The Long View | Making rich musicians richer

Stockholm is the only Scandinavian capital in which you feel the presence of a history more aristocratic than egalitarian. Pretty much uniquely among major Nordic cities, most of its active concert halls and opera houses are nineteenth-century palaces – gilded and plush. It feels like an appropriate setting for the doling out of Nobel Prizes.

Since 2009, Stockholm has had a new prize to give. The inaugural Birgit Nilsson Prize of a million dollars – now the largest gong in classical music – was awarded that year to Plácido Domingo. This October, the Prize was handed to Yo-Yo Ma at the Stockholm Concert Hall, and by no lesser a dignitary than the King of Sweden himself.

I had mixed feelings about the event. Yo-Yo Ma is perhaps the only individual I have met whose very aura and wisdom seemed to me almost super-human. World famous, he has an ability to put anyone at ease. His achievements are hard to overstate. He is the master of a complicated, disciplined art who has only ever seen that art as a transformative gift, especially for the lowliest of us. I had the privilege of attending a lecture he gave to a group of children in China in 2019, which taught me lessons I will draw on for the rest of my life. Ma is distinct in feeling his responsibility to all cultures including the popular, the local and the endangered. If anyone deserves a salutation, a speech, a statue, a standing ovation, Yo-Yo Ma does.

That said, I’m not sure he really needs a million dollars. Of course, he promises he won’t be spending it on blackjack and cigars. He’ll be spending it on good musical causes – new initiatives and the like. But perhaps he should entertain the thought of directing some of it towards good old-fashioned charity. Specifically, towards those classical musicians whose livelihood has never recovered from the havoc wreaked by the Covid pandemic.

It may be implicit in prizes like this that the money will be put to good use. But it’s only ever that – implicit. That was also apparent in Copenhagen just a few weeks before the Stockholm ceremony, when Pierre-Laurent Aimard was awarded the Sonning Prize, Denmark’s far more longstanding (but rather cheaper) award of a million kroner. That’s around £120,000. It was at the time of writing, anyway.

These honorary prizes keep coming, and inevitably to successful musicians who already command fees of thousands of pounds per appearance. To the naïve onlooker, it might look like the classical music establishment loves to move large quantities of cash around its higher echelons, with canapés and champagne thrown in for good measure.

Sure, it’s more complicated than that. It’s also out of everyone’s hands: Nilsson’s award is a legal stipulation of her last will and testament (she even chose Domingo as its first recipient). But if you’re an opera singer or instrumental player who trained for 10 years and now works in Tesco or quit the business altogether (and we all know individuals who have never come back) it must look just a touch ironic given the numbers involved. Ma could give $900,000 away and still have a hundred thousand left to spend on soft furnishings.

Plenty in Denmark, where I live, stick their oar in when it comes to who gets the Sonning Prize, whose laureates constitute a string of A-listers from Igor Stravinsky to Maris Jansons. One year I joined the conversation and suggested it might go to the Royal Danish Orchestra, whose members had just agreed to take significant individual pay cuts to save colleagues from redundancy. As the world’s oldest orchestra and an ensemble with a unique sound culture, it certainly deserves the accolade.

There was a precedent set for this in the awarding of the 2014 Birgit Nilsson Prize to the Vienna Philharmonic. Thoroughly deserved that was too. The residual irony was that, of all the orchestras in the world, the Vienna Phil needed the money and the recognition least.