Certain concerts stick in your memory. Why do they stick there? Was it music you didn’t know, or the company you were with? The interpretation? Or some other unusual ingredient in the musical recipe?

Mahler symphonies always conjure an occasion and a strong memory for me is wallowing in the majesty of the chorale in the finale of his 5th Symphony conducted by Klaus Tennstedt at the RFH. Then there was the physical jolt of the first note of Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet with Mariss Jansons conducting the Oslo Philharmonic. The electricity of the performance held its tension throughout. I felt the same crackle which you hear when standing under pylons in the rain. In the audience we needed therapy for the shock – they administered three encores.

The deepest impression, though, was my first Prom. I had just started work in London as an impecunious graduate and heard that promming was cheap. So I queued all Sunday to hear Claudio Abbado and the Vienna
Philharmonic. The 'cellos projected the arching melody of the opening of Bruckner’s 7th so ethereally that I felt I could reach over the gallery parapet and touch its silver thread. At the end of the symphony I didn’t think it could get any better, ‘til the maestro bowed, turned … and encored the Prelude to Die Meistersinger. All for 80p.

Good ol’ Radio 3. They try hard to alienate their core listenership. Today, Sunday, 10 a.m. Let’s do the Second Viennese School! – A Happy Hour of atonality, just the ticket to liven up a damp, dull, post-Christmas morning.

Or I am massively missing the point? Maybe you can and do appreciate this music which to my ear has no identifiable or memorable: melody, tonality, harmonic progression, rhythmic motifs, developmental structure… let alone the “Gestalt” which brings the satisfaction I experience after, say, a Beethoven symphony or a Schubert lied. If you have the key to the stuff, do let me know so I can unlock and enjoy it too. I am fascinated that the music endures
and even more stunned that it accrues its overall name, coat-tailing the first Viennese school whose music triumphs in popularity and critical acclaim, comparatively, by several orders of magnitude.

Oh – it’s all just been redeemed. I enjoyed the last chord of Schoenberg’s 2nd Chamber Symphony but I think that it may have been a mistake on his part. It was a diatonic minor triad. Its crescendo was quite effective, to
boot.

Happy New Year!