Is Classic FM really a cause for celebration?
As the radio station turns 25, Ivan Hewett asks if what they play is actually ‘classical’ or can we find better elsewhere?
The world’s most successful classical music station is about to mark its 25th birthday. It’s celebrating in style, with a competition for young composers co-sponsored by the Royal Philharmonic Society, a poll of the best recordings of the past 25 years, and a birthday concert from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. And with perfect timing, Classic recently announced its best ever listening figures: 5.8 million people are tuning in weekly.
That ought to be cause for rejoicing. But for many classical music lovers, the success of Classic FM is a sign that we’ve lost our cultural bearings. We’re no longer sure what classical music is, so millions of listeners can accept the rag-bag of classical lollipops, film scores and video games that Classic |that, it peddles the idea that classical music is good only for making you feel relaxed. It’s a retreat, a rest home of the soul, when the hard living of the day is done. What really rubs salt in the wound, is that a much better alternative lies at hand, a mere twiddle of the tuning dial away. That alternative is a magnificent state-funded classical music broadcaster, in the shape of BBC Radio 3. Here the music is always varied, and often challenging. There are no playlists to make sure Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Pie Jesu comes around with monotonous regularity. And no one ever tells you to relax.
No wonder Classic FM makes some people angry. In a column in this newspaper, Simon Heffer once declared that if he failed to summon up the bile needed to write a really ferocious political column, all he had to do was turn on Classic FM, and within minutes he would be livid. I know what he means. There’s nothing more likely to make my blood boil than some honey-voiced Classic presenter telling me to “relax” and enjoy some “smooth classics”.
The trouble with that red mist of fury is that it tends to blot out reality. And is all the fury really deserved? Might there be a touch of snobbery in the knee-jerk expressions of disgust? Viewed impartially, Classic FM has its good points. Yes, the constant ads for holidays and dental implants are annoying, and the presenters often don’t know where the dividing line between “friendly” and “banal” lies. But the music is more varied than the decriers admit. On a random sampling one day last week, I came across a charming symphony by Bohemian composer Mysliveček, the day before, a little-known Swedish 19th-century composer. The station has no charter obligation to be a patron of live music, but in a modest way Classic acts as one, by forming media partnerships with performing groups such as The Sixteen and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. For a radio station whose first duty must be turning a profit for shareholders of the parent company Global Radio, that’s not bad.
Darren Henley, who joined the station as a newsreader five months after it opened in 1992 and rose to become managing editor and finally managing director, says Classic FM is good for classical music for one very simple reason. “Let’s look at the figures,” he says. “Before Classic FM started Radio 3 had around 3 million listeners. When we started, our listening figure was around
4.2 million. Now the figure for Radio 3 hovers near 2 million, and our latest is around 5.8 million. If we allow for an overlap of around one million, that makes a total of around 4.8 million. So in the last 25 years we’ve brought a new listenership to classical music of around 1.8 million. That’s a huge number, which has to be good.”
How did they do it? Partly by focusing on sure-fire hits. “In our early days we learnt more from pop stations than from Radio 3,” says Henley. “We liked to say that we broadcast the greatest hits of the past 400 years.”
It was to ensure those hits stayed constantly in front of the listeners that the station embraced the idea of a playlist, and it’s this more than anything that infuriates Classic FM’S critics. But Henley denies the playlist means that it’s endless Vivaldi and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.
“People have this idea that it’s all done by a computer,” he says, “but that’s not true at all. We use a database of more than 50,000 pieces which our presenters and producers work with. It’s a way of making sure we have a variety of mood and style and artist.”
Ah, but surely it’s the quality of the listenership that counts? One listener who’s fired up by what he or she hears is worth a hundred who are listening with half an ear while they get the kids’ breakfast or do the ironing. The assumption is that it is Radio 3’s more proselytising approach which attracts the really committed listener. But Sam Jackson, Classic FM programme manager, takes issue with the idea that listener commitment and playing “challenging” music must go hand in hand. “Some broadcasters have this idea that it’s their job to take the listener on a journey,” he says (no prizes for guessing which broadcaster he has in mind). “But we don’t take that view. We’re not out to persuade people to like music they don’t already like. People are entitled to enjoy the music they enjoy.” Classic FM takes endless pains to learn about its audience’s tastes, holding regular panels of listeners from all over the country.
John Suchet, the station’s most popular presenter, says that the real point of comparison for Classic isn’t Radio 3, it’s Radio 2. “We want people to have a pleasant listen. Our rule is that if people are twiddling the tuning dial and they come across Classic, there has to be a good chance they’ll like what they hear, and stick with it.” He denies the charge that the playlist is a straitjacket: “We can change the running order right up to the last minute. I’m always looking for something a bit out of the ordinary, and I like to keep an eye on new releases. But we can’t be beating the drum for Schoenberg and Hindemith.”
Simon Heffer once declared that if he failed to summon the bile for a column, he would turn on Classic FM
‘Our rule is that if people come across Classic, there has to be a good chance they like what they hear’
The fact that Classic FM regards two composers who died more than half-a-century ago as scarily modernist is revealing, but not in the way you might think. It doesn’t mean Classic FM has no interest whatever in contemporary music; it simply means it has a different conception of what constitutes modern music, as a quick glance at the list of composers it plays reveals. Under the letter E there’s only one copper-bottomed “classical” name, Edward Elgar. All the others are living composers. Among them are Eshkeri, who composed the music for The Snowman and The Snowdog, and Elliot Goldenthal, composer on Batman Forever, and Final Fantasy.
This points to one bone of contention, which is that Classic FM seems not to know the difference between film music and classical music. Darren Henley thinks this is a red herring. “What they have in common is an appeal to the emotions. That’s the quality which to me is at the heart of classical music.”
Blurring the divide between the classical and film music may annoy the purists, but in doing this Classic FM is simply following its guiding rule, which is: follow the audience’s tastes. In the wider world this divide has been blurred for decades, so inevitably Classic has had to go the same way.
Radio 3 is different. It has a mission to lead taste, and to foster the art of music. It has to venture into difficult areas of classical, where pleasing the audience was never the intention.
In fact, the two stations have such different views of the world that to compare listener figures seems beside the point. Better to admit that the classical music world in this country is lucky to have both, stop using one as a stick to beat the other, and rejoice that Classic FM is celebrating its 25th birthday in such rude health.