More on the older concert-goer. We were in Newcastle at the weekend to celebrate the 90th birthday of my wife’s aunt. I had to come back on Monday, but Judith has stayed on, and on Thursday she and her sister-in-law will be taking Auntie Belle to her first ever orchestral concert at the Sage, Gateshead. Belle is far from unfamiliar with classical music: on Sunday she gave Judith and me a twenty-minute recital of piano arrangements on her old upright, proving that age hasn’t reduced the suppleness of her fingers or her natural musicianship. But she’s led a quiet life, and the opportunity to hear a symphony orchestra just never came up—until now.

To tell the truth, we’re a bit nervous about it, because the Sage is not a large hall, and the concert will end with that rousing warhorse Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. It could be overwhelming, deafening, even dismaying. I can remember my first time hearing the Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow, in my early teens, in the similarly modest City Halls. Compared with the smooth, mellow sound of the LPs I owned, the combination of some 80 musicians playing live shocked me—so raucous, uncontained, almost undisciplined. In fact, it was not unlike my first taste of beer a couple of years later: I knew I was supposed to enjoy it, but I could tell it would take some getting used to! Maybe there’s a danger that we underestimate how much the first time concert-goer has to be weaned away from the false perfection of the recording process, and prepared for the raw energy of the thing itself. I’ll let you know how Belle gets on.

The other matter to exercise us was the price of the tickets. Apart from a few rows at the very back of the hall, the standard ticket price for all seats at this Sage concert is £29.50, and the reduction for OAPs is only a measly two quid. So these three tickets have cost a total of £88, which, by coincidence, is almost exactly what I’ve spent in the last few months on three bumper boxes of CDs, a grand total of 38 discs in all. Among these has been my musical discovery of the decade, the 27 (yes, count them!) symphonies of the Russian Nikolai Miaskovksy, an older contemporary of Prokofiev. It’s been a wonderful journey, getting to know these warm, big-hearted, epic works, and although they may not be outright masterpieces (though I’m coming to think some of them are), they richly deserve being rescued from oblivion. When I started going to concerts at the end of the 60s, a concert-ticket was about the same price as an LP. Now there’s no comparison. And, of course, the quality of the live experience can so easily be undermined by workaday performances, or by external factors, like my unfortunate choice of seats in Perth last week. In these hard times, concert promoters are going to have their work cut out to develop, and even retain, audiences, as ticket prices continue to rise, and competing forms of entertainment become ever more accessible.