Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ursula Vaughan Williams at a recording of Tippett's Second Symphony at the BBC in 1958. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive
So Schoenberg has topped the Classic FM "Hall of Fame", with Berio and Nono second and third. Who would have forecast that? This annual exercise to discover the most popular composers and the public's favourite pieces of "classical" music has at last thrown up a few surprises.
I jest, of course. These three luminaries do not feature in a list that, give or take some nonsense from Paul McCartney and a few other contemporary composers of quasi-religious tosh and the obligatory obeisance to Hollywood (Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings comes in at number 46, one place below Beethoven's Violin Concerto), is entirely predictable.
Classic FM's Hall of Fame, like the station itself, is blameless but pointless. The list confirms what we already know: that Mozart, Beethoven and Bach are the cornerstones of classical music, both the greatest and the most popular composers, with Handel, Brahms and Schubert justly in the overall top 10 too, along with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov because Classic FM listeners like that sort of intense passion (in theory of course), Elgar and Vaughan Williams because they play well in Dorking, and Shostakovich because we have just been subjected to the overload of his centenary year. (The top 10 appears to be a top 11, but I never have understood the methodology of this poll. Has it ever been explained? Is it one of those dubious internet prompts where listeners have to select from a menu of possibilities, which would be a real no no for Nono?)
The number one piece is Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, about which there is virtually nothing to say, so bland is it. It's jolly nice and pleasant and brief; written on the eve of the first world war it has that freight of a fragrant land about to be consumed; and played now in a society riven by doubt and a country where Tescos and B&Qs have covered what would once have been fields over which larks might have soared, it's oddly affecting if you're in the right sort of mood (which today I'm not - I just played it and was bored stiff).
But it's not great or challenging music, and poor Vaughan Williams would occasionally like to have his turbulent Fourth Symphony and nihilistic Sixth taken into account among all the plangency, nostalgia and "quintessential Englishness" usually imposed upon him. His compositional career was more than just a lark, and classical music is more than the aural equivalent of the Radox bath into which one-dimensional Classic FM plunges us each day. Don't relax, surprise us! (I do love VW's Norfolk Rhapsody No 1, though, and might vote for it next year. Along with Pierrot Lunaire.)
