by James Rhodes
‘Do you remember that first time you played to me at Steinway Hall – the Chaconne?’ he asked me.
‘Of course I do – the best time ever!’
‘Well I was thinking about that. How you were jabbering away about the piece, about Bach, about what it meant to you, then you just sat and played it, then you bounced up and started talking about coffee as if you’d just done something totally pedestrian. And I was still reeling from an all-out emotional assault, and I was thinking, what if we made our concert like that?
‘You introduce the pieces, talk about the composers, chat to the audience between each piece. You do it in your own words, not through some Oxford don’s essay in the programme, you wear what you want, we keep the lights right down, we make it more of an immersive, informal experience. Whaddya think?’
They say that every good idea starts out as a blasphemy. Thing is, this sounded perfect to me. Christ, how I wished I could have heard any of the pianists I’d seen when I was going to concerts as a kid actually talking to us in the audience. The thought of Kissin or Zimerman or Richter talking about why they had chosen to play that particular Beethoven sonata, what it meant to them, would have been meteorically cool. The classical music industry caters to a fraction of a percentage of the population, especially in the UK. It is run by, for the most part, pompous, archaic wankers who seem to take a perverse kind of pleasure in keeping ‘proper’ music as the privilege of an elite few who they deem wealthy enough (and therefore intelligent enough) to understand it. Beethoven is their posh fucking house and the only people they want to invite in are those who know which fork to use with the fish course and the difference between Kochel numbers and opus numbers.
There are just so many issues, complications and difficulties with classical music. As a genre it seems to have become the musical equivalent of cranking – crying while wanking because you’re so ashamed of what it is you’re thinking about. Classical music has to stop apologising for itself. The problems need to be identified and accepted, rehab style, before there is any hope of permanent change.
First and foremost, the name. Classical. Why? As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, it gives the impression of something outdated, irrelevant, passe, inaccessible and above all, boring. Is a new Lear production called classical theatre? Do we go to visit an exhibition at a classical art gallery? Do we fuck. Music somehow insists on segregating itself. Classical radio stations, classical concerts, classical composers, classical music magazines, classical CD departments, classical musicians. Feel free to substitute the world ‘classical’ for highbrow, intelligent, worthy, more profound. Most of the people involved in the classical music world act as if it is all of those things anyway.
The other big problem with this bizarre, eclectic and locked-in world is, of course, the people involved, the majority of whom put the ‘ass’ into ‘classical’. These fall into four distinct categories: performers, gatekeepers, record label execs and critics. As with any generalisations, there are a few exceptions to what follows, people in the industry who have a genuine love for music and a desire to make it vibrant and accessible. But anyone looking at my industry from the outside would see the vast majority of those inside it as follows:
a) The performers. Usually socially retarded and extremely awkward. Almost invariably on the Asperger’s/autism scale (as am I – not a criticism but it can make us hard to engage with). Dubious and scary taste in clothing (either paedophile sweaters or ill-fitting white tie and tails). Emotionally castrated, either asexual or massively camp, serial-killer weird, mumbling lunatics with a higher than average number of sexual fetishes. No doubt highly intelligent but virtually incapable of normal social interaction. At concerts they appear, play and leave. Mingling with the audience is an extremely rare event and usually only at the behest of the record label (see below) who demand a CD signing post-concert. Talking to the audience (beyond the occasional encore title delivered in a monotone) is almost unheard of. These guys (and girls), perhaps more than anybody else, have only themselves to blame for the state of classical music today. Social anxiety is often a mask for ego – refusing to play in venues that aren’t prestigious enough, point-blank refusal to engage with fans and audiences, a general attitude of ‘leave me alone with my own genius because that should be enough to make it’. Well it ain’t. Not any more.
b) Gatekeepers. These guys (99 per cent male, white, old) are the ones who run the concert halls and agencies. In recent times, due to dwindling, dying audiences and cuts in public funding, they have been forced to bleat on about opening up the doors to a younger and fresher audience but in reality have done absolutely fuck all to achieve this beyond empty gestures that they deem would be down with the kids like occasional late night concerts and using slightly different fonts in their brochures. For the most part they sit on the fence, drinking champagne with and sweet-talking wealthy older patrons operating under the assumption that all change is monstrously bad, that having a younger audience would be catastrophic for the industry and that their hall/orchestra/institution is doing perfectly well as it is, thank you very much. It’s like Bernie Madoff’s mum whistling bravely in the dark in the unshakeable belief that the whole thing is an awful misunderstanding and that her cash is definitely safe and nothing bad is going to happen.
The most despicable part of this for me is their assumption that new, younger audiences would somehow cheapen the classical music world. God forbid someone turns up wearing jeans and dares to applaud in the ‘wrong’ place. That unless you are an OBE, MA, MSc, Oxbridge-educated, £80,000+ earning, Windsor-knot wearing parody of yourself you are going to detract from the immaculate, refined, ultra-fragile and culturally sacred world that is classical music. Go to any ‘established’ concert hall in the UK and you will see an audience comprising 10 per cent music students, 85 per cent over-fifties fulfilling one or several of the above criteria, and 5 per cent decent, ordinary music fans with no pretensions and a genuine love for classical music. (This paragraph reads as such a cliche because it’s still so true.)
c) Record labels. The (invariably) small, ashamed, naive labels run by well-meaning, meek types with not a shred of business acumen and no desire to even try anything different. Purveyors of dull, lazy album covers and promotional posters (artists looking constipated/French watercolours/abstract scenes in muted colours/Lang Lang with fingers painted as piano keys, for fuck’s sake); sleeve notes written by academics who’ve written books on eighteenth-century sonata form; a marketing budget of £30; a lazy willingness to settle for being placed amongst thousands of other similar products in the basement of HMV where you need a head torch and absolutely no sense of shame to enter; a label president (who doubles as A&R, marketing, photocopier and fluffer) for whom making a phone call to iTunes/HMV/Amazon and asking for any kind of promotion/cross-marketing deal is as alien as Pol Pot adopting a rescue puppy. These guys are slowly but surely draining the lifeblood out of the business and have been for years. There are, thank God, a couple of notable exceptions who are breaking new ground and taking a few risks that five years ago would have resulted in them being stoned to death.
The classical offshoots of the major labels (Sony Classical, DG, WCJ etc) are perhaps the saddest of all. Most of them have been booted out of the main HQs and relegated to scummy industrial parks with a staff of three, a budget frozen year after year, a veto on new signings and the shame of being the major label’s little brother who turned out to be a serial granny rapist. Ignored and laughed at by their major rock division big brothers, they survive on a back catalogue that harks back to the golden age of the 1950s and ’60s.
The apparently easy solution for them is crossover. To take a group of hot young things, dress them up, have them play a combination of short, famous passages from longer works and transcriptions of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, The Phantom of the Opera etc and hope, desperately, that people will buy the lie that this is ‘classical music’ and part with their cash.
d) Critics.
The lonely, embittered, failed musician, asshole disguised-as-academic dickhead. The epitome of all that is wrong with classical music today. The sneering, snobbish, illinformed and vicious ranters who would not be taken seriously in any other kind of journalistic endeavour and gleefully whore out their copy at 25p per word to the few people willing to pay attention. The majority of classical music critics should be looked on as angry, overweight kids who have somehow survived years of bullying, have long ago given up their dreams of doing something creative and worthwhile and now insist on boring to death anyone who will listen (basically other critics, senile classical audiences, the odd music student and a few high court judges).
Clearly there are major problems in the music world. A blinkered outlook by the majority of those in positions of influence, a childish refusal born largely of fear and conservatism to attempt to reach a broader audience, a desperate clinging to what’s familiar despite overwhelming evidence that they are on a sinking ship, a horror of and immediate lashing out at anyone who dares to try new things with old music, and most depressingly, a greedy, grasping desire to keep this incredible music just for themselves and a select few who fit their criteria as worthy listeners.
The people behind classical music seem to have lost sight of the fact that the composers themselves were, in effect, the original rock stars. Today the phrase ‘rock star’ brings to mind Heat magazine photoshoots, tattoos, wanky phrases like ‘conscious uncoupling’, being a judge on Britain’s Got Talent. Back then it meant really bad hair, some form of venereal disease, mental illness and poverty. They were for the large part mental, depraved, genius bastards who would have pissed themselves laughing at the ideas about performance that the classical gatekeepers of today are so rigidly stuck to. They didn’t throw TVs out of hotel windows, they threw themselves out.
Beethoven moved house seventy times. He was clumsy, badly coordinated, couldn’t dance, cut himself while shaving. He was sullen, suspicious, touchy, incredibly messy and angry. And he went on to change the course of musical history. In 1805 he wrote the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, and with one compulsive wrench, music entered the nineteenth century. While every other composer was trying to woo their audience, he kicked down doors and planted bombs under their seats. The idea of forcing his audience to sit in silence, without applauding during pieces, would have made him laugh like a drain.
Schubert, nicknamed ‘Little Mushroom’ on account of his being 5 foot nothing and violently ugly, was spectacularly unsuccessful with girls and, on one of the very rare occasions he did manage to score, he caught syphilis. A friend of his said, ‘How powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.’ Schubert, by his own admission, came into the world ‘for no purpose other than to compose’, and he earned the equivalent in today’s money of around £7,000 (in total) in the last twelve years of his life, with less than 10 per cent of his output published in his lifetime. He was broke, oversensitive, lost his hair, lived in squats, and led a life of relentlessly, miserable drudgery. Would he give a fuck about whether his music was played with the performers or audience wearing the right attire?
From Schumann (who died alone and miserable in a mental asylum) to Ravel (whose experiences driving trucks and ambulances in the First World War changed him forever), the great composers were basket-case geniuses, and were they to come to the average concert today and see the prices, audiences, presentation and pretension surrounding their music, they would be fucking disgusted.
No wonder I was so desperate to do it differently.
How lucky I have been to have found a manager who is on the same page. He became a director now as well as a manager. A few days before the Roundhouse gig we went down to Steinway and I ran through the whole programme from start to finish, talking about Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, the pieces, why, when, how. It detracted slightly from the absolute focus of playing just the notes, but not enough to make it non-viable. I just had to concentrate a little bit harder, remember a few more things and try not to say anything too inappropriate.
Concert day arrived and I pitched up to the hall. There were eight cameras positioned around the auditorium with a keyboard cam for good measure and two giant screens on stage. The idea was that we would relay a live video from different angles while I was playing. That way people in the cheap seats could see everything clearly, and in all the really tricky passages I’d spent thousands of hours working on, everyone could see my hands in close-up, because it looks awesome and I’m quite vain.
It was an incredibly intense experience. It was clear from the feedback afterwards that the majority of the audience had never been to a classical concert before and the average age of the audience was mid to late twenties, a far cry from the usual fifty-plus Wigmore Hall crowd. I introduced all the pieces, talked about the composers’ back stories, played my heart out and then wanted to do the whole thing over again.
I remember as a kid seeing videos of Glenn Gould chatting to the audience in Moscow and Bernstein talking from the stage before conducting masterpiece after masterpiece, but in recent memory I don’t think anyone had ever talked at length and played in a classical concert before other than Daniel Barenboim who talked briefly about Schoenberg from the podium at the Festival Hall a few years ago (it was such a break from tradition it made the newspapers). And cracking the odd joke, sharing anecdotes about Bach fighting and fucking, about Beethoven being almost beaten to death by his drunken father, and talking about why I wanted to play these specific pieces seemed to work well. Having an audience applaud the speaking as well as the playing, and hearing laughter in a classical concert seemed to confirm that this was a good direction to be moving in. I was finally doing what I had dreamed about doing forever. I had never felt so fulfilled in all my life.
And a couple of weeks later we did the exact same thing, minus the screens, at the QEH. Again, a young audience, bemused expressions from the backstage tech crew who had never had to mike up a classical performer before, laughter, music, low lighting, absolute silence from the audience while I was playing, hanging out in the bar afterwards with some of the guys who’d come down to listen. It was, for me, the perfect way to give a concert. It removed the bullshit and ego surrounding so much of the classical music industry and yet stayed true to why we do this job in the first place – the music.
There are so many fucking rules in place around classical music: the dress code, performance practice, programme notes, lighting, presentation, concert format, applause, repertoire choice, timing, performer and audience etiquette, venue choice, and on and on.
Denis and I have only ever had two rules: no crossover ever (not because I’m against it as a genre but because it just doesn’t do it for me when there is so much classical music out there already), and no dumbing down the music (in many ways the same thing). Everything else was fair game and the gloves were off. So if I found out one of my concerts wasn’t totally sold out I’d tell Denis to offer the remaining tickets for free, because why the hell shouldn’t we offer a few people the chance of a free night of music? Luckily, and to the joy of my promoters, things are now at a place where I don’t have to do that any more. But the point is, was, always will be, to fill ’em up, choose music that is immortal and accessible, play as well as I can, talk about music, wear clothes that are comfortable and not based on the performance practice of the 1930s, let the audience bring drinks in, turn the lighting down to almost pitch black. Make it immersive, intimate, exciting and informative. Rip up the rule book and just do what feels right.
We were definitely starting as we meant to go on. It was difficult and frustrating trying to find like-minded people in the industry who were open to looking at and presenting classical in a different way. I knew that there would always be an audience for the immortal pianists of this world like Kissin, Zimerman, Argerich, as well there should be. But much more importantly, I knew that there must be at least forty-five million people in the UK alone who had never heard a Beethoven sona
ta in its entirety before, and that was something I found deeply depressing. It wasn’t about preaching to the converted, or even preaching at all, to anyone. It was simply about reaching as many people as possible with something that perhaps they hadn’t yet heard, and doing it in a way that made it accessible and comfortable for everyone. There was no mission involved – serial killers go on missions – but it felt urgent and important and true, and other than Hattie, there wasn’t much of that going on in my life at that point.
We started to get a fair bit of press interest both good and bad. There was some douchebag in the Daily Telegraph who started off his piece saying he’d never heard of me, never heard me play, never been to any of my concerts or heard my album, but that I was an arrogant prick who was trying to ‘save’ classical music by wearing trainers and jeans when it was doing very well on its own, thank you very much, etc etc. We knew this was going to happen, especially with the old-school classical brigade. What was unexpected, and rather lovely, was the number of really great reviews I got for the album and concerts. I know the goal is to be immune to both criticism and praise, but I’m human, and all of that stuff affects me. I call bullshit on anyone who says it doesn’t. Especially those of us who feel like giant frauds in the first place and disbelieve kind comments while absolutely knowing the negative ones are true.
If you’re somebody for whom the idea of going to a piano recital appeals about as much as a trip to the dentist, maybe consider coming to one of mine. Bring a date, know that it will be casual, inclusive, that the music will be immense. And if I’m not your cup of tea then try the Wigmore or Festival Hall. Go see Stephen Hough, Daniil Trifonov, or any one of a hundred A-game pianists on the circuit right now. Investigate something new and see where it leads. To experience music like this live is something extraordinary.
