This week, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Concert Choir will perform Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 at the BBC Proms. It could well prove a season highlight. After nearly a decade under chief conductor Fabio Luisi, the orchestra has never sounded better.
The ensemble’s anglicised name conceals the fact that it’s operated and funded by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR). Five years older than the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it celebrates its centenary this year – the second-oldest so-called “radio orchestra” in Europe.
Some broadcasting executives on the continent are asking why radio orchestras still exist while the institutions they lead are faced with the wider question of public service broadcasting’s relevance in a consumer age. The BBC, on which DR was modelled, is all too evidently grappling with both issues.
DR, meanwhile, has used the first question to help to address the second. It has put its musical ensembles at the heart of its public service mission – in so doing, justifying not just their existence but its own. In addition to its orchestra, DR runs two professional choirs (both at the Proms this week), several youth choirs, a conducting academy and a big band.
As well as performing on niche radio channels, the ensembles broadcast regularly on television all year round. DR has the resources to bring live, bespoke, original music of all kinds to the widest possible audiences, and is doing so.
The contrast with the BBC is stark. The attitude towards in-house orchestras from senior leadership at New Broadcasting House suggests confusion over their purpose. You are unlikely to catch the BBC’s ensembles broadcasting on TV outside the Proms – broadcasts that are seasonal, look the same and certainly, in the case of the Last Night, bear little resemblance to those orchestras’ year-round, country-wide activities. Each of the BBC’s ensembles is a colossal resource filled with talent and opportunity. Their broadcasting potential is massively underexploited.
Will these ensembles even survive? The corporation has reduced salaried positions in its three English orchestras and had previously announced the closure of its only professional choir the BBC Singers (the chamber group survived after a backlash).
A decade ago, DR faced the same challenges as the BBC: rapidly shifting audience habits, a funding model designed in a bygone age and general mistrust of a bloated, scandal-ridden institution. In 2018, Denmark abolished the licence fee and introduced a media tax instead. Now DR is funded by every taxpaying Dane on the principle that public service broadcasting is essential in a commercialised world and should therefore, like healthcare, be paid for even by those who claim not to use it.
Introducing the media tax has defused the debate around the fallacy of raising funds for public broadcasting on the basis of the equipment used to receive it. It also made a concession to those who believed DR had become too big, cutting its funding by 20% (a cut mitigated to 10% in 2019 by the newly elected Social Democrats-led government).
In being forced to downsize, DR identified its core mission. According to its latest strategy, it exists to “support democracy, contribute to Danish culture and strengthen communities”. This has meant a bolstering of its cultural offering, not a reduction. The licences on entertainment shows such as The X Factor have been released for option by commercial rivals.
Those decisions were vindicated when the first Covid-19 lockdowns arrived. DR put its musical ensembles to work on television. On Friday nights for much of 2020, the Danish National Vocal Ensemble led live singalongs on a TV show called Fællesang (Communal Song). The programme proved so popular it was made permanent and eventually moved to the slot once occupied by The X Factor.
In its capacity to unite a nation across generational boundaries, broadcast live music, freed from the trappings of stardom and commerce, had proved its worth. DR had fulfilled its responsibility to deliver not what it thinks we want more of – as social media does – but what we didn’t yet know was good for us.
Political and public hostility towards DR – rife a decade ago – has dipped, while commercial rivals no longer claim the corporation is trying to have it both ways. The smaller DR’s decision to refocus on offerings the streaming services could never and would never deliver appears to have paid off.
Music on television is a vital strand in that. When I moved to Denmark, I was astonished to see the Danish National Vocal Ensemble broadcast daily on television before the evening news: Dagens Sang (Song of the Day) presented short motets, hymns or folk songs, filmed like a music video. DR’s Girls’ Choir has brought in the New Year on television since 1971. Performances by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra are televised on Saturday nights during its season, playing at the Jean Nouvel-designed concert hall that forms the centrepiece of DR’s headquarters.
On Sunday nights the orchestra plays behind the teams on the TV panel show The Classical Music Quiz. It becomes the fictionalised Copenhagen Symphony Orchestra on the DR sitcom The Orchestra (available on AppleTV+). It is no exaggeration to say that DR’s comedy-documentary television show The Opera Trip has changed the way opera is talked about in Denmark.
If there’s any argument for the public funding of radio and television, it pivots on providing content the market can’t or won’t provide. Seeing choppy waters ahead, DR has got wise to that. It has defined its space and is proving that to be unique, necessary and fundamentally unassailable by commercial counterparts.
The BBC’s strategy for classical music set out in 2023 emphasised education and training. There is no apparent commitment to have the ensembles broadcast on television, in varied formats, all year round. Surely, the unique potential of these ensembles is to reach not hundreds via outreach but millions via mainstream broadcasting. It is the reason they exist.
The more the BBC ignores the wider broadcasting potential of its musical ensembles, the easier it will be to cut them loose into an external funding environment where they can’t realistically survive. Perhaps that’s the long-term plan?
But there is an alternative. In the spirit of John Reith’s belief that the BBC should aspire to offer all audiences the very best, its ensembles could form part of a dynamic, imaginative broadcast offering with live music and arts provision at its core, on TV as well as on radio, all year round. Commercial broadcasters couldn’t possibly provide the same quality, quantity or distinction. The BBC can. Doing so isn’t just its responsibility – it’s what should set the corporation apart.
• Fabio Luisi conducts the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Concert Choir at the BBC Proms on 21 August. Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale).
• This article was amended on 21 August 2025. An earlier version said that the BBC Singers’ funding scheme had changed and that they were now partly funded by an external source. This has not happened.
