Morning:
11°c
An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
London faces a wave of bus and Tube strikes that could cause chaos for millions of passengers as unions walkout over pay and conditions
More...
Don't spoil the classics
By Victor Lewis-Smith, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 27.12.02
Charlotte Church
Ever since winning the Letter of the Week accolade from my local newspaper at the age of 12 (I wrote to its gullible agony aunt, asking "if your penis is burning, does that mean someone is talking about it?"), I've been unimpressed by awards. Indeed, the last one I was unwise enough to accept in person was some years ago, when I turned up to collect a British Comedy Award, then promptly fell off the stage and broke it in half. I left in disgust after realising that Jonathan Ross had been correct to introduce the event (albeit unwittingly) as "top wank entertainment."
However, I was thoroughly delighted, back in the Seventies, when I discovered that I'd won the Young Musician of the Year. What a prize, and what a nice kid he was. I stuck him in my basement, and I still remember how the noise of his oboe got fainter and fainter as he got hungrier and hungrier, then stopped altogether shortly after I bricked up the staircase.
Back then, gifted young musicians sought nothing more than the chance to put on a bow tie and DJ and perform a concerto or two with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. But nowadays, many have been seduced by the more glamorous world of pop and are happy to compromise their artistic integrity in return for mass exposure. That weakness is being exploited by Classic FM TV (Sky 464), which recently took to the air.
"The manner and style we are adopting is of pop music TV," said managing director Roger Lewis when the station launched, as he tried to justify this vulgar attempt to cram the breadth and complexity of classical music into the narrow confines of a three-minute MTV-style video. And having once met the man, it didn't surprise me (when I tuned in randomly during the Christmas period) to discover that his idea of presenting classical music "in a way which is modern, relevant, inclusive and accessible" consists primarily of adding a drum-and-bass machine to Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte or Barber's Adagio for strings, thus creating bland "easy listening" versions that are impossible for any serious musician to listen to.
The archetypal Classic FM TV musician is surely Vanessa Mae, a gifted young woman who once had a promising career ahead of her as a concert violinist. She's undeniably attractive in a wet T-shirt, but to hear her bastardisation of the classics, and to see her sacrifice content for style, is like seeing the Mona Lisa smile, only to reveal a row of rotten teeth.
And so the videos proceeded, with the anodyne Charlotte Church giving way to Vangelis (whose breasts are bigger than Charlotte's), to Nigel Kennedy and his baroque 'n' roll renditions of Vivaldi, and to movie soundtracks that render any meaningful definition of "classic" utterly impossible. As for the videos of Sarah Brightman, the woman has clearly suffered for her art (well, for years she had to have sex with a not-very-Brightman whose face looks like a bendy toy turned inside out), but ... how can I put this delicately? It's not that she sings flat, it's just that her backing orchestra always seems to be sharp.
To be fair, there are some virtuoso showpieces that lend themselves well to the MTV format. I feel better for having seen Maxim Vengerov's inspired and dazzling performance of Bazzini's La Ronde des Lutins. But, to be fairer, the architecture of most classical music requires 30 minutes, not three, if it is to be understood and appreciated in its original context, so what this station is presenting is the musical equivalent of food that's already been cut up into bitesize pieces, leaving you with nothing to chew on.
Before long, the relentless pulchritude and provocative poses of the performers set me thinking about EM Forster's essay, Not Listening to Music, in which he drew attention to the remarkable physical unattractiveness of most of the people who attended classical concerts in his day, be they performers or audience. Which brings me to my New Year's wish for 2003. For God's sake, let's put some uncompromising physical ugliness back into classical music, so we all start listening again instead of looking, before it's too late.
Classic FM TV is yet another example of our society dumbing down (or dum-dum-dum-Dummmm-bing down, I suppose), but it's not all bad news. Just as Classic FM radio serves a useful purpose by divesting Radio 3 of its morons (whose wretched tastes, therefore, do not have to be accommodated in the latter's schedules), so Classic FM TV may well allow BBC4 and Artsworld to fly higher, and to bring us more serious classical music in a pure and untarnished state.
Meanwhile, let's leave Mr Dumbdown himself, Roger Lewis, with his stack of EMI videos (a company for which, coincidentally, he used to work), whose endless repetition is already starting to look threadbare. And let us have no more to do with this sickly, sugary diet of vapid tracks, be they on TV or on radio, where they are interrupted by endless commercials for French bottled water. Let's face it. Classic FM is a station that's seriously eau-ver-rated.
