Page 947 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

12 April 2024

And the band played on

Cash crisis in the arts — what’s new?

FEATURES
By
Richard Bratby
12 April, 2024
This article is taken from the April 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not
subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Another week, another classical music funding crisis and if you deal with this shit for a living
you know the pattern by now. The story breaks on the Slipped Disc blog, and the serious
classical journos pause for 24 hours so they can pretend they read it somewhere else. The rest
of the sector doesn’t hold back.

Social media lights up with fury, initially directed at whichever funding body has made the
decision, but swiftly refocused (the mental gymnastics are Olympic-level) on the usual
suspects: the Tories, Brexit, choose your right-wing bogeyman. Gradually the shock fades;
the great and good sign an open letter, and underpaid, exhausted admin staff start picking up
the pieces. Again.

So why did I get the feeling, this time, that people were looking at me? Birmingham’s
bankrupt City Council has voted to abolish its entire arts budget over the next two years, and
because I worked for years in the management of the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, and later wrote its history, colleagues assumed I’d have views — ideally loud,
angry ones, rather than the resigned ache of someone who’s been through the whole
miserable process so often it barely registers any more. But I mean: this is classical music.
Surely you’ve seen Amadeus? Haven’t you read Berlioz’s memoirs, or Thomas Beecham’s;