Marin Alsop, principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Photograph: Sarah Lee
Anything that gets the eight English orchestras acting together, rather than spending their time and energy in an unseemly scramble for the best share of barely adequate funding, has to be a good thing. No one could quarrel with their stated ambitions in this joint manifesto for British orchestral life in the next decade either. Of course, every school child should be given the chance to experience a classical concert, though unless the means are in place to build upon that experience in meaningful ways afterwards, which will inevitably require funding of some kind above and beyond that needed to subsidise the concert visits in the first place, the idea will be a gesture and nothing more.
What piques my interest much more, though, is the manifesto's ambition to ensure that "British composers will create more of the best orchestral compositions than anywhere else in the world", for that is not merely a question of funding, but a question of the willingness of the orchestras to programme such music in the first place, and that will require a decisive change of attitude. Few works by our leading living composers are included in the mainstream concerts of our leading orchestras on anything like a regular basis; all of them do their bit, but it's generally a tiny, tokenistic bit, sometimes cynically devised to keep the funding bodies. Of the eight conductors who signed that mission statement, only three, all based outside London incidentally, could be said at present to be promoting contemporary music in general, and British composers in particular, meaningfully in their own concerts.
