In the front line of creation

Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaya, whose disc of the Beethoven violin concerto won the orchestral award

I wasn’t expecting that much – to be brutally frank – from the BBC Music Magazine Awards ceremony, an event of middling importance in the London classical music calendar. An agreeable cultural distraction in the midst of an already interminable-seeming election campaign, an opportunity to chew the cud with a few old friends and perhaps make new acquaintances, then listen to speeches and formal presentations that might range from the mildly amusing to the yawn-worthy. It turned out I was wrong on several counts.

BBC radio presenter Jim Naughtie caught my attention when he spoke of the importance of the highest kind of artistic endeavour, especially in dark political times. He remarked on the absence of discussion about culture in an election campaign in which parties seem to have competed for poverty of aspiration, and wittily commented that given the prospect of hearing Brown, Cameron and Clegg giving their thoughts on culture, this might count as a relief.

But the further into the afternoon we got, the more it seemed that the phoney war of the election campaign was the real distraction – not the serious and merited celebration of the kind of sustained excellence in music-making, which is one of the things that can make sense of life.

BBC Music Magazine itself merits some celebration: founded in 1992, and now the world’s best-selling classical monthly, with a circulation of nearly 43,000, it is part of BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm whose profits are ploughed back into public service broadcasting, including helping the BBC maintain its five orchestras. The awards were launched in 2006, and are unusual in being voted for by the public out of a shortlist prepared by critics.

I’m not saying the public always knows best, but on this occasion the votes were cast not for superficial glamour but for real and enduring quality. I happened to have bought two of the winning discs and have been enjoying them over the past few months: neither Murray Perahia’s recording of four early-to-middle Beethoven sonatas nor Christianne Stotijn and Julius Drake’s recital of Tchaikovsky romances contain an ounce of crowd-pleasing – just absolute dedication to repertoire that the performers love and trust.

Perahia’s recorded acceptance speech was one of the highlights of the awards. This prince among pianists always speaks and plays humbly, without ego; he commented that one of the projects taking up most of his time at the moment, and giving him the greatest enjoyment, is editing the Henle Urtext edition of the Beethoven sonatas. I am sure he is as scrupulous an editor as he is a player; scrupulous in the sense of weighing every note, giving every strand and voice its due. The result has a radiance that would surely dissolve any scruple. This would have been my disc of the year.

Stotijn went to the trouble of taking Russian classes to record the Tchaikovsky romances, which I have found a revelation: a collection of many-hued, smouldering vocal masterpieces. No wonder Nicolas Slonimsky called them “the most poignant creations of his genius”.

Fortunately, some musicians were able to be there in person – one not just to collect her award but to play for us. This was the young Moldovan Patricia Kopatchinskaya, whose disc of the Beethoven violin concerto was the surprise winner of the orchestral award. Genre-bending and full of gypsy devilry, Kopatchinskaya played a solo piece by George Enescu and Jorge Sanchez Chiong’s Crin, in which her voice and violin struck sparks off each other. If anyone thought classical music was stuffy or corseted, here was the riposte.

But the overall star of the show, winner of the Disc of the Year for his recording of Wagner’s Lohengrin, also able to collect and speak in person, was Russian conductor Semyon Bychkov. It is easy to underestimate or misunderstand Bychkov, with his outsize Russian charm and warmth; what he brings to music-making, and to opera in particular, is not the electric excitement of a Valery Gergiev but the utmost refinement of aural imagination.

Bychkov’s acceptance speech was far from being either mildly amusing or yawn-worthy; it was strikingly serious and eloquent. He paid tribute not just to Wagner and his performers, but to Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the German public broadcasting organisation that had made the whole project possible.

His peroration deserves quoting: “Artists have this unique privilege to be constantly and permanently affected by the mystery and miracles of great creations. The never-ending discovery of their meaning is in fact a never-ending exploration of the human spirit ... [and] the most existential question of all: who we are and why we are here.”

Artists have that privilege, and responsibility, because they are in the front line of creation; but the rest of us – even including politicians – share it, because we are essential “hearers and hearteners”, as Yeats put it, of the meaning-giving work of culture.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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