The conductor Charles Hazlewood is described by The Daily Telegraph as “the face of classical music for the BBC”. “How terrifying,” said one of my friends when I mentioned this. “I didn’t know classical music had a ‘face’.” But giving music,  all music, a face is exactly what Hazlewood tries to do. He wants to remove the smokescreen that art puts up between the spectators and the work.

Since his days at Oxford he has had a slightly controversial habit of giving introductions to the pieces he performs, allowing those who know the music backwards to see it with fresh eyes and giving the uninitiated “hooks to hang on to along the way, so that you can engage intellectually as well as emotionally with something that unfolds in front of you. It’s all about empowering people, about saying ‘Don’t worry, leave your insecurities and your sense of lack of qualification at the door.’”

This ability to perform what he describes as “a kind of open heart surgery on music” is what has led to Hazlewood not only conducting orchestras across the world, but presenting numerous TV and radio shows about everything from Mozart and Tchaikovsky, to what makes the perfect pop song. He is a slightly built, attractive man who manages to combine an intense and infectious passion for his subjects with a total lack of pomposity. In person he is as warm and unintimidating as he is on screen, laughing dirtily and rolling cigarettes as we talk. He’s about as far as you can get from the stereotypical elitist musician, something which “a hardcore of the classical music establishment, certainly within the media and so on, really detest me for:  ‘Oh, he’s that relentless populariser of music,’ they say, as if there’s something faintly cancerous about that.”

He thinks it’s sad that anyone should misguidedly want to keep classical music within a privileged club. “There was this journalist from Time Out who over the summer launched this very public invective against audiences, arguing that they should be taught things like when and how to clap”. How to clap?! “Yes. So a piece that ends slowly and softly, evaporating into a silence – that after that there shouldn’t be any vigorous clapping, that there should be a long and respectful pause and then maybe a slow warm ripple which then gradually builds. The very idea that people should be given masterclasses in how to respond only perpetuates the problem and makes it that much worse.” He can’t stand people who seem to consider audiences as “a necessary evil. It’s completely nonsensical because that’s who you are talking to. You can’t make music in a bubble. Well you can, you can play your guitar in your bedroom but that’s only ever a kind of…” Masturbation? “Yes. It is really. It’s certainly not the real thing.”

It was a desire to free both music and audiences from “all these terms and conditions” which inspired him to launch Play The Field this summer, a festival set in the grounds of his farm in Somerset. “By taking the orchestra out of the concert hall I could tear out the whole page of the programme on the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ of concert etiquette. The reality is that orchestras make music that is visceral, red-blooded and intensely meaningful. So how about if you take this rarified beast, an orchestra, and put it in a field where it can blaze away and where there are no rules, where your toddlers can melt down, your teenagers can be pissed, everyone can be how they want to be and yet still absolutely be immersed in this extraordinary music.” There was also a radical scheme that anyone who lived within a certain mile radius of the farm paid what they want to pay for a ticket “so it was genuinely accessible, not just dumping a posh event in the middle of Somerset and saying, ‘Yeah well most of you tossers can’t come’.” What he is most excited about is that this meant that most of the people there had “never, ever seen an orchestra in the flesh before. And they talk about it now with an almost religious fanaticism – they’ve heard this big music and they’re never going back.”

In between the classical pieces he also had “a troupe which were made up of musicians from a totally broad musical spectrum: members of Goldfrapp, members of Portishead, jazz musicians, offering spontaneous responses, improvisations to what the orchestra had just played”. This is one of Hazlewood’s other passionate beliefs – that different worlds of music should be brought together; “not in some kind of weak, sappy fusion” but in a way that proves how absurd it is to “think of music in terms of mutually exclusive categories. There are only two sorts of music – there is great music and terrible music and it’s up to you to decide which is which. No one can prescribe – it’s absolutely absurd to think that you should.”

Even for someone as limited in their musical knowledge as me, it is impossible not to feel empowered by the rousing energy with which Hazlewood talks. He grew up watching his father, an Anglican vicar, bring communities together through faith and was, he says, inspired with “a parallel mission with music”.

Proof of music’s power to unite people happens all the time he says. A curious thing about British football fans, for instance, is that “of whatever team, they sing and sing and sing. I’ve got mates who are obsessive fans, and one of the things they love most about going to games every week is this immersive experience of losing themselves in this sea of sound, where their individual contribution is important, but it’s also about being buoyed up by this intense and enormous collective.” Like a modern day hymn? “Exactly.”