Classical music’s enduring allure

In the summer of 1895, at the new Queen’s Hall in London’s West End, Sir Henry Wood conducted the first-ever ‘Promenade Concert’. Today, the BBC Proms continue to thrive and over the years it’s been joined by a plethora of other classical music festivals. People, it turns out, like the music, and they also like the fact that they can spend their holidays pursuing a sustained and meaningful activity.

On that first night of what would become known as the Proms, an orchestra conducted by Wood was joined by a cadre of soloists to perform a potpourri of beloved oeuvres and recent compositions. The playbill included, among other things, the overture to Richard Wagner’s early opera Rienzi, an aria from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, an orchestral version of one of Frédéric Chopin’s polonaises and the world premiere of an arrangement of the now-forgotten Adolphe Schloesser’s Grand March ‘Les enfants de la garde’. The national anthem was sung.

One hundred and thirty-one years later, I joined thousands of other concertgoers at the Royal Albert Hall – Queen’s Hall was destroyed during the Blitz – for a performance that featured an orchestration of JS Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a newly composed cello concerto. Although the Bach and Beethoven were adequately performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philharmonia Chorus, and Gianandrea Noseda’s conducting was inspired as ever, the big surprise was the cellist, South African Abel Selaocoe, who defied convention by singing as well as playing. Indeed, he got the audience to sing along and received enthusiastic applause along the way.

A few days later, I travelled to Verbier, a town in the Swiss Alps. Three decades ago, it was known mostly for skiing, but today it’s known as much for classical music. The Verbier Festival was founded there 32 years ago and ever since it has brought a remarkable collection of the world’s top musicians to the mountain resort. If you travel there by public transport, you reach Verbier by means of a breathtaking cable-car ride. Among the musicians performing at Verbier this year are: Evgeny Kissin, Mischa Maisky, Martha Argerich, Renée Fleming, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Alexandre Kantorow, Yunchan Lim, Bruce Liu, Noseda (again) and Simon Rattle. As happens every year, the stars were joined by a lineup of phenomenal young musicians. In a performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the 15-to-18-year-olds in the Verbier Festival Junior Orchestra outshone the soloists.

One could interpret that as a sign of the times. Today’s concert audiences have access to phenomenal soloists, conductors, orchestral players and choral singers. There are quite a few not-so-great ones, too, but that’s the nature of any industry. Despite the habitual fears that classical music will decline, the generation of musicians now making their debuts on concert stages look likely to, in time, become even more impressive than the current stars. (One can only hope that managers and promoters don’t succumb to the temptation of overexposing them at an early age.)

The Verbier Festival is part of a remarkable trend. For decades a modest number of European (and some American) festivals catered to what was perceived to be a small audience for classical music. There was the Salzburg Festival, not to mention the Festspiele in Bayreuth. In the late 1970s, the East German government realised that classical music could bring visitors to the country and launched the Dresdner Musikfestspiele. These festivals continue to operate and impress, but today they have been joined by many others, quite a few of which, like Verbier, have been launched in the past three decades.

South Korea has several of them, including the large Tongyeong International Music Festival. Europe has seen dozens of new festivals crop up. There’s Ireland’s West Cork Chamber Music Festival and the Grafenegg Festival in Austria. The Gümüşlük International Classical Music Festival takes place in a fishing village in southeastern Turkey. Wimbledon has its very own International Music Festival. In the Caribbean, Guadeloupe – the French overseas department – hosts the Festival International de Musique Saint-Georges. Not all attract the star power of Verbier, but all – I dare suggest – offer their guests meaningful enjoyment to which they can return again and again.

Attending the Verbier Festival, one realises why classical music festivals have become so popular. There are masterclasses, open rehearsals and concerts, several of them each day. Classical music is becoming more popular, especially among younger people, and festivals offer an opportunity to enjoy intellectually stimulating experiences far from the suffocating crowds swarming tourist destinations. Looking out over the stunning Alps, one might even begin to wander down the emotional path alongside Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp, who, in The Magic Mountain, ascended to the Swiss Alpine town of Davos, only a few hours from Verbier, for a brief visit and worked up the determination to descend seven years later.