Sex

Who needs this when the classics are already bursting with sex? asks the Telegraph, sick and tired of the talentless playing the mediocre being 'sexed up'.

Classical music is mostly full of sex, or to put it better, eroticism - it's just that it's hidden, buried in music's grammar.

Every time you hear a dissonance (a tense-sounding interval or chord) melt into a consonant one, you're hearing the basic erotic pattern of arousal and relief. That's true even in the chaste polyphony of Renaissance church music (which is why some of it doesn't sound half as chaste as it ought to).

But where that pattern is spiced up with really grinding dissonances, or where it's repeated in ascending sequences, each repetition more intense that the last, then the sexual connotation becomes blindingly clear.

There are moments in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde where it seems as if all the eroticism of humanity has been poured into one super-charged phrase. The tension, the agonised delay, purges the erotic quality of any sense of the body.

The sexiness of Bond or Vanessa-Mae seems manufactured. Only a culture that could routinely use the word "sexy" in antiseptic contexts (a "sexy" company logo, for example), could possibly find these vapid creatures alluring.

Definitely worth a read.