Mariss Jansons – High Drama on the Podium by Norman Lebrecht / May 31, 2000 FORTY minutes before a concert, Mariss Jansons mounts the stage and checks the musicians’ seating. The second clarinet’s chair is moved half an inch to the right, the tuba’s turned 15 degrees towards centre. Like a brain surgeon, Jansons needs to be assured that all his instruments are correctly aligned before he can start to operate. More than any conductor I have known, Jansons is preoccupied with his precision tools. Among friends, he compares the vagaries of orchestras. If he has a spare hour on…

SSUE 1818 Wednesday 17 May 2000 Friends in need?   BOC Covent Garden Festival – official site   Norman Lebrecht on the callous misnomer “arts community” THERE are one or two lessons about money that I have picked up during 20 years of unremitting arts crisis. The first is never to believe a public-funded company that says it is going broke. When the cash runs out, there is seldom enough time to sound the alarm. A funded institution that cries “bust!” is doing no more than playing the joker in a long-running game of brinkmanship. Another hard-learned tip is not…

Good Managers are Hard to Find by Norman Lebrecht / May 10, 2000 THE Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has lost its manager. What, again? I hear you cry. There is a well-established pattern in the life of London orchestras, and this one in particular, that when they return from an arduous tour to find the diary half-empty and a record company (BMG) gone cold, the players call an emergency meeting and the board, in a panic, offers up the manager as a human sacrifice. John Manger had done sterling work in the five years since Paul Findlay was ousted. He gave…

Heard But No Longer Seen by Norman Lebrecht / May 3, 2000 WHICHEVER way you look at it, and many have given up watching, BBC Television has forsaken serious music. During the 1990s, concerts, opera and music-related programming fell by half. What remains is a clutch of six or eight summer Proms and a few Christmas specials. Whenever this column reported the decline, BBC executives demanded the right of denial, maintaining that any apparent reduction was but a temporary adjustment. Now the retreat is complete. The BBC director general, Greg Dyke, has relieved television of its responsibilities for classical music.…

The true humanity of Alma Rosé by Norman Lebrecht / April 5, 2000 THE morning they took my neighbour Eleanor away for cremation, there arrived in the post a 1928 recording of her uncle and cousin playing the Bach double-violin concerto. Her uncle was Arnold Ros*, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for half a century and brother-in-law of Gustav Mahler. His daughter, Alma, named after Mahler’s wife, would end her days conducting the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz. Eleanor Ros* talked often about Alma, who had fled with her father to London in 1939, only to return to Europe. A…