For me, as a classical musician performing mostly repertoire that - unlike, say, Italian opera - has always been strictly segregated from and is difficult to assimilate to the pop tradition, the cultural sidelining of classical music is more than a little unsettling. So often there seems to be a need to explain or even apologise. Classical musicians seem ever eager to convince that the music they perform is interesting, relevant .?.?. groovy ? It doesn't really convince anyone.

Pop music is pop music, creatively dominated by the model of the three- to four-minute song, even when it seeks to break out of those confines. It can be harmonically, rhythmically intriguing, and enthusiasts are forever pointing to this song in 5/4 time, or to that weird modulation, rhapsodising about the final rising cacophonic crescendo at the end of Sgt ­Pepper culminating in a throbbing E major chord. But the best of the Beatles was pop simplicity - Yesterday, Norwegian Wood, Drive My Car - rather than pop art tricksiness.

Classical music, by the same token, is classical music. Ever influenced by popular styles and popular melody - Schubert and the Viennese waltz, Brahms and the alla zingarese style of Hungarian refugees in Hamburg, Thomas Adès and the club scene of the early 21st century - classical music yet remains essentially discursive, long-­breathed, temperamentally serious, historically avant-garde. There may be all sorts of exceptions, but we do violence to the aesthetic and historical facts if we pretend otherwise.

Just the other day I read an article in the London Review of Books by Nicholas Spice which bound together the recent case of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman imprisoned for 24 years in a basement by her own father; the sadistic imaginings of Elfriede Jelinek, the one-time piano prodigy and Nobel Prize-winning Austrian novelist, and the privileged role of classical music in Austrian culture. I spend much of my professional life in Austria, a country where the classical musician can feel a little more at home. Here - for all sorts of reasons, historical, economic and cultural, some of them worthy, some less so - classical music is indeed culturally central, whether in the day-by-day bourgeois life of Vienna or in the hyper-­reality of the Salzburg Festival.