Take Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, which has been vying for top slot in the Hall of Fame with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending since 2003, and this year has come out on top. For me, the Rachmaninov comes perilously close to kitsch – but for Alan Wiseman, a Telegraph reader, the rival piece by Vaughan Williams is the real offender. “I have never been able to come to terms with its popularity,” Wiseman wrote to the Editor last week. “It is so unutterably long, very repetitive and has little obvious melody.”
I beg to differ. It’s true that Vaughan Williams’s opening is hard to hum, but all that rapturous warbling issues eventually into a lovely swaying melody, soon followed by another more sturdy melody which is eminently hummable. It’s the way graspable form and melody emerge by degrees from airy nothings, and then melt back into them at the end, that for me makes the piece so masterly.
Nevertheless, some stinkers baffle me and make me reach for the off-button. What quality is it that brings on the “yuck” response? One is being annoyingly catchy: you know the piece is terrible, but you can’t get it out of your head. Another is over-familiarity, as another annoyed letter-writer, Cedric Harris, pointed out in the most recent Sunday Telegraph. “We have been brought “jollity”, in Holst’s ‘Jupiter’, at least 5,000 times. The other planets? Hardly ever. Similarly, we are subjected every couple of days to the same tired excerpts from Smetana, Beethoven, Greig and others.” I agree. Any piece becomes horrible if it’s forced on you often enough.