Of all the daft notions about the classical music business, the daftest is that it’s
a business at all. Seriously: an industry that’s structured to make a loss, unable to survive without subsidy? If you enjoy conspiracy theories, classical music’s façade of white-tied affluence, combined with fading memories of Herbert von Karajan’s private jet, might imply the existence of some vast global musical-industrial complex. Perhaps it even existed, once. But the modern reality is a fragile network of (to quote Sir James MacMillan) cottage industries: ensembles, promoters, boutique record labels, all heads down in their silos, sweating away at whatever it takes for their own corner of this unsustainable ecosystem to break even.
For proof, think back to the 1990s, when Classic FM plugged a new recording of Gorecki’s Third Symphony and the impossible actually happened: a serious, large-scale work by a contemporary classical composer sold in platinum-disc quantities. At this point, conventional economics dictate that Gorecki’s symphony should have conquered the world’s concert halls. In reality, most concert planners probably never even clocked its success. Since 2009 the symphony has had a little more than 50 live performances worldwide (for comparison, Elgar’s First Symphony had nearly 100 performances in its first year). It’s not that classical music is hostile to change; it’s just completely unprepared to take advantage of it.
Something similar might be happening with the Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1909–69). A cycle of her string quartets, recorded by the Silesian String Quartet, won the Chamber Music category in the 2017 Gramophone Awards. Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic and the box set climbed the album charts. But I’ve not spotted any really major uptick in live performances, and last week, when the Silesians came to London with a programme that included Bacewicz’s 1951-vintage Fourth Quartet, the Wigmore Hall looked less than two thirds full.
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