Julian Lloyd Webber: Listen to sounds of protest

Politics and music. Do they, should they, mix? Some of the 20th century's greatest musicians certainly thought so. Casals refused to play in his native Spain while Franco was in power. Menuhin was actively involved with Unesco and Rostropovich's open support of Solzhenitsyn cost him his Russian passport.

Yet, despite their own continual struggles with the Soviet authorities, Rostropovich's compatriots, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, preferred to let their music speak for them. Just listen to Prokofiev's Sixth or Shostakovich's Eighth symphonies.

On August 21, 1968, in a cruelly ironic piece of programming, Rostropovich was scheduled to play the Czech composer Dvorak's Cello Concerto at the Proms. Earlier that day Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague to crush Alexander Dubcek's liberal reforms. To compound the irony, Rostropovich's accompanists were a Soviet orchestra (the USSR State Symphony) under a Soviet conductor (Evgeny Svetlanov).

Despite vociferous objections, the concert went ahead. I have it on tape. During the concerto's hushed opening the Royal Albert Hall resounds to strident yells of protest. It must have been a nightmare for the cellist, yet Rostropovich proceeds to give a performance of such seething intensity that no one could have left the hall with any doubt about his feelings towards the invasion.

In their different ways politics and music aspire to influence the human condition but, before musicians are tempted to play politics as well as music, perhaps we should consider the advice of Ecclesiastus: "Pour not out words where there is a musician."

* It was not a dignified beginning to my Far East tour last month. My trusty instrument had retained its spike for nearly 200 years and for it to be detached after all that time by Heathrow security officers was hard to bear: emasculating, even. But detached it was and duly banished to the hold - another victim of the crusade against terrorism. Yet, as the long metal appendage with its sharpened tip clunked unmusically on to the conveyor belt at Seoul International (earning me seriously suspicious looks from my fellow passengers), I could not help but feel this tool of the trade had seemed a good deal less threatening tucked up inside my cello where it belonged.

Where, I wonder, will it end? Will my bow soon be counted as an offensive weapon too? Will the cello's strings have to be removed on the offchance I might try to throttle a stewardess with my G-string? And what about all the other instruments? I am pretty sure you could give someone a good, hard whack with a flute, not to mention all the nasty things you could do with the business end of a drumstick. And surely the viola is an offensive weapon anyway? (Only joking, comrades).

* It never ceases to amaze me how easily we British cede to our foreign counterparts. During the tour in Asia I found out that classical music is an obligatory part of the education system in many Far Eastern countries. Large numbers of their young people learn an instrument and attend concerts. In South Korea classical musicians are often featured on daytime television.

I am not sure about New Zealand, but in Britain classical music hardly features on school timetables and is rarely seen on TV. When I dared to suggest that British television should play its part in letting young people discover classical music, I was taken to task by a Guardian columnist who opined that to find your child watching classical music on TV would be as embarrassing as learning your granddad likes Eminem.

Unfortunately, that kind of remark only fuels the media's continuing determination to deny children access to classical music. There are some fantastic young musicians who should be given an opportunity to play to their peers on the programmes they watch. Reality TV? Not when it comes to classical music.