Young, hip, vital ... the classical stars making pop sound past it
LIKE spats, penny farthings and floppy discs, classical music seems to belong to a past we can hardly expect today’s schoolchildren to understand.
Most of us old ’uns like to hear a familiar symphony or sonata, but we rarely turn the dial to the Beeb’s all- classics Radio Three unless John McDonnell is being interviewed on R4’s Today programme.
So the Young Musician of the Year contest, which paradoxically is held every other year, always comes as a pleasant shock — as we discover a new crop of phenomenally talented, prodigiously dedicated players who make the classics sound more vital than the hit parade.
In the run- up to this year’s contest which starts on Friday, BBC Young Musician: Forty Years Young (BBC4) reported that 17-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the 2016 winner, has not only had a Top 20 album but became an online sensation with a viral video.
In front of a mural of Bob Marley, he performed a solo cello version of No Woman, No Cry — proving that the classics of pop, like earlier jazz and Broadway standards, are now part of the classical catalogue.
Sheku is an inspiration, so grateful for his supportive teachers that he donates some of his concert fees to his old school. His ambition, he says, is to encourage children to appreciate classical music: ‘That’s something I feel every child really deserves.’
This enjoyable overview of the contest was narrated by presenter Clemency Burton- Hill, who happens to be the daughter of the show’s creator, former BBC head of music Humphrey Burton.
Fans of the show who voiced their admiration included actor Richard Wilson, making a welcome if brief return to our screens after recovering from illness.
The most irrepressible interviewee was saxophonist Jess Gillam, who was also 17 when she competed in the 2016 final, playing the insanely complex Where The Bee Dances by Michael Nyman.
She loved the piece so much that, in gaps between her passages, she was bopping to the orchestra. Can’t see Nyman catching on in discos, though.
Philomena Cunk, the breathtakingly dim- witted arts and history presenter, ought to do a series on classical music, when she’s finished her moronic survey of our island race, in Cunk On Britain (BBC2). That might take some time, since she began with the Big Bang, in an account that promises to travel ‘from ancient man to Ed Sheeran’.
Cunk, played with a face as cold and immobile as a side of mutton by Motherland actress Diane Morgan, is a send-up of every self-regarding TV personality who ever recited a script while standing on a windswept cliff- edge and gazing portentiously at the horizon.
‘She’s like an idiot twin sister,’ says Morgan. ‘Occasionally she’ll get things so right you think maybe she isn’t an idiot. Maybe she’s a genius.’
The TV in-jokes wear a bit thin. But her malapropisms are hilarious: when she talks about the king of the dinosaurs, ‘Tyrannical sawdust rex’, or the ‘Baywatch tapestry’, she’s in the great comic tradition of Joyce Grenfell and Dame Edna.
The professors and historians facing her pea-brained questions evidently knew what to expect, and played along. Ronald Hutton and Neil Oliver were trying not to giggle — but full marks to the lady at the National Archives who talked to Cunk like a weary primary schoolteacher.
No, she explained patiently, the Domesday Book isn’t cursed. Perhaps they’re used to daft questions at the National Archives.