Dmitri Shostakovich (left), who would have been 100 this year, with Benjamin Britten. Photograph: Ria Novosti
Another day, another classical music anniversary. Yesterday was the anniversary of Mozart's death, an occasion marked, as usual, by performances of his Requiem in Salzburg, Vienna, and, in a more interesting fashion, in Canterbury. By contrast, the BBC Philharmonic's marking of the occasion, with a programme consisting exclusively of works composed by Mozart in 1791, the year of his death, showed all the signs of fatigue from a year of celebrating the composer's birth 250 years ago (more like 251 now).
But 2006 hasn't just been about Mozart. This year we've also seen major celebrations of Shostakovich, who would have been 100 this year, Schumann, who would have been 200, and Britten, who would have been 93 but happens to have died 30 years ago yesterday. We've also got a would-be 80th from Morton Feldman and a live one from György Kurtág; oh, and Radio 3 is 60 and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe is 25. Congratulations all round.
There were some who this year felt that the enormous Mozart bicentenary (of his death) of 1991 was just a little too recent for the whole Mozartjahr circus to go back on the road, and clearly there would be some mileage in having a moratorium about restricting anniversary celebrations either to a composer's birth or death, but not both. For Jesus it's OK, but for everyone else it's just too much. But the underlying issue is more serious.
There are hundreds of ways in which the music of Mozart, Schumann and Shostakovich is relevant to contemporary culture, and the least of these, clearly, is the thoroughly incidental fact that they happen to have come into or out of mortal breath on a particular date or year. Mozart's operas, for instance, dramatise the complex psychology implicit in a dissolution of social structure resonant in many important ways of our own fluid times. His instrumental music, too - in seeming to originate from an effortless grasp of an apparently timeless, musical nature - raises pressing concerns for today's musical environment in which a composer's musical language is arrived at after an often tortuous series of questions and choices, mirroring modernity's continuous incursion of immutable nature by contingent culture. Similarly, the music of Schumann and Shostakovich both relate to pressing contemporary concerns, more than sufficient in themselves to generate an articulated and aesthetically fruitful interest for today's listeners.
There are of course elements of genuine interest to be gleaned from considering the particulars of a composer's birth or death, but these are usually ignored in favour of the simple culture of celebration which, using a trivial springboard to generate a feast of listening, ends up by trivialising the music too.
So have concert and radio programmers forgotten what cultural relevance is really about? Has classical music (and historical literature suffers from the same disease) really lost the authority to demand to be listened to for reasons it generates of itself, rather than because record company PR departments chance upon easily saleable features? Surely it's best to choose Schumann or Shostakovich because of something pertinent that their music suggests or expresses, rather than to use it to add a fresh coat to cover up whatever happened to be last year's musical wallpaper.
Oh, and by the way, Elgar would be 150 next June and Grieg will have died 100 years ago in September. You have been warned.
