Classical music

Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal melancholy over the whole piece: the evanescent sweet-sadness of autumn, beautiful in its dying’. This being late autumn, I listened to the quintet on Sunday to see if its ‘distillation of Brahmsian yearning’ still made an overwhelming impression on me. It did. I swear these are the most miserable 35 minutes in classical music. One critic refers admiringly to the display of ‘every super-refined shade of silver-grey regret’. But that’s the problem. The ageing Brahms — obese, cantankerous, his spirits lowered by the deaths of friends and undiagnosed cancer —

In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in the planning: to hear Allegri’s Miserere on ice, specifically on the ice of Antarctica. A number of things came together to put this on my bucket list, from the thought of dressing up like penguins (as usual) while we sing to penguins, to reading in the press that the Tallis Scholars ‘have performed on every continent on the planet except Antarctica’. I want to fill a boat with like-minded enthusiasts and adventurers, and set off from South America via the Falklands to the Antarctic Peninsula, hoping to make a landing

‘Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire…’ Auden wrote his words for the young Benjamin Britten, who was born on St Cecilia’s Day, and who set them to music, but his poem would also be a tribute to the composer that Britten admired above all others except Mozart. Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797, and died there 31 years later. ‘Let us honour the memory of a great man,’ he said, raising a glass after attending Beethoven’s funeral in March 1827, ‘and drink to the man who shall be next.’ Schubert died in November the following year, having heard only one concert in his

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for A-level students? A delicate question lies at the heart of the subject of female composers, and it’s not ‘Why are they so criminally underrepresented in the classical canon?’ It’s ‘How good is their music compared with that of male composers?’ Ms McCabe told the press that ‘I’d quite like to learn about the music of

Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret discussion they have chosen Kirill Petrenko — reminds one of little less than the election of a pope. In both cases the expectation is the same: the organisations are so iconic that they must continue into the future without a hitch and without question. Whatever sort of job they are doing, or have done, they have become too much a part of normal life to be abolished. Why is it that symphony orchestras of any standing are expected to survive indefinitely, where smaller musical organisations, though they may be just

This year the Proms are to stage 21 world premières and 11 European, UK or London premières. It is good to see the corporation continuing its mission to encourage new music, though some think they overdo it. I heard one of our leading keyboard players say that when he was asked to première a piece recently, he replied that he would rather dernière it. Clearly the BBC takes a more hopeful view. The most eye-catching new work in the series, leaving Whitacre out of it for now, will surely be the Fourth Symphony of our latest musical knight, Sir James MacMillan. MacMillan has described the piece as ‘abstract’ and ‘infused

The award of a knighthood to the composer James MacMillan will have ruined last weekend for lots of unsavoury people: the Guardian arts desk, which decided he’d lost his mojo as soon as he turned his back on the left; Kirsty Wark, whose squawking is mimicked in MacMillan’s Scotch Bestiary; the SNP, which he detests; and, most of all, the Nats’ religious front organisation, the Scottish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. OK, enough point-scoring. MacMillan has been honoured because he turns out glorious music. He’s also rare among living composers in having worked out an answer to the question raised when John Cage pushed sound to the point where nothing short of

As Sepp Blatter has so affectingly remarked, the organisation he formerly headed needs evolution, not revolution. There is a consensus that this is also what David Pickard will bring to the Proms, when he takes over after this season. Of course, Pickard’s job is going to be more complex than Blatter’s ever was. The challenge for Pickard is that however hard he tries to please most of the people most of the time, the modalities of running the Proms mean that he cannot be friends with everyone — and for him there will be no short cuts. What do we expect from the Proms these days? Despite all the flurry

Tours that start in Mexico have a nasty habit of repeating on one. Of all the British groups touring in the United States at the moment, we were the only one to launch our efforts there. But the upshot is that, two weeks later and safely in New York, I am still directing a sea of unnaturally white faces. I am often asked what happens when someone falls ill on stage. The answer is that they leave it, while trying to give the impression that this is all part of the evening’s entertainment. The resulting sense of unease can be felt by everyone in the room, but is perhaps worst

Daniel Barenboim is back in town: the South Bank is mounting a ‘Barenboim Project 2015’ in which he’s playing the Schubert piano sonatas and conducting his magnificent Berlin Staatskapelle in Elgar’s Second Symphony and Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, with Martha Argerich as soloist (if she doesn’t cancel yet again, in which case I assume Barenboim will do it himself). As usual, the arts luvvies are wetting themselves. I remember being at a newspaper morning conference when he was about to play the Beethoven piano concertos at the South Bank. The arts editor — who knew zilch about the respective merits of classical pianists — announced this as if it were