The public sponsorship and private patronage that has sustained symphony orchestras, the free school music lessons that give students their first embrace with an instrument, and the general agreement that aspiring to play “classical” music is a valuable part of our society are under threat.
But orchestras are responding to this challenge in new and surprising ways, with exhilarating results.
I recently spent a glorious week in China conducting the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, performed live with the film by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. It’s a bold project created at London’s Southbank Centre in collaboration with the British Film Institute.
And this month, I’ll lead the BBC Concert Orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the first live presentation of the great Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the 1968 Planet of the Apes, with Charlton Heston battling his simian captors.
This kind of collaboration is becoming more common in orchestras’ calendars as they struggle to fill concert halls. Increasingly, orchestras are looking for new ways to engage audiences, by performing great music that plays a familiar part in people’s lives.
It’s proving to be a huge success. Everywhere, orchestras are broadening their scope: live relays to cinemas, crashing pop festivals such as Latitude, and performing alongside video artists and circus performers. In a very bold move, Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra invited audiences to come along and pay what they thought the concert was worth on their way out.
The symphony orchestra is an august and venerable guardian of the greatest classical music of the past three centuries. And if that seems a bit stuffy, just think of it as the ultimate tribute band. We recreate Bach’s and Mozart’s definitive sound, even using replicas of 18th and 19th century instruments. We devote whole concert seasons to the music of Beethoven. There’s even an entire festival and auditorium devoted to Wagner’s week-long cycle of operas at the Bayreuther Festspiele. Of course, there’s also our own mammoth classical Glastonbury at the BBC Proms.
However, I’ll bet that today more people hear orchestral music in films than anywhere else. I recently toured the UK with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) with music by film composer John Williams. After a recent concert in Northampton I was met by a biker at the stage door who said he had heard the RPO before (“somebody’s piano concerto … don’t ask me who”) and really wanted to come back to hear this amazing orchestra in something he was familiar with. The music from Star Wars was just the ticket and he and his mates roared off very happily into the night.
In Europe, orchestras were formerly part of the fabric of society; they were an essential part of education and entertainment. I remember guest conducting early evening (6.30pm!) concerts in Poland and East Germany in the 1980s, before the wall came down, and being met with an audience of grannies, hipsters, parents and their toddlers. Whether they went home afterwards, out to dinner, or off clubbing, they all began their weekend together in the concert hall.
In the US, the history is different. Before the pop music industry was established, “classical” music had the hits worth recording. Intimidated in the face of European high culture, American audiences were guided by early record labels such as RCA’s His Master’s Voice (HMV), which democratised the classics through popular recordings and music appreciation classes.
Classical music stars were lionised. Enrico Caruso was the first to sell 1m copies of a record (1902); Arturo Toscanini was thrice on the cover of Time Magazine (1926, 1934 and 1948); and Leopold Stokowski and Arthur Rubinstein appeared in Hollywood films.
A similar levelling is happening through the digital revolution, which has made all music immediately accessible, transforming the way orchestras reach their audience. Twitter and Facebook are essential marketing tools and increase the dialogue artists have with their audiences.
My eyes were really opened to this when in July I conducted the Royal Philharmonic in the premiere of Pete Townshend’s Classic Quadrophenia at the Royal Albert Hall, with a cast including Alfie Boe, Billy Idol, Phil Daniels and Townshend himself. The euphoria the audience felt continued on social media for weeks afterwards.
Why do rock stars such as Townshend, the Police’s Stewart Copeland or Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood want to use orchestras? Because it gives them a bigger canvas, more colours and new and compelling ways to reach us with their music. As Erich Wolfgang Korngold, one of the first (and some say still the greatest) film composers, said: “Music is music whether it is for the stage, rostrum or cinema … a direct avenue to the ears and hearts of the great public.”
Robert Ziegler conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra for Planet of the Apes at the Royal Festival Hall in London on 28 August
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