Page 202 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

It’s in this unlikely place that, having lodged my postal vote, I will await the fall of
this godforsaken government. By the time you read this, the result will be known.

We in the weird world of classical music are dreaming of a new dispensation. The

current—at time of writing—leader of the opposition attended the Guildhall
School of Music and Drama as a teenager, playing piano and flute; the shadow

secretary of state for culture is a former orchestral cellist; and, most significantly

for me, her number two played Macheath in my university production of The
Threepenny Opera.

As the government changes, the mood will change. We remember the feeling of

abandonment during the Johnson administration—the crass philistinism of that

Covid-era ad with the picture of a ballet dancer and the accompanying slogan
“Fatima’s next job could be in cyber”. The Brexit agreement negotiated by the

hapless David Frost sold the performing arts down the river. Some repairs at the

margins will, one hopes, be made. While the Labour party seems doggedly
committed to no shift on freedom of movement in general, it does offer some hope

on helping performers to work in the EU. The 90-day rule (no more than 90 days in

any 180-day period in the Schengen area) is complex and disastrous for many
musicians, individuals and orchestras alike.

Classical music is not, despite all the jeremiads, dead. I’ve just been in Aldeburgh,

where the festival, in its last season led by the newly knighted Roger Wright, is

seeing full houses for innovative programming, and an expansive vision which
reaches into the local community and strengthens international connections. The

previous week, I went to a piano recital by Yuja Wang at the Festival Hall in

London. That nearly 3,000-seater venue was packed to the rafters for an
uncompromising programme: Samuel Barber’s Sonata, preludes and fugues by

Shostakovich in the first half; Chopin Ballades in the second. Ten or eleven

encores. This was serious stuff, but it was also fun and full of the life force that is
at the heart of music-making.

But there is a malaise affecting classical music in the UK that goes beyond years of

government neglect and penny-pinching. Institutionally, one can point to the Arts

Council which, under ministerial instruction, has been idly destroying the delicate