Sir Peter Maxwell Davies at the Royal Academy of Music. Photograph: Graham Turner
You have to admire Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for his angry denunciation of an "utterly philistine" government and a "platitudinous" prime minister whose musical tastes do not extend beyond pop and rock.
Perhaps you don't admire him. But I cheered quietly, not least because I am fed up with feeling shifty about having had a thing about classical music ever since I discovered my uncle's collection of 78s, which I used to play on his wind-up gramophone (made c1928). I particularly remember the JH Squire Celeste Octet, whose members managed to get through carved-up versions of the 1812 overture, the first piano concerto and the Marche Slave on one side of a 12-inch record called Memories of Tchaikovsky.
Classical music (a terribly inadequate term) was not trendy when, as a teenager, I apologised to an acquaintance because I regularly paid my five bob to see operas from the upper circle at Sadler's Wells and borrowed classical LPs from the public library in Walthamstow. Now it is much less trendy, the enthusiasm of middle-class grey-heads who sit in half-empty concert halls across the land.
So it's very cheering when Sir Peter makes a stand on behalf of an art form that stirs both brain and heart, one that, in his own words, gives us "intimations of eternity". I certainly felt a twinge of those intimations a couple of weeks ago when I sang, with copious wrong notes and missed entries, in a performance of Bach's St John Passion.
Of course some (Tony Blair included) are going to call him an elitist old codger, as remote from the real world as his Orcadian island home. Of course he is looking back to some long-gone golden age when he could teach teenagers at Cirencester grammar school to sight-read Palestrina and Monterverdi. And of course some are going to say: "If you are so keen on people liking classical music, why don't you make a your own a stuff a bit easier to follow?"
But beneath Sir Peter's rage is a simple message: some works by some composers are so life enhancing that it would be a tragedy to pass through this life without knowing them. Which is why children in schools have a right to be offered them. And it's also why we grey-heads listen sometimes to Desert Island Discs, hoping someone's enthusiasm might lead us to something new.
But that doesn't happen often and, in his speech to the conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, Sir Peter gave his explanation.
"You listen to the musical choices of someone whose work you admire enormously, who can discourse on science, theatre, literature and most things cultural outwith his speciality, but who is happy to display absolute ignorance of our musical culture,'' he said.
Pretty depressing, eh?
