Some hope for classical music?

The weekly audience of the radio station Classic FM has risen by 470,000 people over the last year.

We conservatives moan rather a lot. I don’t need to provide any examples; just scroll down our homepage! Some news from last week, however, produced a slight grin on my otherwise downwards face.

The weekly audience of the radio station Classic FM has risen by 470,000 people over the last year. Now, 5.6 million tune in a week. Even more uplifting is that the 15-24-year-old audience has grown, in the same period, by over 50,000. Add to this group children, and the total number of weekly listeners is 760,000 people.

In our fourth print issue, I discussed the problems caused by common performances of modern, senseless ‘classical music’. If one’s first live experience of classical entails members of an ensemble playing against rather than with one another – seemingly in a competition to produce the most hideous sound – as I have been unfortunate enough to witness on a number of occasions (examples to be found in my article), then this shall surely also be their last experience.

The above news adds weight to this argument. It is quite likely that a number of those who are tuning into Classic FM will want to experience a live performance of that which they hear on the radio. Presented with actual classical, they will want to repeat the experience again and again. Presented with squeaks and rabble, they might not even bother waiting to hear the last note. I, for one, could not blame them.

Let’s hope, then, that there is less of this – or else the rise in listening figures will soon, again, begin to fall.