What do Benjamin Britten, Tchaikovsky and Francis Poulenc have in common besides composing some of the most enduring music ever written? They were all gay men. Yet for much of history, the personal lives of queer composers remained hidden between the lines of the score, shaped by a world where homosexuality was criminalised, stigmatised, or simply too dangerous to discuss openly in their lifetimes. Today, British conductor Oliver Zeffman, through Classical Pride, the annual festival he founded and curates at the Barbican Centre, celebrates the contributions of LGBTQ+ artists to classical music while bringing a fresh, joyful energy to the genre.
Total Look: Dior.
Ahead of the festival that opened on the 10th June and runs until the 14th, photographer Ramon Christian captured the conductor championing a more inclusive future for classical music. We got to speak with Oliver to discover more about Classical Pride and get to know more about the young maestro.
I love origin stories, my mom likes to remind me that I was born to Brahms’ 4th Symphony, 3rd movement. Do you remember your very first exposure to classical music? Was there a particular piece, performance, or person that sparked your interest?
I’m afraid my introduction to classical music was a little more prosaic. My cousin – who is a couple of years older than me – started playing the violin, and so my parents decided I should learn the violin too. I was fortunate, though, to have a wonderful teacher – Sheila Nelson – who was very committed to young people and insisted not just on solo lessons, but also playing chamber music with her other students. She taught thousands of students over decades and lots of the really great violinists who play in the top orchestras all over the UK- and the world – passed through her hands. She was already in her mid-60s when I started with her, and so I was really one of the last generation of students to learn with her. Certainly, she was the formative influence on me in my earlier years.
Total Look: Dior.
Conductors are often described as storytellers without words or painters without paint. What drew you to that role?
Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I played in lots of different youth orchestras. When I was about 14, I joined the London Schools Symphony Orchestra – and at some point, sitting in the violins and looking up at the conductor, I thought it just looked more fun – to be at the front, everybody looking at you, you’re in charge. I mean that half-jokingly, of course – but you do have to have some ego if you want to be a conductor.
More seriously, it is a way of being engaged with music in an entirely different way. Of trying to grasp what it is trying to say, and how to bring all these different elements together to craft a story – and then transmit this to a group of musicians. It is a fascinating and enormously engaging process. When it doesn’t work, it can be very frustrating. But when it does work, it is the most thrilling thing.
Classical Pride is now in its fourth year. What has surprised you most about the response from audiences and the industry?
I don’t want to come across as too presumptuous, but the reason I started Classical Pride isn’t because I thought it would be a niche project. Really, it’s not a particularly ‘out-there’ idea. So many of the greatest composers whose music is played every day in concert halls all over the world were or are LGBTQ+: Tchaikovsky, Handel, Chopin, Barber, Britten, Bernstein, Caroline Shaw, Thomas Adès, to name just a few – and it seemed mad to me that, outside the US, no major concert hall or orchestra had ever celebrated Pride before 2023.
I started Classical Pride because I hoped it would be a big success – both in its musical output and as a way of showing audiences that classical music is just as important a part of Pride, and of gay culture, as (e.g.) pop music. I wanted to bring new, LGBTQ+ audiences into the concert hall, who come to celebrate Pride – and it seems to be doing just this. It’s grown pretty quickly – from a single concert in 2023 to a multi-day festival already in our second year. Last year, our third year, included our first international date. We’ve already partnered with some of the greatest concert halls and orchestras in the world – the Barbican, the Wigmore Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, King’s Place, the London Symphony Orchestra, the LA Phil – and have lots of big projects in the works. So, while I am very pleased that the industry and audiences have embraced Classical Pride so enthusiastically, I am perhaps not too surprised…!
Jacket: Thames MMXX. Trousers: A Day’s March.
When you first conceived Classical Pride, what was the gap in the cultural landscape you felt needed to be filled?
Really, the gap in the cultural landscape that needed to be filled, was to show that classical music is – and always has been – an important part of LGBTQ+ culture and I felt it was about time this was celebrated.
Why is it important to celebrate LGBTQ+ composers and artists not as a niche category, but as an integral part of classical music history?
Because they are! And this really is the point of Classical Pride, to show that LGBTQ+ composers are – and have always been – a key part of (not just classical) music. So much of the greatest and most recognisable music ever written has been written by LGBTQ+ composers. The Nutcracker, Fanfare for the Common Man, Adagio for Strings.
Total Look: Denzil Patrick. Loafers: Grenson.
Do you think classical music is becoming more inclusive, or is there still significant work to be done?
Certainly, over the past decade, there has been a huge step change in gender representation in classical music. There’s still some way to go, but female conductors – for example – are far more visible and prominent, working with major orchestras, than they were, say, a decade ago. Where though there’s still really significant work to be done – certainly in the UK – is in terms of socio-economic background. Exposure to – and involvement in – classical music is still largely a middle-class preserve. Successive governments have increasingly cut funding for music education in schools ensuring that fewer and fewer people have exposure to classical music. While many orchestras and arts venues run great education programmes or really excellent organisations like the Nucleo Project provide free music training to children from lower-income backgrounds – really as a social mobility project via music – these are necessarily localised and resource-constrained.
This year’s programme ranges from Henriëtte Bosmans to Ravel’s Boléro. How did you approach curating a programme that balances discovery with beloved classics?
The most important thing is making sure we play really great music. There is so much music that we call ‘classical music’ – from Renaissance motets to Mahler Symphonies to ambient electronics and everything in between – that there is lots of great music, but also lots of rubbish. Particularly as lots of our audience are coming for the first time – or certainly aren’t regular concert goers – we have a responsibility, I feel, to programme some of the greatest music ever written, and also to show off the breadth of what classical music has to offer. Our programme with the LSO this year spans the 20th-century, featuring beloved classics – Ravel’s Bolero and Barber’s Adagio for Strings – as well as the UK premiere of Henriëtte Bosmans’ 2nd Cello Concerto and a sparky opener, Agnegram, by Michael Tilson Thomas He was one of the great conductors of the second half of the 20th Century (and the LSO’s Principal Conductor in the 90s) – also a wonderful composer – who sadly passed away a couple of months ago. Elsewhere in the festival, we’re presenting Baroque music for the first time – as part of a Ball. Three of the six or seven most important Baroque composers – Handel, Lully and Corelli – were gay.
Total Look: Mithridate.
You’re conducting the UK premiere of Bosmans’ Cello Concerto No. 2. What drew you to her music, and why is now the right time to bring her work to a wider audience?
Henriëtte Bosmans was a Dutch, Jewish bisexual composer who survived WWII in hiding from the Nazis, but then died not too long after from stomach cancer. I came across her music about a decade ago when I was looking into music and musicians that had been dubbed ‘Entartete’ [degenerate] by the Nazis and banned. There is a whole generation of composers who were suppressed – many were killed, but even for those who survived their careers never really recovered and they’ve largely been forgotten about today. Bosmans is one of these composers – but she wrote some really beautiful pieces and her Second Cello Concerto deserves, in my opinion, to be a part of the repertoire.
You have described Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as one of your favourite pieces. What makes it so special to you?
It’s an incredibly beautiful and evocative piece of music – capturing a deeply nostalgic, vanished world of small-town America, captured through the eyes of a child but weighted with the bittersweet awareness of an adult looking back. Barber set the stream-of-consciousness prologue to a short story A Death in the Family by James Agee, and it’s one of those rare pieces of music where the text and the music seem to come from the same impulse and fit perfectly one another. I conducted it once before, in a very early concert of mine, about 12 years ago, so it holds something special for me too.
The inaugural Baroque Ball has been described as “fun, sexy and decadent.” How did the idea first come about?
Today, Baroque music is often thought of as a little staid, but the opposite is in fact true. A lot of it wasn’t written for concert halls – rather it was the court entertainment of its day. All the ballets that Lully – the court composer of Louis XIV – wrote weren’t written to be seen on a stage in a theatre, but instead the court would dance, Louis himself would come out, dressed as Apollo and perform. And so the idea behind the Baroque Ball is to re-create – with some historical licence – the court parties of James I and Louis XIV, as a fun, sexy and decadent, gay night: all the performers and audience in costume, elements of drag, nods to Bridgerton, The Favourite, Madonna’s Vogue performance at the 1990 MTV Awards, etc. but all to Baroque music. If you can have a gay night nowadays that’s pop or house or techno – why not Baroque music, a lot of which was – after all – written by gay men to be party music.
Shirt: Geordie Campbell.
You’re bringing together figures such as Joe Locke, Dylan Mulvaney, Jodie Harsh and Jonny Woo. What do they each bring to the spirit of the evening?
We have an incredible cast and team assembled for the ball – directed by Daniel Evans (Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company), choreography from James Cousins (responsible for the recent Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre), a full Baroque orchestra, a dance troupe, star opera singers Anthony Roth Costanzo, Nicky Spence, Bruno de Sa, Jaye Simmons, and Jonny Woo, Nicky Doll, Joe Locke, Dylan Mulvaney and Jodie Harsh. There will be music, dancing, poetry, drag, comedy, tragedy, partying. It should be a fun night – and we’re only doing it this year!
If you could invite any historical LGBTQ+ figure to attend the Baroque Ball, who would it be and why?
James I. After all, we are presenting the Ball in the palace he built to party in.
Classical music has traditionally been associated with formal dress codes. I find that funny because working in fashion I swim in a world of black clothing which I usually share with my choral friends. Do you think fashion can help make the art form feel more accessible?
Definitely. For most other art/entertainment forms there seems – to me at least – to be a degree of symbiosis. Fashion seems to work closely with the TV/film world, with the (mainstream) music industry, with the art world. For example, a fashion house may work with a young actor and help them get noticed – and then when they’re famous, it’s reversed and the famous actor helps the fashion house to sell clothes and reach big/different audiences. Fashion designers work on films and music videos but – with some notable exceptions – classical music seems, as an industry, to sit quite apart from this and do its own thing. Certainly, I think there are lots of ways fashion and classical music could work together to help each other – both artistically and to reach new and different audiences.
Total Look: Denzil Patrick.
Are there any designers or fashion houses whose work particularly inspires you?
I love what Jonathan Anderson has been creating at Dior and as for young designers, Geordie Campbell I think is very exciting.
Is there a misconception about classical music that you’d most like to challenge?
Yes. The thing that really annoys me – is when someone says, I can’t go to see ‘x’ because I don’t know anything about it. You don’t have to have read up on Rosalia’s biography or the background to her music or speak Catalan to enjoy listening to her music or go to her live shows. No one says that Lux is inaccessible because she sings in 14(!) different languages on the album. But you have people who won’t go to an opera because it’s in a foreign language (there are surtitles) or they don’t know about Mozart. When you go to see a play or a film, you don’t read up on the plot beforehand – it’s a piece of drama. How amazing would it be to see – eg Tosca – for the first time and not know what will happen. You can go to a concert or opera and be moved/thrilled/excited/devasted/etc. just by the music and the story. You don’t need to have any contextual information.
Total Look: Denzil Patrick.
Classical Pride has grown from a single-night event into a major cultural festival. What is your ultimate vision for where it could be in another five or ten years?
We have some big plans over the next few years – including some exciting new commissions – though I’m not allowed to write about these here yet! I also don’t have – and nor would I want to have – a monopoly on performing Pride concerts in classical music and I’d love for more and more orchestras and concert halls all over the world to be celebrating Pride. Indeed – and I’m not taking credit for this, classical music has very slow timelines so these may have been in the works for longer than Classical Pride has been around – but the New York Philharmonic is doing its first-ever Pride concert this season, likewise for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
