To the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem, serendipitously, on the day of Pope Francis’ funeral. Maybe that coincidence added a further layer of solemnity to the occasion, as well as suggesting a possible reason as to why the auditorium was filled virtually to capacity. The programme, overall, had a funereal theme. We began with Beethoven’s rarely heard Op 118, Elegischer Gesang, Elegiac Song, composed in 1814 for string quartet and a small group of voices. We heard a scaled-up version performed by the strings of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the RSNO Chorus. The piece was composed in memory of one Eleanor, the wife of Beethoven’s friend and benefactor Baron Johann Baptiste Pasqualati. Eleanor had died in childbirth, in 1811, aged 24.
Sanft, wie du lebtest,
hast du vollendet,
zu helig für den Schmerz!
Gently as you lived
Have you ended,
More holy for the pain!
Extraordinary to hear some undiscovered Beethoven. With its hushed opening, we immediately entered Beethoven’s world. It was as if the great man himself were present in the room.
Conductor Patrick Hahn then directed Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, with soloist Carolin Widmann. The ensemble had recorded the Berg, along with Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, earlier in the week, and they were now going to make a live recording, presumably for the RSNO archive, so Maestro Hahn politely asked us to unwrap our cough sweets now. The audience was very attentive, so no retakes were required.
The Berg is a serial piece, based on a 12-note tone row and heavily influenced of course by Schoenberg. But I think of it rather as late romantic, and very lyrical. I don’t think, on the occasion, that this performance entirely came off. The soloist made a beautiful but not a big sound, which was occasionally drowned out by the orchestral forces, and similar imbalances within the orchestral tutti concealed the melodic line.
Ha! Everyone’s a critic.
But Mozart’s Requiem was wonderful. Some of the music is severe, and austere. The clarinets and bassoons which introduce the Requiem aeternam are so doleful. The use of trombones renders an added solemnity, in the Tuba mirum, and in subsequently reiterated and rapidly moving passages for trombone trio, brilliantly played. It is a well-loved piece, no doubt made famous by the film Amadeus. It comes with its mythology – the mysterious commission, conveyed by a masked stranger; an ailing Mozart dictating passages of music on his death bed; the contribution of the amanuensis Süssmayr. Wonderful music, wonderfully performed.
It just shows you; if you put on beautiful music, you can fill the hall. Of course filling the hall, bums on seats, is a serious preoccupation for impresarios. It always has been. Looking at the prospectus for the 2025-26 season, you can tell that the RSNO are trying to reach out to a wider audience. RSNO at the movies – Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Gladiator etc. And in the recently published brochure for the forthcoming BBC London Proms, there’s something about The Traitors, and Claudia Winkleman. I have no idea what that’s about. But then I haven’t turned my telly on for about six weeks.
The debate about “standards” in music has been going for a long time. The classical repertoire versus “dumbing down”. Even in Mozart’s time, some people thought The Magic Flute was a pot-boiler, and a bit naff. Of a lovely spring afternoon on Thursday I sat with some friends in a very beautiful garden under the flightpath out of Glasgow airport, and we discussed whether it is better to keep classical music classical, or to try to attract a wider, and possibly younger, audience, with “gaming” music and so on. Predictably, I inclined to the purists’ camp. When I first saw the BBC Proms brochure I felt a bit impatient with it, though with the serenity of retrospection I can see some wonderful music is in there. Similarly, the RSNO prospectus is very clever – a combination of the familiar and the new.
But in fact the problem in programme planning is not really a matter of mainstream versus dumbing down. The problem actually resides within the purists’ camp itself. The repertoire is in fact quite limited, limited, if you will, by flavours of the month. Current flavours of the month across the classical world are undoubtedly Mahler, and Shostakovich. The current RSNO season ends with an all-Shostakovich programme, and the new season opener is Mahler 7. The Proms are doing Mahler’s 2, 3, 5, and 7, as well as Das klagende Lied, and one of the Rückert Lieder. Shostakovich is appearing eight times throughout the season. Now don’t get me wrong; I admire Mahler and Shostakovich; I just don’t want to hear them every day of the week. Other composers are available. For example Arnold Bax, a great hero of mine, does not appear at all in either brochure for the Proms or the RSNO. There is, in fact, a huge repertoire of beautiful music out there that we never hear.
Why not?
Do I detect the baleful influence of managerial pseudoscience? I have a horrible notion that programme planning may have been taken over by focus groups, strategic planners, audience researchers, and a variety of other “influencers”. People who know what will “sell”. Life has become so transactional.
With respect to music on the BBC, I would suggest Auntie might take some advice from what in this context might seem an unlikely source. Have you heard Amol Rajan’s interview with the footballer and pundit Gary Lineker? I recommend it. Two very smart cookies, and nobody on the back foot. Lineker famously got suspended (I think a kinder expression was used – he temporarily “stepped back”) when he allegedly breached the BBC’s impartiality rules for voicing political opinions. He advised the BBC not to pay any attention to the furore; just ignore it, and it will go away. Besides, even-handedness is not always a virtue. If somebody says it’s raining, and somebody says it’s dry, you don’t need to give them equal air time. Just look out the f****** window. I suppose the analogy is a bit of a stretcher, but in music, you don’t need to research what the audience taste is. Just play music that is beautiful, and beautifully played, inspirational, and deep. And people will fill the hall.
jamescalumcampbell 