Billed as a pioneering classical music series, Eurovision Classical Concerts feels like the start of a new journey — one that quietly signals the challenges public service broadcasters now face in sustaining classical music programming.

News today from the BBC and EBU announcing a series of classical music concerts featuring orchestras from the European Broadcasting Union’s membership organisations.

Four orchestras featuring include the BBC Philharmonic (BBC/UK), WDR Symphony (WDR/Germany), Finnish Radio Symphony (YLE/Finland) and Gulbenkian Orchestra (RTP/Portugal).

Described as a ‘pioneering’ new series that celebrates European radio orchestras set up when radio was in its infancy, the programmes see four orchestras playing in studios or European concert halls performing programmes dominated by core repertoire. Some contemporary music has made it to the cut, including excerpts from Thomas Adè’s Dante, and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Le ciel d’hiver. The BBC Philharmonic has also included the main title from the film Big Country.

Fronted by Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Nicholas Collon, the series will be ‘offered’ to all 113 member organisations of the European Broadcasting Union across 56 countries reaching a potential audience of ‘millions’, with presumably the participating countries being guaranteed markets for the series. Collon sees this as demonstrating innovative musicians in each country, though it’s not entirely clear how a programme of largely core repertoire demonstrates innovation.

The EBU Deputy DG Jean Philip De Tender points to the series as a ‘testament to what’s possible when public service broadcasters come together with a shared vision’. A hint about how this content might serve a much broader strategy to tell the story of public service broadcasters to the cultural landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries. That’s important from an EBU perspective, though it’s not entirely clear how these TV events significantly differentiate from national broadcasters existing commitments to classical. The eight-week BBC Proms season has 25 broadcasts scheduled for this year’s programme, arguably likely to reach a much larger domestic audience than a four part series broadcast (presumably) late on a Sunday night on BBC Four, say (it seems unlikely the series would make it to BBC One given that only a fraction of the Proms output does).

The new collaboration is the first endeavour mounted between the BBC and the EBU since the formation of Eurovision Young Musicians (the European ‘grand final’ for BBC Young Musician) in 1982. The year the BBC hosted the competition in 2018 saw a marked improvement in production values, but by and large the competition doesn’t carry the editorial weight it did in the 80s and 90s. 2014 was an especially dire experience for competitors and audience alike.

In this way, the Eurovision Classical Concert series is perhaps a strategic redirection for the broadcaster who hasn’t offered up a competitor in nearly twenty years, opting instead for modest gesture signalling editorial direction in the future. It signals a potential shift to cheaper production and maybe even a move towards the creation of more bespoke classical content for TV of the kind the BBC made forty years+ ago. If that’s the case, then that might signal a deliberate shift toward lower-cost productions and pre-recorded formats. If this modest collaboration were to grow in years to come, role might it play in the BBC’s classical music strategy given that its most valuable strand – the BBC Proms – can’t not be affected by an ever more squeezed Licence Fee?

The timing of these things is rarely coincidental. The announcement coincided with an EBU gathering at the Radio Theatre in the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, the first gathering in London for 50 years (which must have been a little awkward for the Director General given the Glastonbury issues the weekend before). Something to watch, if not strategically, then certainly editorially.

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Aviva Studios in Manchester, United Kingdom

Adams A short ride in a fast machine

Tchaikovsky Swan Lake – selection

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Greensleeves

Adès Dante: The Earthly Paradise; The Heavenly Procession; The Ascent

Moross, The Big Country main title

Ben Gernon, conductor

Gulbenkian Orchestra

Grande Auditório of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal

Smetana Vltava

Debussy La Mer

Ravel La Valse

Aziz Shokhkimov, conductor

WDR Symphony Orchestra

Philharmonie in Cologne, Germany

“Fairytale Sounds”

Lyadov – The Enchanted Lake

Stravinsky Petrushka (1947 version)

Marie Jacquot, conductor

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Music House in Helsinki, Finland

Kaija Saariaho: Le ciel d’hiver

Uuno Klami: Kalevala-Suite

Sibelius: Finlandia

Nicholas Collon, conductor