LONDON — What is gay music?
“It’s Charli XCX, Kylie Minogue and Elton John, but it’s also Tchaikovsky,” says Oliver Zeffman, the British conductor who is taking classical music on a world tour.
He’s on a mission to shed light on the genre and its queer composers — think Leonard Bernstein, Camille Saint-Saëns and Harold Arlen, the composer behind “The Wizard of Oz” from 1939, who wasn’t gay, but his music has resonated with the queer community.
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Their music will be played at “Classical Pride: Voices of Joy & Sorrow” at the Barbican Centre in London on Friday with the London Symphony Orchestra before taking off to the Hollywood Bowl in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles on July 10.
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“The most important composers past and present have been gay, but classical music has never done anything to celebrate that. It seems really long overdue,” says Zeffman, pointing out that every corporation and industry has tapped into the commerciality of celebrating Pride apart from the classical music scene, which is “generally behind with the times by 10 to 15 years.”
The conductor’s program for “Classical Pride” is not just 19th-century string pieces, but modern-day features, too, from Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral” about losing her brother in 1998 to George Benjamin’s “Dream of the Song,” Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” and Bernstein’s “Overture to Candide.”
The show ends on a familiar classical note with Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake Suite.”
If Taylor Swift’s “The Eras” tour was a compilation of her musical evolution, then Zeffman’s “Classical Pride” is a collection of classical music’s best hits for newcomers and seasoned listeners.
The face of classical music is a changing one.
Zeffman, a confident, athletic man, is more Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones” with his charmingly dark features and light eyes than Bach or Handel in their powdered wigs. On stage he wears a formal suit as he waves his baton in the air — there’s no pomp of a tuxedo, tailcoat or waistcoat as seen in the film “Tár” where Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor.
The 32-year-old conductor is also injecting some fun into the seriousness of classical music.
At the Hollywood Bowl, drag performer Thorgy Thor from season eight of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” will take the stage to play the violin.
Since setting up “Classical Pride” in 2023, Zeffman has been treating it like a crossover between a film festival and concert. He’s designed coquettish merchandise for the event, such as caps that say “DeBussy Boy,” “Are you a Callas B—h?” or a cap with three musical notes that translate to the word “fag.”
As a genre, classical music is in somewhat of a limbo — it’s partly attached to highbrow culture and therefore benefits reputationally, but at the same time it needs all the help it can get from appealing to the mass market because of governments slashing funds for arts and culture.
“Classical music isn’t good at audience development and there’s a bit of an attitude of ‘we do important art, if they don’t know about it, it’s their loss.’ But that’s not how you sell to an audience,” says Zeffman, who believes that nobody needs to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Frederick the Great or Igor Stravinsky to enjoy classical music.
His love for music began at a young age playing the violin and piano. He was also part of a youth orchestra, which is how he got his start as a conductor by conducting his friends. He put on his first concert at the age of 16 and between 2012 and 2018, he was conducting six concerts a year and commissioning young composers through the money he raised for putting together a symphony.
“Conducting is not like sign language, where a specific gesture means play this note. It’s about bringing together a unified vision and it’s all about timing. It’s like being a director or soccer manager — all the work happens in rehearsals,” Zeffman says.
The role of the conductor on stage is to guide the orchestra and control the tempo of the music. Their cues can dictate whether something should be played aggressively or delicately.
Classical music’s rich history led Zeffman to studying history and Russian at Durham University. He speaks fluent Russian and French with a little bit of Italian, which is always a boon for someone in the field of classical music.
He spent a year abroad in university at the prestigious music school Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia studying conducting. The school is recognized for its illustrious alumni including Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Artur Kapp and Rudolf Tobias.
But Zeffman is not a disciple of the da-da-da-duuuum of classical music. Sometimes he will put his baton aside and indulge in Azealia Banks, whom he saw perform in Paris with his boyfriend; the hip-hop duo Coco & Clair Clair at the Camden Ballroom in London, and Aphex Twin at All Points East in 2023.
Life is not always an oratorio.