The older I get, the more I realise how strong my early musical influences were. It was brought home to me at a Prom the other week when the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra played excerpts from Khachaturian’s Spartacus and Gayaneh ballet scores, music I hadn’t listened to for years, and suddenly, I was catapulted to my time as a teenager again, as though experiencing this flamboyantly colourful music for the first time. I had forgotten how wonderful this music is (mindful of Noël Coward’s remark: ‘it’s amazing how potent cheap music is’). Other repertoire which conjures up my teenage past is Suppé’s overtures (recorded by the VPO under Solti) and Stravinsky’s The Firebird (recorded by the New PO under Ansermet). Not for me namby-pamby chamber or piano music (repertoire which, as I approach forty, I enjoy more and more – a sure sign of getting old).
It suddenly occurred to me how vital it is to expose the next generation to classical music. One never recaptures the exhilaration of learning new things in the way one did as a teenager. That unquenchable thirst, that insatiable curiosity: that is very hard to recapture.
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