It is a sad truth, widely acknowledged, that London is no longer a music capital. World orchestras that passed through once or twice a year no longer stop over. Headline artists save their signature concerts for Paris and Berlin. New music has dried up. There hasn’t been a premiere of world consequence since before Covid. London is falling off the music map.

Various reasons and excuses are attached to this decline, among them Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine war, economic woes and a government that is plundering funds from the capital and spreading it around the regions, going out of its way to penalise London orchestras while smiling upon pointless little minority start-ups that are barely above kindergarten level.

These are all contributory causes but the cumulation of factors does not begin to describe the loss of national purpose and fundamental incompetence that has relegated music in London to an all-time low. The economy has nothing to do with it.

London achieved its musical status in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, adding two new symphony orchestras and drawing a surprised endorsement from Arturo Toscanini that they ranked among the best. Today, star maestros shun London and one of its symphony orchestras came within a matter of days of being abolished.

You want to know how bad it has got? Let me start with the physical surroundings. London’s main symphonic venue since 1951 has been the Royal Festival Hall, augmented by two smaller halls, the QEH and Purcell Room, and run by a South Bank Board.

Most British conductors of talent and ambition now seek their futures abroad

Acoustics were never first-rate but the Festival Hall had an aura of embedded glory, the kind of uplift one gets on entering Parliament or Westminster Abbey.

No longer. Approaching from any direction you are beset by a stink of fast food, a racket of canned music from pubs and bars and a throng of people who hang out on the South Bank for drugs, drink and degradation. Am I too harsh? Not much.

After a concert you have a right to carry away the aural experience unpolluted by ambient noise. That right no longer exists on the South Bank, nor does the site make much secret of its disinterest in classical music. Its chairman, Misan Harriman, is by his own description a “photographer, creative director and cultural commentator, and is the first Black person in the history of British Vogue to shoot the cover of its “September issue”. Such are the present summits of South Bank cultural values.

Harriman, in private conversations, has described classical music as “elitist” and “not cool”. The South Bank treats its resident orchestras, the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia, like unwanted tenants. Both have been cut from 35 concerts a year to 25 next season and neither has been given fixed dates, with managers holding out until the last minute in the hope of more lucrative bookings for film premieres and business conferences. The orchestras are in despair. No one cares.

London’s other symphonic venue, the Barbican, has an acoustic so constipated that the City of London Corporation agreed to Simon Rattle’s demand to build a new hall, only to retract when they saw the cost. Rattle, unwilling to endure inferior conditions, fled to Munich mid-contract. Most British conductors of talent and ambition now seek their futures abroad.

The Royal Albert Hall stages the BBC Proms in midsummer and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at other times. The Proms, last year and this, are seriously low-key as a result of BBC cuts, which briefly threatened to abolish an orchestra.
The Albert Hall comes into its own with middle-aged rock stars when the public dresses up in sparkly outfits to relive a glamorous past. Audiences at classical concerts look shabby by comparison.

The only classical attractions in London that are free of gloom are the chamber music venues at the Wigmore Hall, behind Oxford Street, and Kings Place, behind the Eurostar terminal. Both maintain a standard of uncompromising excellence, funded largely by a loyal middle-class audience.

If music is ever to reverse its spiral of disaster, it will need to take governance into its own hands

The Wigmore puts on Lieder cycles by Matthias Goerne and Asmik Grigorian, piano recitals by Daniil Trifonov and Mitsuko Uchida, string quartets by the Ébène and the Casals: the world’s best. Kings Place does weekend-long immersions in major composers. These are the relics of our glory days.

Some claim that classical decline is part and parcel of a wider malaise: a collapsing health service, strikebound trains, a sinking education system and general national dissatisfaction. Optimists imagine that a general election and a change of government will put things to rights next year.

It won’t. Orchestral music will never be a political priority. If music is ever to reverse its spiral of disaster, it will need to take governance into its own hands.

The public funding of British arts was invented in 1945 by the economist John Maynard Keynes with a view to regenerating national creativity with small subsidies. The first Arts Council grant to the London Symphony Orchestra was £2,000; today the LSO receives £2 million and still pleads poverty. After almost eighty years of dependency culture, music must come up with a different tune.

London is where the world comes to do business. Its cultural amenities are collapsing. The South Bank has cut its working week to four days. If it goes bust, as it deserves to, arts will be hard to locate and the business classes will divert to Paris and Berlin. Without orchestral music at its core, London will have less to offer after dark than Bucharest and Helsinki.
A moment of reckoning is near. I hear that some citizens are preparing to take action after the summer break. Watch this space.

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This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.