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…