London, Barbican: Masterprize Final

There's no doubt that Masterprize, the international composition competition with a mission ‘to bring music lovers and composers closer together’, is a slick and professional operation, with a tremendous outreach. The CD with the six pieces which made it to the final (of some 1,000 entries) was stuck on the front of both Gramophone and Classic FM magazines, with a joint print-run of around 100,000. The ‘gala final’ in the Barbican on 30 October, when the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Daniel Harding, was broadcast live on Classic FM (which reaches 6.5 million listeners a week), NPR in the States (16 million) and Radio Latvia (you tell me); and NPR also packaged it for their deferred ‘Symphony Cast’. These are scarcely believable figures for contemporary classical music: Masterprize is plainly doing an enormous amount of good. Another statistic worth celebrating is that 1,300 children were involved in the associated education project, playing the six works up and down the UK. It's just a pity that most of the music that made it through to the final was so dull, a post-Hollywood syrup of feel-good consonance and glittering over-orchestration – slickly wrapped empty boxes.