Even if the BBC Classical Music Unit had bought a manual on hackle-raising, it couldn’t have made a programme as guaranteed to rile the cognoscenti as Classical Star. “What’s wrong with BBC Young Musician of the Year?” “Why do we need a Fame Academy retread?” “When will the dumbing down stop?”

Those are the predictable questions being asked in advance of BBC Two’s ambitious five-part series in which the punky cellist Matthew Barley puts 18 teenage musicians through their paces, after which a panel of classical experts either votes them through to the next round or consigns them to musical history. The result, it is hoped, is that the one who survives the final cut will be the proverbial “complete package” – a superstar-in-the-making who can survive the commercial market while also managing to “broaden the appeal of classical music”.

Classical Idol this definitely isn’t, however. It’s true that there is some car-crash fun to be had in episode one with the Hobbit clarinettist who plays his instrument with his chin tucked firmly into his chest and only a shock of blond hair visible above it. The resulting exchange (Barley: “What are you going to do about your embouchure problem?” Hobbit: “Actually, I don’t see it as a problem”) possibly owes more to the Sharon Osbourne school of mentoring than the Suzuki Method.

Equally, I wish the BBC had come up with four judges who actually were classical stars rather than a conscientious double-bassist (Chi-chi Nwanoku, of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment), a concert promoter (Steve Abbott), an unknown conductor (Jason Lai) and a far-too-known broadcaster with a sideline conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra (Charles Hazlewood). As far as I’m aware, none has made, collaborated on or even commissioned a truly commercially successful classical recording.

But, watching the first episode, in which 18 hopefuls are whittled down to the nine chosen to enter a Big Brother-style hothouse, I realised that Barley and his accomplices have an important point to make about performance. It’s just not enough any more for budding classical musicians to lock themselves in the practice room during their formative years: what are they really going to have to say about their music, and themselves, when they emerge?

Don’t get me wrong. The last thing we need is another pouting violinist whose marketing campaign does the job instead of him or her. In the past few years the record labels have put countless such artists through this sausage machine, with predictable results: the spin shows through as exactly that – fakery at odds with the artist underneath.

Just this past month Natalie Clein, a young and talented cellist heavily promoted by EMI, took public exception to a flowery YouTube clip of her playing her new recording of the Elgar Concerto. Incredibly, she got her record label to withdraw the video, and morosely told the journalist who brought it to her attention that “for me it has always been about the inner goals, about controlling my playing and serving the music. The other stuff is very shallow.”

Is she right? Perhaps she would be if she lived in a world where her introspective diligence would be automatically noted by a large, healthy and diverse audience for Elgar. But she doesn’t, and pleading that “it’s really all about the music” isn’t going to get you noticed. Worse, it probably isn’t going to make you a live performer of real imagination and spontaneity, the virtues that Barley quite rightly emphasises in Classical Star.

So who manages to square the circle? The artists who seem to really want an audience, and who have a personality that complements rather than detracts from their musical style. For all the brickbats hurled at Lang Lang’s showboating, he draws a devoted following because he came from nothing and wants to make every minute at the piano count. Every concert with the Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel on the podium is a true event – true to Dudamel’s fiery intuition even if it isn’t always quite true to the composer’s exact intentions. In both cases, they’re better musicians for the personality they project – just like their counterparts in pop, rock and jazz.

Here’s hoping Classical Star turns up a real live wire, one who might make every budding musician think a little bit harder about the prospect of spending his or her life courting a paying – and fickle – public.

Classical Star begins at 9pm tomorrow, BBC Two

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