Here's a moment from last year's début Classical Pride festival that perfectly crystallises the event's colourful, adventurous and all-welcoming feel.

The pianists – partners both on and off stage – pirouetted through Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, the instruments nestled together among the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Pavel Kolesnikov’s off-beat staccato phrases melded with Samson Tsoy’s ascending motif; acerbic interjections shifted into poignant lyricism.

It followed on from the catchy overture to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which featured alongside the premiere of Julian Anderson’s Echoes, with bass-baritone Davóne Tines as the soloist. ‘It was a classic Barbican concert in many ways,’ recalls conductor Oliver Zeffman of last year’s performance.

What is Classical Pride?

Indeed it was – except there were rainbow-coloured drapes behind the ensemble, the stage lights winked a bright shade of pink, and there was a greater proliferation of glitter. This was Classical Pride, the first event of its kind in the UK – and, remarkably, Europe.  

Given the popularity of Pride – now an annual summer celebration of LGBTQ+ culture, having developed from the first rally held in London in 1972 – it came as a surprise to learn that, prior to Classical Pride 2023, there had been no obvious classical music representation. Even Sainsbury’s and Marmite have rainbow-coloured logos.

Zeffman seized the opportunity, curating a concert and recording a new version of Caroline Shaw’s Is a Rose – the three-piece song cycle, originally composed for mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter is reimagined on the recording for baritone, soprano and tenor, sung by Tines, Ella Taylor and Nicky Spence. 

'Zeffman has achieved the unachievable'

‘I wanted the different voice types to represent the diversity of Pride,’ says Zeffman. There’ll be an even broader range of styles on display this year: the first Classical Pride was so successful that it is now expanding to five shows held across five days (3-7 July). At a time where arts funding is more challenging than ever, Zeffman has achieved the unachievable: sponsors have quadrupled their commitment to the project. 

Who is performing at Classical Pride 2024?

Zeffman is keen to continue his series of firsts. The festival opens with Classical Drag, an event that combines drag queens and opera. ‘A lot of the drag queens have backgrounds in classical music,’ says Zeffman, referring to saxophone-playing Snow White Trash, self-styled as ‘the UK’s saxiest drag queen’ and Thorgy Thor, ‘Queen of Classical Music’ on reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race.

‘There’s a huge amount of shared DNA between drag and opera’

From the opera side, lyric soprano Pumeza Matshikiza and Is a Rose soloist Spence will be making special appearances, and the lip-sync showdown – where drag queens mime to recordings – will be operatically themed. ‘There’s a huge amount of shared DNA between drag and opera,’ says Zeffman.

Travesti roles, such as Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier have long seen women dressed as men, and castrati or countertenor roles are often gender fluid. Historically, part of the thrill of a 'trouser role' was the forbidden love between same-sex couples, expressed in powerful music such as the love scenes between Octavian and Marschallin (and Sophie) in Der Rosenkavalier. 

Is music becoming more inclusive?

Voice types are no longer inextricably linked with gender. ‘Mixed voice’ choirs rather than SATB (soprano / alto / tenor / bass) are encouraged in schools, as it’s more inclusive for boys whose voices are changing, people who may not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, and those who don’t have an ‘appropriate’ voice for their appearance.

It’s a frontier being explored on stage by transgender singers like baritone Lucia Lucas, who recently sung the lead in Tom W Green’s 2017 The World’s Wife based on Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems under the same title (1999). The theme is also covered by Laura Kaminsky in her opera As One, which splits voices as ‘Hannah Before’ (baritone) and ‘Hannah After’ (mezzo-soprano). 

LGBT+ History Month was set up in the UK in 2004, with a clear objective to ensure that institutions ‘do not lie about LGBT people by omission’ (‘Queer Talk: Homosexuality in Britten’s Britain’). Since then, listicles such as ‘15 LGBTQ+ composers in classical music history that you probably already know’ or ‘top ten gay composers’ are commonplace.

'The classical music industry is largely welcoming'

But is identifying musicians in this way helpful? Music is clearly more than the composer or performer’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and there’s an argument against outing those who were notoriously private about their personal lives. Finally, with February dedicated to LGBT+ History and June to Pride, surely we’re... OK?

‘Yes, if you are a gay man living in the West, life is, generally speaking, fine,’ agrees Zeffman, ‘You can hold your partner’s hand in public, you can get married, you can have a baby. In terms of classical music, the industry is largely welcoming. But that’s not true around the world; and in some places gay rights are even regressing.’ One example is Uganda, where the Anti-Homosexuality Act passed in 2023 restricts freedom of speech on LGBTQ+ rights and enforces life imprisonment, and even the death penalty, for engaging in same-sex relationships. 

It’s one of several countries where Rainbow Railroad operates, helping refugees escape state persecution. The charity is among Classical Pride’s partner organisations (all net proceeds are donated to Rainbow Road, Amplifund and the Terrence Higgins Trust) and one recipient of its support has written a text that has been set by composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, to be premiered at the festival.

Classical Pride and protest

Back in the UK, the rate of progress is not universal for all within the LGBTQ+ community: trans rights are currently in flux. At last year’s Classical Pride, I witnessed one member of the team being misgendered on multiple occasions during rehearsals.

It hit hard: if we can’t get this right at an event with LGBTQ+ culture at its heart, imagine the experiences in more conservative settings. ‘To be frank, it’s naïve to think that this issue doesn’t affect classical music,’ says Zeffman. ‘Pride has always been a protest movement, and while Classical Pride is a celebration, we want to emphasise the importance of LGBTQ+ rights.’ 

It’s worth remembering that it was as recently as 1967 that ‘homosexual acts in private between men over the age of 21’ was decriminalised in England and Wales; Scotland would have to wait until 1980, and a further two years for Northern Ireland. It wasn’t until 2000 that you could ‘officially’ be gay in the armed forces. That’s before we’ve got to what was deemed domestically acceptable: same sex marriage only became legal in 2014 in England, Wales and Scotland, progressing on from the 2004 Civil Partnership Act.

Which composers feature at Classical Pride 2024?

Many of the composers featured in this year’s Classical Pride have reflected the impact of this inequality in their work. Benjamin Britten, for example, whose Canticle I with the subtitle ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’ was quietly radical in 1947. ‘My Beloved Man’, performed by the Fourth Choir, uses the letters between Britten and his partner Peter Pears (read by Petroc Trelawny) interspersed with music by Purcell, Barber, Tippett, Imogen Holst and others, to track the couple’s life together.

More explicit is Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerilla, one of the more printable titles that reference the composer’s struggles and satisfaction in being a black gay composer. (In an interview with Buffalo News, Eastman explained his mission: ‘What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest – black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest’.) A new arrangement of the piece by Jessie Montgomery will be performed at the Barbican foyer (7 July, free). 

‘Queer culture is increasingly important in mainstream culture’

Nearly a year before the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra sanctioned phone use in its concerts, Classical Pride had already – unintentionally, perhaps – endorsed a more relaxed approach to the usual concert etiquette. The rainbow light projections behind performers appeared on screens dotted around the Barbican.

News spread, and so too are similar events, such as Pride Classical, which took place (3 June) at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom, hosted by Radio 1 DJ Danny Beard. The event featured a new Pride anthem created by members of Stockport LGBT+ PLUS Spectrum, alongside orchestral versions of disco hits – also the premise of the upcoming Everybody Dance! The Sound of Disco Prom which, while not openly a LGBTQ+ celebration, uses music closely associated with the movement: Gloria Gaynor, Diana Ross et al. ‘Queer culture is increasingly important in mainstream culture,’ concludes Zeffman. ‘We’re engaging new audiences – supporting LGBT+ is good for classical music.’  

Pride at the BBC Proms

Flag-waving and the BBC Proms go together like a horse and carriage. Traditionally, it was a Union flag that most people clutched, raising colours to the air for the now-contested ‘Rule, Britannia!’ sing-a-long, a tradition born out of the Second World War. 

Then, as the festival became more international, other flags began to appear, decorating the red, blue and white with splodges of yellow, black and green, among others. The red, blue and white fractured into its original component parts: white and blue; red and white, and, especially when Bryn Terfel sung in 2008, there be dragons too. The yellow-starred blue has featured more prominently in recent years, particularly since 2016, with certain factions even handing out their preferred flag to audience members to sway the overall colourway. 

But it wasn’t until 2019 that the Pride flag was used on stage – unfurled by mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton during the usual Last Night of the Proms festivities. The US mezzo-soprano made a historic moment for Pride in classical music when she starred as the soloist in the closing Prom. At one point dressed in purple and pink – matching the bisexual flag of the same colours – Barton sang Bizet, Saint-Saëns and, fittingly, ‘Over the Rainbow’.