Petroc Trelawney writes in this week's Spectator about the New York Philharmonic's woes. But he doesn't really touch on the worst of them: their new chief conductor, Lorin Maazel.

Brian Mickelthwait does, and he gets it spot on:

Maazel is classical music living dead. He's a fine conductor. But everything I've ever heard him say, or read about him, tells me that he takes the future of classical music for granted, and regards actually having to, you know, do anything to secure that future, anything risky, as being just too undignified for someone of his supreme grandeur to contemplate. He wafts about in his opera cloak, issuing orders to trembling orchestral musicians, his head stuck in a vanishing age, imagining himself to be at the top of his tree, seemingly unaware that it is rotting.

If anything, though, I think he's being too kind. Maazel used to be a good conductor (his 1960s recording of Sibelius' 2nd Symphony is very fine), but he was always more technique than substance. Today it's entirely technique, and he has a way of sucking the life out of everything he touches.

(There's a book to be written on conductors' later years. Some bloom even more - Bernstein, Tennstedt, Colin Davis - but some fall apart. I heard a few performances by Giulini in the late 80s and early 90s and they were as if he had moved into another time world, where everything happened mmmuuuccchhhh mmmmuuuucccchhhhh sssslllloooowwwweeeerrrrr.)

A few weeks ago I heard Maazel rehearse the NYPO in the Eroica, and he spent the entire morning smoothing things out; at the first sign of tension and spark, he was in there dampening things down into a bland, velvet sheen which was deadening. If there was ever a piece which needs tension and struggle it's the Eroica, and what Maazel did to it was damn near criminal: he made it boring. Admittedly, there are few performances which have ever come close to my legendary triumph with the Kensington SO (and yes, that's a joke; whatever it may have sounded like, though, to everyone else, in my mind's ear it was perfect, and it meant that a lifetime's ambition was fulfilled).

This has nothing to do with his traditional style. His predecessor, Kurt Masur, was steeped in such methods, as are the likes of Daniel Barenboim and Bernard Haitink. Period practice doesn't impact at all on them. And nor should it, since they offer something very different. Maazel's problems are nothing to do with performance practice - they stem from the fact that he's simply no good.

Maazel is a disastrous appointment for the NYPO. They are sleepwalking into oblivion with him at the helm, the first part of a triple whammy. The second - Avery Fisher Hall - they have tried (and now failed) to do something about. The third, the New York audience, is a real problem. I posted below about my experience of the Viennese, but New Yorkers are far, far worse. They cough when they feel like it; they fidget as if fleas have infested the hall; they talk to each other in loud whispers; and they get up and leave if the fancy takes them. Awful.

Put that mix together, add in the astonishingly dull programmes Maazel has scheduled, and you have a recipe for decline. I went to the rehearsal because I wanted to hear if a new challenge might do the trick for Maazel. Far from it - it's simply infected another orchestra with his musical virus.