, but a woeful blindness on the part of educationalists must take its share of the blame. I have heard teachers say in all seriousness, "We're glad we don't have to teach classical music at GCSE any more: it helps with inclusivity. Now we're doing keyboard and karaoke more kids want to get involved". It is with difficulty have I restrained myself from shouting, "Take that, you smug bastard", whilst beating them with a riding crop. Would they make the same argument about Shakespeare? Can you imagine someone saying, "We don't bother with Macbeth or Hamlet any more, because the kids don't want to get involved. We let them do Harry Potter or Garth Nix instead"? And yet that is effectively the place we have reached. A generation of teachers who were themselves taught little about classical music is now responsible for teaching a new generation of children. We have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.

My remedy? How long have we got. I would start, and it would only be a start, at the very bottom, in primary school. Every classroom has a CD player already. Make teachers play classical music every day while the kids are doing reading or drawing. This already happens in my youngest daughter's school. Play the Brandenburgs. Some Handel. Start them off slow. Get the language into their heads. That would do to get them going.

Unfortunately my daughter's teacher is a Barry Manilow fan. She now knows the words to Copacabana by heart; but when I conduct Beethoven's 5th tomorrow night I know my wife will struggle to persuade her to come.

Alan Green at the Proms

As the umpteenth Proms season grinds its way to a close, I find guiltily that yet again I have failed to listen to more than a fraction of the concerts. There are several reasons for this. The pressures of family life. Being away on holiday. Not liking some of the programmes. And, it must be admitted, reluctance to face the sobering reality, experienced annually by the vast majority of British composers, that one's own music does not feature. Again. This chilling douche makes the Proms as much a horse-syringe sized injection of humility as a great music festival. Attendance can be as painful as it is enjoyable.

The Proms and I go way back. As a student I queued for hours outside the Albert Hall to hear Rattle conduct Mahler, or Elder with the NYO doing bits of Valkyrie with Gwyneth Jones as Brunnhilde (quite the loudest singer I have ever heard). It was there that a performance of Nielsen's fifth left me speechless for a full ten minutes. And after the concerts we'd literally run down the street to the Queen's Arms to get two pints in and somewhere to sit before the crush of listeners and orchestral players arrived, arguing the toss about the music we'd just heard. Later, when I was working near Chancery Lane, I'd get the Tube to Marble Arch and walk across Hyde Park in the evening sunshine to meet my wife outside. It was a thoroughly civilised and invigorating thing to do, and now, ten years after having left London, it is still the only thing I miss about living there.

Notwithstanding all the concerts missed this year, there were still some great performances. Maris Yanssons doing Sibelius 1 with the flair and conviction of a great conductor at the top of his game. The Lebecq sisters playing the Poulenc Double. And has there been a more arch performer since Liberace than the uber-charismatic Lang Lang? For all his eye-rolling and gurning at the piano, he made the Chopin F minor concerto look really easy, and played with all the grace and finesse you could ask for.

To the downside, I didn't like any of the newer stuff. I caught bits of a Xenakis piece which sounded truly dreary, and there was something by Louis Andriessen which did nothing very much before lumbering and stumbling to the finishing line. Did Roger Wright really have to commission Goldie, the former electronica luminary, a man who does not even read music, to write an orchestral piece?

And the BBC TV coverage was infuriating. Yes, no-one else would do this - and thank God for the BBC generally - but did the pundits have to be so bland? Not all performances were great, and neither was all the music. Strauss's Alpinesinfonie is a monstrosity. The English singers in the otherwise wonderful John Wilson prom were wooden and lacklustre. The programme of the Gustav Mahler youth orchestra concert was a turgid fin-de-siecle Viennese-fest in which the lightest item was the Kindertotenlieder and rows of empty seats were clearly visible behind the presenter. You wouldn't know any of this from the coverage, because in this the best of all possible worlds everything was great, the audiences loved it all and classical music was in rude health.

Does it have to be like this? I was reminded by contrast of the BBC's football commentries, and in particular of Alan Green, a fearless Ulsterman who tells it like it is. The BBC no doubt pays him handsomely for his efforts, and pays handsomely for the right to broadcast those efforts to us. But Green couldn't care less. "This game", he'll tell listeners, "is rubbish. The standard of football has been woeful. I'm doing my best to stay awake, and thank goodness it's nearly half time".

Why can't we have that kind of punditry at the Proms? You may object that Alan Green knows nothing about classical music. Possibly not. But that didn't seem to harm Goldie's prospects.

Dino Powell

Every now and again, sitting in the cinema as the final credits roll, I see that the music for the film I've been watching was by John Powell. It happened to me yesterday when I took my youngest daughter to the cinema. Seeing John's name makes me smile because twenty years ago I was at College with him. A small bloke, handsome in a slightly chubby way, he had the most dazzling white teeth: if there was ever a Brit who didn't need his teeth fixed to make it in Hollywood, Powell was the man. He displayed no outstanding talent for composition, but worked hard in the Trinity recording studio, was easy to get along with, and was quite good at just about everything.

How did he get into films? It must have helped that he was close friends with Gavin Greenaway, son of Roger "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Greenaway, a luminary in the world of advertising jingles. And Hans Zimmer famously got Powell the job of scoring his first movie, the John Woo action thriller Face/Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. But you don't get a second job by doing the first one badly, and I think John deserves his success. He can do a bit of Holst, a bit of Strauss, some Copland, some electronica. In fact, as he demonstrated at College, Powell can do just about everything quite well.

Sometimes when I'm sitting there I think, "Should I be feeling envious that he writes film scores that are heard all over the world, whereas I'm just a moderately successful classical composer and conductor of amateur orchestras?" On the whole, no. John must be rich; he lives in sunny L.A. But I've got drink in the house and money in the bank too, and I quite like it here in rainy Manchester.

But there is one thing I envy him. Composing is an isolating and isolated business. Sometimes you get asked to write pieces, but a lot of the time you write something just because you want to, not knowing for certain whether you'll be able to persuade anyone to put it on. John, on the other hand, must feel loved when he gets the phone call. It may not be real love, but it's pretty close and it must make him feel pretty good.

Would I like it if someone rang me up and said, "We're willing to pay you a lot of money to write some music which will be heard by millions of people all over the world"? Yes, I think I would. But - and this is where John Powell and I part company - I might not like it quite so much if the music I had to write was the soundtrack for Ice Age 3 - Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Celebrity Composers

It was perhaps predictable that, after posting a month or so ago about the forthcoming performance of Rufus Wainwright's opera Prima Donna at the Manchester International Festival, my wife would buy a pair of tickets and insist we go. "I'll be miserable", I protested. "Either it'll be brilliant, in which case I'll be jealous, or it'll be dreadful, in which case I'll be furious". But my objections were in vain, and off we went last night to the packed Palace Theatre.

Actually Prima Donna was neither brilliant nor dreadful, and I was neither jealous or angry. Wainwright is clearly a very talented guy, and about a quarter of the opera worked really well. OK, a lot of it sounds like Puccini, but perhaps better so than Birtwhistle, and there is after all a lot of Haydn in Mozart. A lot of other bits reminded me of no-one at all.

As for the remaining three quarters, the word which sprang to mind was amateurish. Wainwright cannot write a climax and does not know how to make the music move forward. He doesn't always know how to write music which underscores and amplifies the (fairly melodramatic) story, often serving up the bland at what should be the most gripping moments (the suspended dominant chord when the heroine may or may not be about to chuck herself from the window ledge perhaps the most memorably dreary example). Some of his writing for voices is leaden and unsympathetic (just because tenors can sing high doesn't mean you have to make them sing high all the time). It came as no surprise to read in the score that Wainwright had needed the assistance of an "orchestration assistant". I read this as meaning, "Rufus doesn't know how to score for orchestra, so we'll get a guy in who does".

The truly depressing thing about Prima Donna is not that it is no good at all, but that all these superbly professional people - the singers, designers, producers and orchestra all aquit themselves honourably - had been put at vast expense at the service of someone who is essentially an inexperienced amateur. Why? Because Wainwright is famous; the fact that he is famous for doing something else does not seem to have bothered the people who commissioned his piece. This is exactly the same mistake as that made routinely by the chairmen of football clubs, who appoint managers thinking that because they were good at football they must also be good at management. Bobby Charlton, John Barnes, Paul Gascoigne and many others tried it and failed. The best managers in the English league on the other hand in the last few years - Fergie, Mourinho and Wenger - were all average or worse as players. The gifted player like Mark Hughes who makes a good manager is an exception.

So now as well as celebrity managers we have celebrity composers. Is Leona Lewis writing an opera? Not so far as I know. But her agent should get onto it as soon as possible, because I'm sure that the organisers of some arts festival somewhere would like to hear from her. I am available if she needs an orchestration assistant.

The Quality of the Invention, stupid

Three things recently have conspired to remind me of the great John Williams, composer - I almost said "film composer" - extraordinaire.

Firstly, the Halifax Symphony Orchestra blasted its way through a Star Wars medley last Saturday, a performance it was a privelidge to conduct, with the brass section on coruscating form (by the way, in the eyes of the Courier's reviewer I was "lively" this time - does she read my blog?  Is she teasing me?).

Secondly, I've been reading Alex Ross's (otherwise excellent) history of 20th c. music The Rest is Noise, in which nonentities such as Varese get a dozen references but Williams is missing altogether.

Thirdly, I went to see the new Star Trek movie the other night, and found it pretty much like Star Wars only with mediocre music; which made it a pretty mediocre experience.

Why should John Williams feature in Ross's book?  After all he's not a classical composer.  Wrong.  Actually Williams has written quite a bit of concert music, including concertos for violin, clarinet and cello (this last for Yo Yo Ma).  But that's not quite the point.  Ross finds space for several Hollywood composers of the 30s and 40s, forced out of Europe by the rise of Nazism.  Why not space for one Hollywood composer of the 80s and 90s forced out of the concert hall by the rise of Serialism?

For all the debt Williams owes to Shostakovitch and Prokofiev (isn't there a good deal of Beethoven in Brahms?), he has one priceless quality afforded only to the very, very lucky.  A gift for memorable harmony and melody.  And what makes music last is not its originality, the sublety of its construction or the superficial allure of its intellectual foundations: it is the quality of the invention.  

That's why Williams's is a greater composer than Varese, and why his music will still be played when Varese is long forgotten.

Rufus "Anonymous" Wainwright

So singer Rufus Wainwright has written an opera, and it's going to be put on at this year's Manchester Festival.  Lucky Rufus.  Last year it was Damon Allbarn's Monkey.  A while back the London Sinfonietta was looking for a composer to work with.  Who did they go for?  Answer, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.  

The moral?  If you want your work put on, don't bother going to Music College, learning your craft, sending your music to people who'll never read it, going in for the same competitions everyone else is going for, trying to scrape a living while you write in the little unused corners of your spare time that aren't taken up by your domestic life.

No, instead become a pop star, because apparently that's a bit of a draw for the powers that be in classical music.  

Don't get me wrong, these people may be talented and their work may be really good.  May be. But let's face it, they got the gig because they were who they were.  If they want to see how much their talent counts for, next time let them submit it anonymously.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old classical music, poking around in the bottom of the barrel for something the public might actually pay to see. Without wishing to labour the obvious, putting on works from composers the public quite likes might be a good place to start.  Why not stop commissioning Birtwhistle and Rihm, whose stuff the mass audience cordially loathes, and encourage instead composers who care about whether the listener has a good time and can understand what's going on?

After all John Adams can't be the only one who can do it.

Looking like Brad Pitt

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson.  Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director.  However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.  

This time I was "attentive".  I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.  

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough.  Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame".  In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan.  And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts?  Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.  

From the back, of course.  In a dark theatre.

Symphonie Fantastique!

You can think you know a piece pretty well, but some new things struck me after conducting Berlioz's masterpiece on Saturday night for the first time.  

Extraordinarily, the Symphonie Fantastique was written in the same period (late 1820s) as Schubert's Great C Major symphony.  But where Schubert does his wonderful best to follow in Beethoven's footsteps - Schubert lacks more than a small part of Beethoven's great gift for construction based on motivic development, but nevertheless the Great C Major is recognisably designed on the same principles - Berlioz's method is something altogether new and different.  True, there are tunes, one of which recurs throughout the work, but Berlioz is less interested in contrasting and developing these than he is in the bravura opposition of brilliantly vivid and idiomatic orchestral textures; you might even say that this is the principal constructive device.

It shouldn't work.  It should be rambling and incoherent.  But it isn't.  Why?  Partly because the above-mentioned idee fixe ties it all together; partly because the ideas themselves are so wonderful; and partly because in the second half of the piece Berlioz cranks up the rhythmic excitement so successfully after the long silences of the central slow movement that you seem to be caught up in some crazy dance, a party that's got out of hand but that no one wants to end.

Conducting long symphonies like this one, I am sometimes just relieved to have got to the final bars without mishap.  But on Saturday, admiration for Berlioz's achievement came welling up at the finish, and now I can't wait for the chance to do it again.