A night at the Proms won't break the bank. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
Classical music has a real communication problem. Following up Charlotte Higgins' blog on the Sun's hook-up with the Royal Opera House, and one of the comments made - "How much is a West End cinema ticket nowadays? Or a pop concert? The idea that opera is elitist is a complete myth" - even the Proms suffers from the bonkers idea that "if it's classical music, it must be expensive". It costs £5 to go to the Proms, to be part of one of music's great audiences, and to hear a concert in the best acoustic space the Royal Albert Hall can offer - it's a delightful, democratic irony of the South Kensington rotunda's design that the more you pay at the Proms, the worse the music sounds. And all for the price of Top Gear magazine (it's even cheaper if you buy in bulk, with a season-long or weekend Promming pass).
And yet that message seems, strangely, not to get out there. Last year, having a beer at a restaurant on Exhibition Road, I got talking to one of guys behind the bar, who said that he would love to go to the Proms, but that it was too expensive. His jaw hit the floor when I told him that it would cost him a fiver, every night: he assumed it would be 'about fifty quid', and was astonished it cost less to go to a concert of orchestral music than to go to watch his team, Crystal Palace, every second Saturday (tickets for Selhurst Park next season: £25 a time for adults).
It's not just the Proms, of course: I saw the Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House a couple of weeks ago for £14 for two tickets - standing up in the Gods, but with a fantastic view of conductor Charles Mackerras and the orchestra as well as most of the stage, and a better sound than down in the stalls - and you can routinely turn up for tickets at the South Bank or the Barbican during the rest of the season and see any orchestral concert for under a tenner. The same is true for every British orchestra, in concert halls wherever you are.
So why does the notion persist that go to classical music concerts is a financially elitist pastime? I think because there's part of the media wants to hold on to the fetishised idea that classical music or opera is something glamorous, expensive, separate from the rest of culture. Part of the righteous indignation that the Royal Opera's stalls tickets are too expensive - a debate that crops up routinely in all parts of the press - is a desire to believe that if it costs, say, £500 to see Domingo, it's a perfect excuse to reinforce the prejudices that classical music is run by a cabal of well-off aesthetes trying to line their nests, and that it's not something people should bother to engage with. But the real news is that classical music in this country is, and can be, cheap. But apparently that's not a story the world seems to be ready for at the moment.
