Photography by Emilia Staugaard

It might not have fully caught on in the public domain, but when it comes to genres – classical music is pretty much as queer as they come. So much so, anyone seeking LGBTQIA+ representation among its pantheon of greats could find it as quickly as a conductor’s baton strokes the air. “It’s not exactly an obscure list,” Oliver Zeffman tells Man About Town. “Tchaikovsky, Barber, Britten, Copland, Bernstein, Poulenc, Szymanowski, Saint-Saëns, John Cage, Ethel Smyth, Lully, probably Handel, Chopin, and Schubert. And that’s just some of the dead composers.”

It makes it implausible that English conductor Zeffman’s establishment of Classical Pride in 2023 – an annual music festival celebrating past and present-day LGBTQIA+ creators in the field – was the first event of its kind by any major European orchestra or concert hall. But it was. The appetite for it since is testament to the gap it filled, reaching new crescendos each year with a five-piece programme in its London home in the last week and a debut US outing on 10th July at LA’s Hollywood Bowl. “The point really is that when people think of gay music it’s generally Kylie, Madonna, Cher, Charli xcx, Elton John, whoever,” Zeffman explains. “But actually, there’s also all of these classical composers, many of whom were writing music long before any of today’s pop icons were even alive.” Thankfully, the 32-year-old is making it his mission to bring the sonatas and symphonies that comprise the genre’s queer legacy to the masses.  

As part of Man About Town's "Queer Creatives Shaping Culture" this Pride season, Zeffman talks his story from youth orchestras to creating the festival, the biggest reflections audiences share following the concerts and the non-negotiable on his Pride itinerary…

  Photography by Emilia Staugaard

Hi, Oliver! Hypothetically, you have the opportunity to curate the Pride float of your dreams. What five individuals (living or deceased) are definitely coming with you?
Leonard Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, Azealia Banks, Charli XCX and William Bracewell.

Congratulations on the continued success of Classical Pride and taking it stateside! When you started in 2023, what were your expectations?
To be honest, I’m not sure what my expectations were when I started it. In 2023, we had the first Classical Pride – just one concert at the Barbican with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. I, of course, thought there would be some appetite for it and a need for it too, otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it. But I definitely wouldn’t have imagined that for our third edition – just two years after that first show – we’d be performing at four major venues across London: Wigmore Hall, Wilton’s Music Hall, Kings Place, the Barbican, and going to the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Phil. It’s very exciting.
 
Can you tell us more about your reasoning for conceiving the project? Did you feel like the classical music world served you well as a queer person?
In classical music, so many of the most influential and important composers – both past and present-day – are LGBTQIA+. Many of the most important composers living and working today are LGBTQIA+ too: Thomas Adès, George Benjamin, Julian Anderson, Nico Muhly, Jennifer Higdon, Caroline Shaw, and Meredith Monk, to name just a few. It’s a long list.

And given this enormous contribution the LGBTQIA+ community has made and continues to make to classical music, it was surprising that no one had done something like this before. Our first concert in 2023, was the first time that any major orchestra or concert hall anywhere outside the US had celebrated Pride in this way. I don’t think that’s necessarily due to homophobia. I’ve never experienced homophobia in classical music. It’s rather that classical music tends to be at least 10 years behind any ‘trend’ and, bizarrely, just hadn’t thought to do it. 2022 marked 50 years of Pride in the UK and, nowadays, in the West, most companies and brands want to show their support for Pride. So it is kind of mad that it took until 2023 for any major classical institution outside the US to do a Pride concert. I want to bring new audiences to classical music and show that classical music is part of queer culture and has been for a very long time. It's about time we celebrated it.

We read that you started playing violin at the age of four. Can you give us a whistle-stop tour of your story pre–Classical Pride: from picking up your first instrument to picking up the baton?
Yes, I started playing the violin when I was almost four. My cousin played the violin, so my mum thought, “Okay, Oliver can start some violin lessons,” and I played in the school orchestras and various youth orchestras. At some point, I thought conducting looked way more fun. I mean, you get to be there in front of the orchestra and be in charge. I’m half joking, but you do need something of an ego to stand in front of 100 musicians and direct them. But also, you get to experience and be a part of the music in a different way, with more overview but also more depth.

I was about 16. And if you want to conduct, obviously no one says, “Oh, hi, you want to conduct? Here’s a gig with the London Symphony Orchestra.” It doesn’t work like that. So I got some friends from school and the youth orchestra together and we did some concerts. I was pretty rubbish and they were almost as rubbish as me, but that’s how I started out. It was a lot of fun.

I studied History and Russian at Durham University, and on my year abroad I studied conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which has a very long and storied tradition of teaching conductors. After that, I spent a year at the Royal Academy of Music (nearly 10 years ago) and now I’m a ‘real’ conductor.

What’s one sentiment you most hear expressed from audiences after a Classical Pride event?
One of the sentiments I hear most is that people didn’t realise all these composers were gay. Even people in classical music say, “Oh, I didn’t realise Tchaikovsky was gay,” or “I didn’t know Saint-Saëns was,” or whoever. It’s not a surprise in a bad way, it’s just not something that people really think about. It really is striking how much of the music we think of as part of the canon is by LGBTQIA+ composers.

And the other big sentiment, especially because a lot of the audience that comes to Classical Pride isn’t necessarily a core classical audience, is how amazing classical music is. Which it is. When you’ve got a symphony orchestra of 100 people playing enormous climaxes in Tchaikovsky or Szymanowski, or playing the most delicate and intimate pianissimos that really draw you in as a listener, there’s nothing else like it. It’s amazing. Come to the concert.
 
What do you love most about being queer?
One thing I find interesting, compared with my straight friends, is that I’ve got real friends across all age groups. People younger than me, all the way to people in their seventies. None of my straight friends really have close friends who are significantly older than them, and it means I get to hang out with people who have all kinds of life experiences, backgrounds and opinions, which is great.
 
The non-negotiable on your Pride itinerary is…
Lots of committed learning of music, basically.
 
If you could incorporate a more conventional queer pop cultural icon into the classical world – who/what would it be?
Watch this space for 2026…