Norman Lebrecht HERE are the latest additions to my forthcoming Dictionary of Musical Euphemisms and Factual Economies. A couple of weeks ago, a well-placed source in New York warned me that things were warming up at the Philharmonic. ‘You’ll know the foreplay’s over,’ he said, ‘when Kurt Masur cancels a bloc of concerts for some flimsy reason and the candidates to succeed him are lined up for audition.’ Barely had his words crossed cyberspace than it was announced that Masur was dropping out for a fortnight at the end of this month to undergo an unspecified minor surgical procedure (UMSP).…

Norman Lebrecht HERE is a brief summary of the summer’s casualties. Two of America’s leading dance companies, the Martha Graham and the Cleveland Ballet, went belly-up as audiences slackened and funding ran dry. There is hope that the Cleveland troupe may survive by relocating to San José, in Silicon Valley. The authorities in the Netherlands have announced the abolition of three orchestras, two symphonic and one chamber. In Berlin, Daniel Barenboim has joined the exodus of top-flight conductors – Abbado, Thielemann, Kreizberg – as subsidy lakes freeze over and cuts appear inevitable. Canada’s orchestras are in chaos. Toronto is a…

Royal Opera House   In part two of The Daily Telegraph’s serialisation of his extraordinary book on the Royal Opera House, Norman Lebrecht recounts the explosive impact the young Rudolf Nureyev had on both the Royal Ballet and the flagging career of Margot Fonteyn Fonteyn’s secret pension Diana: the Royal Ballet’s biggest fan WHILE the Royal Ballet was dancing in Russia in June 1961, news broke that would change its destiny. A young soloist had broken free from the Kirov Ballet in Paris and requested political asylum. At the height of the Cold War, weeks before the Berlin Wall went…

WITH a week to go before the series goes on air, nothing has been fixed and no participants booked – which is just as I intended. Lebrecht.live, the new freespace on BBC Radio 3 for contentious issues in the arts, is designed to cut against the grain of all the over-scripted, pre-recorded, corporately manacled and politically neutered talk slots that clutter the public-service airwaves. Live, in my view, ought to mean live. In cultural radio, it is more often euphemistic, a cover for institutional cowardice. So-called “live” concert commentary, for instance, is typed up hours ahead for approval by presentation…