Richard Morrison

Are we distributing classical music’s prizes and honours entirely fairly?

ust to be clear, I have the highest regard for the pianist Imogen Cooper. As I have for the singers Bryn Terfel and Emma Kirkby and – while they were still with us – the conductors Charles Mackerras and Colin Davis. I just wonder why, when it comes to dishing out gongs and prizes, it’s always the same big names who are the recipients. Aren’t their mantelpieces packed with enough trophies? Among the thousands of classical performers who receive nothing for their labours except their meagre concert fees, there surely must be some who are worthy of being plucked from obscurity and held up as shining examples of how to serve music and music-lovers.

What prompts these thoughts?

Well, all the above-named have been recipients of the annual Queen’s Medal for Music – Cooper being the latest

(see p12). Full disclosure: I served for a while on the committee making recommendations for this medal, so I know the pressures involved. The Royal Household craves good publicity, like every institution, but it’s not likely to receive much if it bestows its highest honours on people whose names are unknown to the public. I was made painfully aware of that in the year when I suggested that a veteran orchestral trumpet player, venerated throughout the brass world, be considered for the medal – as a symbolic recognition of orchestral players everywhere. If I had suggested that my local roadsweeper be made Lord Chamberlain I couldn’t have received a stonier reaction.

The other big classical music prizes around the world operate in similar fashion. The first four winners of the Germans’ Siemens Music Prize were

Britten, Messiaen, Rostropovich and Karajan – not exactly a bunch who were ‘born to blush unseen’, in Thomas Gray’s famous words. The Siemens committee has continued to pluck its winners from the musical stratosphere ever since. Similarly, the last four classical musicians to win Japan’s Praemium Imperiale – the so-called ‘Nobel Prize for the arts’ - were Anne-sophie Mutter, Riccardo Muti, Gidon Kremer and Mitsuko Uchida, none of whom needs the extra publicity, let alone the 15 million yen (£110,000) that goes with it.

This year would be an ideal time to honour a hitherto little-known hero. While the pandemic has mostly confined the world’s top conductors and soloists to their Swiss villas – where they might stir themselves occasionally to dial in a party-piece for some glitzy online gala – others way down the ladder have been moving heaven and hell to keep some semblance of musical life going in their areas. I’m thinking now of the instrumentalists and singers organising ad hoc concerts in parks or outside hospices and hospitals. Or the amateur choir directors attempting the near-impossible task of rehearsing by Zoom, just to keep up morale during lockdown. Or the leaders of (usually unsubsidised) little opera groups and chamber ensembles scrambling to put on live performances despite all the obstacles of social-distancing. Or the music teachers responding resourcefully to the challenge of giving lessons over the internet.

Musical life is usually so hierarchical, so structured from the top down. The pandemic has rendered that hierarchy impotent. Instead, it has thrown the spotlight on the grass roots and neighbourhood heroes. Perhaps that’s a sign of how things will be during the next few years. Famous orchestras, conductors and soloists won’t go jetting round the world, following schedules agreed years in advance. For a start, most of the agents who sorted out that stuff have gone bust. As we emerge from this chaos, the emphasis will be on the local and the small-scale, and on musicians and organisers who can respond imaginatively to opportunities that may not even have existed a fortnight earlier.

For that we will need a whole new breed of mentors and role-models.

And it would be entirely appropriate if those who make recommendations for medals and honours acknowledge this change. They need to start recognising people who are making a difference to our musical world now, not those who have spent most of their lives polishing their own reputations by following nowoutmoded career-paths.

So, judged solely by how they have enriched musical life during the pandemic, who should get the next Queen’s Medal for Music? I’d be keen to have your suggestions. Maybe I’ll even turn them into a list and put it through the letter-box of Buckingham Palace next time I’m passing.

This year would be an ideal time to honour a hitherto little-known classical music hero