As we approach the Royal Festival Hall’s 50th birthday, there is still no discernible renovation has taken place there in 14 years I HAVE tried biting my tongue, buttoning my lip and binding the fingers of my right hand. But, try as I might, I cannot keep mum any longer on the longest-running blot on Britain’s cultural landscape. As another year ends, it seems almost unimaginable that stagnancy still prevails at our premier arts centre. It has been 14 years since the South Bank, freed from the abolished Greater London Council, was handed to an unelected board of the great…

In February Michael Kaiser will leave his post at the Royal Opera House, the fifth chief executive in as many years. But with the top post in UK arts management now artistically neutered and at the mercy of a meddlesome board, who would want to replace him? ADVICE to those contemplating taking the top job at Covent Garden: don’t. Only the desperate and the dumb would apply to occupy a hot seat that has roasted five chief executives in as many years – not because of their ineptness but because the job is no longer do-able. Trouble in the Garden:…

A one-man brand Chamber Orchestra of Europe Vienna Symphony Orchestra Nikolaus Harnoncourt is the antithesis of the modern star, yet he has become the first conductor since Karajan to sell records on the strength of his name alone. Interview by Norman Lebrecht FUTURE archaeologists of the classical record industry will trace its collapse to the deaths, a year apart, of Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein. For half a lifetime, these two busy batons monopolised orchestral output, saturating the racks with self-repetitions. When they died, a decade ago, the public refused to recognise the next pharoahs and precipitated industrial wipeout.…

THE next time you hear the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (they play in London on December 7), watch out for the trombonist – he’s British. For the first time in almost 160 years, the self-selecting and not famously cosmopolitan members of Europe’s most elite ensemble have offered one of their gilded seats to a graduate of the Darwinian school of cold showers and funding scrums that makes British orchestral players the hardiest on earth. Ian Bousfield, trombonist of the London Symphony Orchestra, was solicited earlier this year to audition for Vienna’s principal position. He blew away 14 competitors in a screened…

How the city’s three opera houses were spared THE crimson rhetoric coming out of Berlin this week has rather obscured the nature of the conflict, a bare-knuckle fight between government and the performing arts. The bout began when the ruling senate of Berlin decided that the capital could not afford three opera houses. Its cultural senator, Christoph Stolzl, proposed that the two largest should merge. Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Staatsoper on the former east side, said he would rather quit. Christian Thielemann, music director of the west-side Deutsche Oper, had already resigned over plans to put both companies…

What’s in a name? In California, about $5 million IN the Pacific sprawl of Los Angeles, amid the dream factories with their rainbow-billowing smokestacks, there is an academy of higher learning, known as UCLA. Among its amenities is a concert hall – the Arnold Schoenberg Hall, after the great composer who taught on the campus from 1936 to 1944. The hall is regularly used for public concerts, thus perpetuating Schoenberg’s name among movieland’s micro-minority of lovers of serious music. Last month, the college renamed the hall. The new dedicatee was Mo Ostin, a UCLA economics alumnus who rose to towering…

Among the current crop of wonderful bass baritones, none is more sought-after than Thomas Quasthoff. But that’s not all that makes him unique – he is also a thalidomide victim with wickedly outspoken views on art and disability. WHATEVER else might ail the music industry, the market is booming in bass baritones. While lyric tenors are near-extinct and the latest hot soprano turns out on close inspection to be just another jumped-up mezzo, there have never been so many middle-low men, so many white-tied crooners who can melt a stony-faced audience with the opening phrase of Winterreise. Consummate performer: ‘I…

Our greatest living composer has returned from self-imposed exile in France to turn his fierce intelligence on the parlous state of the arts in this country. As his latest work receives its UK premiere, he talks to Norman Lebrecht about Tony Blair, Melvyn Bragg and his other cultural enemies ONE evening at the Ivy, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, our foremost living composer, was dining with Lord Gowrie, the former Arts Council chairman, when the Blairs were ushered in to their usual table. ‘Would you like to meet them?’ offered Gowrie, an old-school Tory of cross-bench courtesies. ‘Only Harry, you must promise…

Norman Lebrecht MY letter to the Luftwaffe came back stamped ‘no longer on active service’ – more’s the pity, since it offered the only holistic solution to London’s concert-hall woes. What I had proposed was that our German allies should mount a ceremonial fly-over in this Battle of Britain 60th-anniversary year, dropping precision bombs on the Royal Festival Hall and Barbican Centre, and thereby enabling us to build an acceptable symphonic environment. It was the Luftwaffe that, on May 10, 1941, knocked out London’s last acoustic marvel – the Queen’s Hall, on Upper Regent Street. Neither of its replacements is…