It doesn't seem possible that Rostropovich is dead. How can it be that a man so life affirming, so heart warming and so giving to all should have died? Almost certainly the finest musician of my lifetime, we shall not see his like again, and should count ourselves privileged to have lived when he was alive.

I heard him play so many times, and every concert was special in its own way. I was once - relatively recently - lucky enough to have met him and spoken for a while. I was sitting in the Eurostar departure lounge and spotted him straight away as he arrived. To my amazement, he sat down next to me. I had a dilemma. I hate intruding on the private space of public figures. But I could not let the chance go by to thank him for the years of pleasure he had given me. So that's what I said, and then said I did not want to disturb him further and good bye.

'No, no, come back', he said as I bid to leave him. And we then spoke for what seemed like hours but was probably no more than twenty minutes. And then his train to Paris was called. 'Will you sit next to me? I would love to carry on talking', he said. I was despondent - I was off to Brussels for a meeting I couldn't miss.

With hindsight I can't believe I was such an idiot and didn't accompany him to Paris. To have had the chance to talk to one of the great men of the age - not just a great musician but a great man - for an entire train ride; and I missed it.

If you are going to listen to only one of his recordings, try this: the famous live recording from the Prom of 21st August 1968 when he played the Dvorak Cello Concerto with the USSRSO on the night when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. It's far from being his most technically accomplished performance but you can almost hear his cry of pain for the people of Czechoslovakia.

Rest in peace, Slava.

Brian Mickelthwait flags up Jessica Duchen's clip of Grigory Sokolov.

Sokolov is an astounding pianist whose rare UK concerts are an absolute must for anyone who appreciates piano playing. I think his name is fit be mentioned in the same breath as Gilels and Richter, and that is the highest possible praise. As it happens there are two recitals now scheduled. This one at the Wigmore Hall on 6th June (sold out, but there may be returns) and this at the Barbican on 10th May 2008. I'm lucky enough to have tickets to both, and also to see him in Brussels.

Wow. The Guardian is releasing the tapes of Andras Schiff's recent lectures on the Beethoven Piano Sonatas. You can hear the first here, and they'll be uploading the rest over the next few weeks.

I was at most of them and cannot recommend them - or indeed his recordings of the sonatas - too highly.

(via Jessica Duchen)

UPDATE: Blimey, I had a spelling howler here earlier...I wrote 'here' rather than 'hear'. Ouch.

I don't usually write here about concerts I've been to - mainly because, if I did, I'd not have time for anything else. But I'm going to make an exception tonight because I've been to one of the most staggering performances of my life. And given that there's been barely a week of my life since my teens when I haven't heard some sort of live music, you can see how many performances that is (I'm 41 now - you do the maths!).

There are some performances which you know as you hear them will remain with you for ever. The opening notes of Verdi's Otello at the Royal Opera House, conducted by Carlos Kleiber, were a sound the like of which I will never hear again. It was as if the earth was opening up and swallowing all the sounds which have ever been played. Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler's Fifth was an emotional roller coaster. Bernstein conducting the Concertgebouw in Mahler's Ninth was like hearing death itself. I could not listen to anything else for weeks afterwards. Sir Reginald Goodall conducting Tristan. Emil Gilels playing the Hammerklavier Sonata. Dawn Upshaw singing Purcell's The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation.

Tonight I heard something which I know will live on in my mind for as long as I am alive: Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Bruckner's 7th Symphony. The sheer quality of the BPO's sound is usually taken as a given, but it shouldn't be. Glorious as it has always been, it can sometimes seem just too perfect - like a giant shag pile smothering sheen of sound. Rattle has given it something else; a transparency which has not detracted one iota from the perfection and the sheen, but has added a new dimension of character.

But it was the coupling of orchestral playing of unmatched brilliance - I don't think I have ever even imagined such perfection was possible - with an awe-inspiring interpretation of Bruckner's most perfect symphony which lifted the performance into legend. I've heard any number of interpretations of it, but never before have I felt that I was hearing something almost too painful to listen to. The Seventh is, in many ways, Bruckner's most lyrical symphony, and most conductors often merely hint at the pain which is also there. Rattle somehow managed to convey every ounce of the poetry and lyricism but at the same time laid out the despair which lies behind every bar, however sweet the notes may seem. The second movement, which was inspired by the approaching death of Bruckner's hero, Wagner, was wrenching.

Tne good news is you can hear it here. Click on Listen Online, then Prom 65, Part 2. I don't know for how long it will be available, so do it asap!

Michael Henderson is spot on in his Thunderer today about Sir Charles Mackerras (and he is right, too, about Sir Colin Davis, who is taken too much for granted in his home country).

Sir Charles is more inquisitive, more exciting, and more energetic than most others a quarter of his age. There is - still - no more vibrant, pulsating Janacek conductor than he, and his Handel remains peerless.

Not for him the languid, dull, drawn out performances of some other octogenarian conductors (I have in mind some of the mind-numbing later performances of the formerly inspiring Carlo-Maria Guilini, for instance).

I'm sure his Prom in a fortnight will be just as special - a new completion of Mozart's C minor Mass, performed on period instruments. I can't wait!

The next time you hear someone say, as is the wont of arts grandees and TV controllers, that dumbing down is a myth, I have a suggestion. Take them to the Coliseum in London, the home of English National Opera (ENO), where next year they will be able to witness dumbing down in action, above the stage of a once great opera company.

Even if you have not the slightest interest in opera, the decision of ENO to lower its standards, in the apparent belief that its audience is comprised of idiots, is a metaphor for our times.

The founding principle of ENO, since its creation in 1931, has been the performance of opera in English. For decades, audiences have benefited from the dramatic immediacy and unique level of theatricality and communication this brings to performances.

No longer. So garbled are the sounds which now emanate from singers’ mouths that audiences are finding it difficult to make head or tail of their words. As a regular at the Coliseum for more than 25 years, I can corroborate this. Where I once had no difficulty understanding, today the sounds are so often unintelligible that the artists may as well be singing in Swedish.

The response of the artistic director of ENO, Séan Doran, is to introduce surtitles, so that audiences will be able to read the words the singers are trying to communicate.

It is almost impossible to think of a less apposite response. Against stiff competition, Mr Doran’s decision is a perfect example of our age’s warped intellectual values.

The problem is straightforward: the singers’ diction is poor. The solution is equally simple: return to the clarity of diction which was once taken as standard. The result: standards would rise, and everyone would be happy.

But no. Mr Doran appears to believe that the problem lies with the audience, which he clearly considers to be too stupid to understand sung English. And so, instead of returning to the basics — teaching singers to communicate in English once again — ENO has introduced a solution that can only exacerbate the problem.

Surtitles will make proper teaching even less necessary, since singers will be able to mumble away without worrying whether audiences understand them.

If it is not schools or universities dumbing down, it is opera companies. Woe.

The wisdom of The Wisdom of Crowds is revealed here, in Norm's poll of the greatest composers.

By wisdom, of course, I mean that the top three in the poll fits with my own verdict:

Beethoven, Mozart, J.S. Bach, Schubert, Chopin, Wagner, Mahler, Brahms, Haydn, Handel.

That said, it's surely a poll of popularity, not of greatness. Much as I would have the same top three, the idea that Chopin - for all his well-merited popularity - is somehow a greater composer than Wagner is surely bizarre.

UPDATE: I have been informed by a correspondent that

Whatever you mean by 'bizarre' (both, Chopin and Wagner, were composers of genius and it is a matter of personal taste to prefer one to another), Chopin, unlike Wagner, did not write hours of naff, pompous and even boring music.

I agree it is, on one level, a matter of taste. So I should explain what I mean by 'great'. Chopin was clearly a genius of a kind. His piano compositions are (almost) all masterpieces, and I would not dream of denigrating them. But whereas Chopin worked, however triumphantly, within the existing framework, Wagner - like Beethoven and Bach - transformed the framework in which he worked, pushing it to previously unimagined developments. (Mozart did not, but I still think he qualifies since his music was so perfect.)

But I have to say that anyone who thinks that Die Meistersinger is "hours of naff, pompous and even boring music" clearly has something wrong.

Martin Kettle had an interesting analysis in yesterday's Guardian of the decline of classical music:

Whatever happened to the composers? ...For around three centuries, operas poured from the pens of Italian composers and found lasting places in the repertoire. After Turandot, there has not been one in 80 years of which that could be said.

Maybe that is an extreme example. But answer this question: what is the most recently composed piece of classical music to have achieved a genuinely established place in the repertoire? I mean a piece that you can count on hearing in most major cities most years, and a performance of which is likely to bring in a large general audience. Shostakovich's first cello concerto, written in 1959, perhaps? Even that is stretching a point. A more truthful answer might be Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, composed 56 years ago in 1948.

...At some point in the past half-century, classical music lost touch with its public.

At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism. Modernism is a huge, varied and complex phenomenon, and it took on different qualities in different national cultures. But an essential feature, especially as Van der Merwe argues it, was to turn music decisively towards theory - often political theory - and away from its popular roots.

...The upshot was a deliberate renunciation of popularity. The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer's lack of communication but the public's lack of understanding.

Not surprisingly, the public looked elsewhere, to what we are right to call, and right to admire for being, popular music.

I'm just back from seeing Das Rheingold at the Royal Opera House. I've been looking forward to it for - literally - years, since I first heard that Bryn Terfel was to sing his first Wotan, and I was lucky enough to get hold of a ticket for a run which is entirely sold out.

It was, however, a monumental disappointment, some superb singing and orchestral playing marred - ruined, I'd say - by a puerile production which cheapened the musical side.

Things started promisingly, the opening scene with the Rhinemaidens cleverly lit to give the impression of the Rhine flowing across the stage, and the Rhinemaidens themselves walking and moving as if underwater. But apart from one coup de theatre, when Wotan's residence lifts off the stage to reveal Alberich's domain, the rest of the production was, at best, banal and at worst simply puerile.

Wotan himself was portrayed as a mildly annoyed middle manager, lacking any sense of grandeur. Given that he was sung by Bryn Terfel, a singer who simply has to stand on stage to reek of grandeur, this was quite some achievement. Fricka and Freia were annoying, simpering moaners, and Donner and Froh were dolled up like party magicians. (The one exception was Loge, whom Philip Langridge invested with genuine interest and character.) As for Alberich: simply dull. Quite how it's possible to make Alberich seem like a petulant bore is beyond me, but Keith Warner, a director plainly out of his depth, managed it.

Musically, it was much better, with some excellent singing from Terfel and Langridge, and competent (albeit uninspired) singing from everyone else. And it was well played by the orchestra, although it seemed to me that Pappano has a long way to go before he can be considered a front rank Wagner conductor. There was no thread to the performance, just a series of individual bars strung together.

The production conception, such as it was, seemed to be that Rheingold is a light comedy with some heavy music - just about the polar opposite in my view of the case.

I've also been going to the English National Opera's Ring, and although it has some real musical drawbacks - neither the singing nor the orchestra are in the same league as the ROH's - and the production is flawed, it is much, more interesting, and a far more worthwhile evening in the theatre. It's also a third of the price.

Oh dear.

I have been Kammed.

(Oliver is not the only person of taste and judgement to take exception to my piece on Mendelssohn. My mother emailed me to upbraid me. My views on Mendelssohn are, she tells me, 'disgraceful'. I am suitably chastened.)

If Tony Hatch, the composer of the theme music to Crossroads, Mr and Mrs and Neighbours, as well as a string of pop classics such as Downtown and Don’t Sleep in the Subway, wants to be celebrated as a musical genius, he need wait only another 34 years.

Tony Hatch was born in 1939, and so 2039 will mark the centenary of his birth. Of their type, his compositions are outstanding. He is regarded by his peers as the doyen of TV theme music writers. Whatever their merits, however, I doubt that even Mr Hatch would consider the introductory tunes to a hilariously inept soap opera, a cringe-making quiz and an Australian teen drama to be high art. Tony Hatch is a hack composer, albeit an extremely gifted master of his craft.

To judge, however, from some concerts to be performed this year, if he makes it through to his one hundredth birthday, Tony Hatch will be hailed as a musical icon, a genius of composition and an unfairly neglected master of that craft.

This year is the centenary of the birth of Michael Tippett and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Both were gifted composers, one British, one German. Both composed some pieces which repay repeated listening. But both also composed a string of pieces which had already outlived their worth on first hearing. None of that matters, however, since the simple fact of their centenary appears of itself to have attached an undue reverence to their name. Programme planners, devoid of imagination, have latched on to – as they do every year – this year’s anniversaries and themed entire seasons around their work, irrespective of the worth of their compositions.

It is unfashionable to make judgements about the relative – and absolute – merit of composers. (The same is, of course, also true of other artists). Plainly, almost all strive to give of their best. They can endure anguish as they go through the process of composition. Perhaps it is the simple generosity of the human spirit which prevents us writing off the result as barely worth bothering with, let alone dismissing the produce of an entire life as a waste of time.

But really, life is too short to have to hear for a second time the likes of Hartmann’s First String Quartet, ‘Carillon’, or any of his eight Symphonies. They are perfectly passable pieces of music, but have no greater artistic worth than Tony Hatch’s Don’t Sleep in the Subway – considerably less, I would argue, since unlike Mr Hatch’s compositions, they do not even come close to meeting the aspirations of their listeners (or even of their composer).

Their centenary does, however, give Hartmann and Tippett a claim on public attention this year, however spurious. What, though, can possibly explain the eleven concert festival beginning next month on the South Bank in London, ‘A Generous Spirit: Mendelssohn the Musician’?

One concert extends – I can barely write these next words without falling asleep – over an entire day, consisting of “leading Mendelssohn experts” who will be “exploring Mendelssohn, his family and social background and the breadth of his contribution to music”. I can’t wait. Mendelssohn did indeed make one valuable contribution – promoting someone else’s music. In 1829, he conducted a famous performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion (albeit in his own butchered version) which revived interest in the music of a real genius. But as for Mendelssohn’s own music: in the pantheon of the world’s most overrated artists, Felix Mendelssohn, the very archetype of the hack composer, stands at the summit.

As a precocious child, he composed his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; it was pretty much downhill all the way after that. The British have a particular affection for him because he travelled to Scotland and London and composed an Overture entitled The Hebrides. Dull and hackneyed it may be, but our nineteenth century musical wasteland meant that we were flattered by the attention he gave us and the piece has remained popular ever since.

Mendelssohn’s great achievement was to compose a series of middle brow pieces – above all, his Violin Concerto, his Octet and his oratorio, Elijah – which do precisely what compositions by the likes of Tony Hatch, Richard Carpenter and Burt Bacharach manage: give the listener an easy fix. All such pieces have their place. But when was the last time you heard about an eleven concert festival devoted to exploring the works of Burt Bacharach? The now 76 year old Mr Bacharach has a far more extensive oeuvre than Felix Mendelssohn, who died at 38. His pieces are more concise, more finely crafted and more complex than Mendelssohn’s hackwork.

The problem is not that there is anything wrong in the lack of a serious retrospective of either Tony Hatch or Burt Bacharach. Light music is light music, whatever the level of skill in its composition. The problem is that far more frivolous composers, with far less skill, are accorded unmerited stature by dint only of having lived a long time ago, or written in a genre – classical music – which lends itself to pretension and unmerited acclamation.

I've just discovered this classical music site, by the writer Jessica Duchen, via Brian Mickelthwait's culture site. Both are well worth a look.

If you have nothing better to do, you can hear me on the Today programme tomorrow morning at 8.20 debating with Nicholas Kenyon, the excellent director of the Proms, the bad behaviour - or otherwise - of the Proms' audience.

Or you could record it and play it back at night, as a D-I-Y insomnia cure.

This evening, Sir Simon Rattle brings the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to the Proms for their second concert this season. After they have played Messiaen’s Éclairs sur l’Au-delà there will, no doubt, be loud cheers. That is the norm when such a great orchestra and conductor perform.

That will not, however, be the only non-musical noise. Something else has also become the norm — kerfuffle. Not just after but during the performance. I have been to nearly a dozen Proms so far this year. Not one has been free from someone near me either chatting to her neighbour in the middle of a piece, conducting along and tapping his foot, or simply getting up to leave when the fancy took him, even in the pianissimo.

People in audiences today have been so indoctrinated with the idea that they must fulfil themselves and act on their desires, that they now behave as if their wants are all that matter. Feel like leaving? Then leave. That it might disturb three thousand other people is of no consequence.

I have been going to the Proms for more than 25 years. For 15 years, as a season-ticket holder, I would stand in the arena. I gave up because — contrary to myth — promenaders are among the most undiscriminating and noisy audiences anywhere. Sitting in the stalls, there was much less risk of encountering a couple snogging, a man unwrapping his foil-covered sardine sandwiches or a young woman reading a book and laughing at it at in the hushed silence of a Bruckner symphony — all of which happened around me in one concert.

It seems to me that audience behaviour has, however, reached a new low. There is now no escape. On Friday, for example, I had to turn to my neighbour and ask him not to wave his arms in the air pretending to conduct Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The job was already being done by Bernard Haitink; he did not appear to need the assistance of a man in the stalls. No sooner did that distraction cease than, in the middle of the slow movement, a couple barged past everyone on my row as they made their way out of the hall.

Perhaps the best response to such behaviour was from the pianist, Andras Schiff, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001. Confronted by ringing mobile phones and a man who seemed to be auditioning for a place on the Olympic coughing team, he got up after the slow movement, announced that he could not continue amid such cacophony and that he had no choice but to pause, and walked off the stage.

It is too much to hope that the culprits were shamed because the onward march of the ignorant gathers pace with every passing day. The cause of their misbehaviour is ignorance: ignorance of etiquette, ignorance of decent behaviour and ignorance of the purpose of live performance. I do not suppose that these people wilfully set out to disrupt others’ enjoyment. They simply do not understand that live performance is different from listening at home, and thus our behaviour must differ, too.

An audience may be composed of thousands of individuals but they come together to form something of a whole. Disruption of that whole cannot but break the spell of performance.

It is not just music which is ruined by these selfish ignoramuses. The theatre also suffers. At a performance of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage which I attended in the small Donmar Warehouse, a woman’s mobile rang repeatedly. One can perhaps forgive a single ring, when the perpetrator has forgotten to turn the phone off. But this seemed never to stop. I loathed the play; but the evening was worth it to witness the actresses, Anna Chancellor and Zoe Wanamaker, each give the culprit a stare so cold that I hope she still wakes in the night in a sweat.

This arrangement of Stairway To Heaven, in the styles of Schubert, Mahler, Beethoven, Glenn Miller et al, is somewhere close to inspired.

On Friday and Saturday, one of the world’s great conductors brought one of his orchestras to the Proms. The Latvian conductor, Maris Jansons, is one of the few living conductors whose name quickens the pulse. Jansons is incapable of dullness or routine. Even the most hackneyed pieces sound fresh under his baton. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is a cultured, refined orchestra. In combination with Jansons, who has recently become its principal conductor, it is resuming its place as one of the world’s best.

The label ‘world’s greatest’ is, however, less of an accolade than it used to be. It is, no doubt, the wont of every generation to look back at the past with an over-egged fondness and to be too damning of current standards. There are certainly wonderful conductors doing their thing today. But the musical titans – the Leonard Bernsteins, the Herbert von Karajans and the Carlos Kleibers - are no more. The age of the conductor who imposed his will on an orchestra, and woe betide any mere orchestral player who did not conform to the demands of the maestro, has disappeared. In its place are conductors who see themselves not as dictators but as primus inter pares.

Although it would be silly to argue that the quality of music making today is worse than it once was – technical standards are higher than ever, poor acoustics can be improved where before they were set in stone, and there are glorious performances available in concert halls across the world – something has certainly been lost: the indefinable quality which separates the first rate from the immortal.

Even revered contemporary conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Christoph von Dohnanyi are – to be blunt – little more than glorified time beaters, who are lauded for their ability to fuse an orchestra into one rather than for the extra spark which lifts music into the stratosphere. The Cleveland Orchestra, which von Dohnanyi used to conduct, was regarded with awe for the unity of its ensemble and the perfection of its pitch. Its performances, however, were so perfect that they were utterly soulless.

When the Argentinian conductor, Carlos Kleiber, died last month at the age of 74 it really did signal the end of an era. Quite apart from his bizarre behaviour – to describe Kleiber as eccentric would barely begin to describe a man who refused at any point in his career to commit himself to a future engagement and would sometimes simply turn up at an opera house and announce that he felt like conducting that night – Kleiber was the last representative of the line of conducting giants who dominated twentieth century music.

He was acknowledged by almost everyone as peerless. Mark Elder, the current principal conductor of the Halle Orchestra, described Kleiber as “head and shoulders above the rest of us, the best conductor in the world.” No one who heard him conduct will ever forget it. I was lucky enough to hear him conduct Verdi’s Otello. I can recall almost every phrase today, more than twenty years on. The opening few bars, when Verdi portrays the tempest which greets Otello’s arrival in Cyprus, were a raging torrent of sound which felt as if the earth was opening up and swallowing everything around me. I will never hear its like again.

Inspirational conductors have always been outnumbered by the workmanlike. Today, however, the flash Harrys of the musical world – the likes of Lorin Maazel, Seiji Ozawa and Zubin Mehta – are rewarded with jaw dropping fees as style triumphs over substance.

There are a few exceptions. Maris Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Sir Simon Rattle are all, above all, musical. They are indeed capable of transcendent performances. But there remains a nagging doubt even with today’s finest. Will their performances still be revered by future generations in the way that recordings made by the likes of Bernstein and, from a still earlier era, Toscanini and Furtwangler, are today?

I doubt it. I recently selected a few hundred from my thousands of CDs to put onto my iPod. It was only afterwards that I realised I’d chosen barely a single recording made after about 1980. If I had to have only one performance of a symphony, it would almost always be one now labelled ‘historic’. In a direct comparison with their predecessors, it is difficult to think of a single interpretation from a living conductor which ranks with one from the past.

Maybe I am simply falling into the usual trap of taking today’s artists for granted. Composers who were dismissed by their contemporaries as hacks – Janacek, for example – were only recognised for their genius by later generations. So perhaps when I hear the Mahler and Beethoven interpretations of the latest conducting stars in the 2030, I will moan that they aren’t a patch on the Rattles and Jansons.

A little while ago, I achieved a lifetime ambition. Not only did I conduct a full-size symphony orchestra; we performed Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, in my view the greatest symphony ever written. And not only was there an audience; it even clapped.

I say "we," because I considered that we were, for the piece's 50 minutes, a collective entity. The sum of our individual parts was far, far greater than anything we could individually have achieved. And equally, if any of us had made a mistake, it would have affected the others, too. I may only have been waving my arms around, but if I'd waved them at the wrong time or in the wrong place then the result would have been chaos.

What never crossed my mind, however, was that because I was the only one of us who was busy throughout the piece, I should have been paid more than the horn players, who were only needed sporadically, or even the strings, which had moments when they were silent. I am not, after all, a "name" conductor. No one has ever paid money to hear me conduct: they come for the piece. The same goes for orchestra: No one has ever paid to hear a specific member of an orchestra play. They come to hear the orchestra as a whole.

In the view of 16 violinists in the Bonn-based Beethovenorchester, however, I should indeed have taken the biggest share of the money. They have decided to sue their management for a pay increase on the grounds that they play more music than the brass, the woodwinds and the percussion. The violinists argue -- the case goes to court next month -- that they should be paid an extra €100, or about $121, for each rehearsal or performance.

The orchestra's deputy director, Michael Horn, told Agence France-Presse that the violinists "feel disadvantaged because, depending on the compositions being performed, they are required to play more than wind players." And they are, they say, being generous in their demand. As reported on a BBC Web site, one violinist said: "We could have calculated the surcharge per semi-quaver, but we chose to take an easier course." Sometimes, in other words, the brass get a movement or two off -- so the strings should be paid more.

There's only one word for the idea: ridiculous. Last week I heard the Amsterdam Concertgebouw perform Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. I haven't added up the number of notes played by each section of the orchestra, but it's safe to assume that the violins had, as they almost always do, the most to play. But the measure of a great performance of Bruckner's Ninth -- the same goes for all of the Austrian composer's symphonies -- is the brass. The strings provide a foundation over which the brass soar. If one of the violinists makes a mistake, it barely matters: It will be hidden by sound coming from the rest of the strings. But if a brass player makes just one, tiny mistake, it will ruin an entire passage. The word musicians use is "exposed." They all were, however, perfect. When the conductor, Bernard Haitink, beckoned them to take a bow after the performance, the audience rose as one to acclaim them.

If the Beethovenorchester's violinists had their way, the brass players would have been given a sandwich and a cup of coffee as a thank you and been grateful for it. The violinists would have scooped up their payment in gold bullion and returned to their mansions to be waited on hand and foot and fed peeled grapes. They had, after all, played the most notes.

I heard the downside of what it means to be exposed a few days ago when the English National Opera performed "The Rheingold," the first part of Wagner's Ring Cycle. The introduction is -- should be -- one of the most delicate, haunting, evocative passages in all music, depicting the flow of the Rhine itself. Listening, one should be transported out of the opera house and into a different world. Unfortunately, however, the ENO's brass is far from top of the range, and the first few bars were marred by a series of split notes. The Rhine it was not. Working on the logic of the violinists from Bonn, perhaps the brass players responsible should have their pay docked.

I have to confess never to having heard the Beethovenorchester perform, but I do have one observation that the dissident fiddlers might care to ponder. Their orchestra is not -- how to put this politely -- one of the world's leading bands. It's not even one of Germany's. Indeed, there are some who would argue it's not Bonn's. If I were a violinist in the orchestra, I'd think long and hard before demanding that my performance be measured before I am paid. And I might find the orchestra manager asking me, "If you are so great, why aren't you playing in the Berliner Philharmoniker?"

The opera world is in turmoil. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden has committed a terrible crime-one that so offends against operatic received wisdom that opera critics across the planet may never be able to bring themselves to forgive it, or to cross Covent Garden's portals again. It has fired a singer because she is too fat.

Deborah Voigt, who is thought to weigh some 220 pounds, has one of the most impressive dramatic soprano voices around. She was due to display it at the Royal Opera House this summer in a production of Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos." Unfortunately, however, she would have had to display far more than just her voice: The production requires her to wear a slinky little black dress. In Ms. Voigt's case, the word "little" was something of a problem, and the director decided that the mise en scène could not survive such a sight.

Cue uproar! On and on it has gone, as the Royal Opera House has been subjected to a barrage of verbal assaults from the arbiters of operatic taste, who have condemned her dismissal as the ultimate triumph of style over substance. There is, we are told, only one thing which really matters: the quality of a singer's voice. The rest is superficial, a blight of the modern obsession with looks and image. As the New York Times' critic, Anthony Tommasini, put it yesterday, "The Royal Opera would seem to have forgotten the most basic truth of the genre. Yes, opera is a form of drama. But drama in opera has never been dependent on literal reality."

Indeed not. But when so many of its most passionate supporters (of which I am one) live in an alternate universe, refusing to recognise how weird is their sense of aesthetics, then it's little wonder that opera is, if not a dead, then at the very least a dying art form.

A couple of years ago I saw Pavarotti's last performance at Covent Garden, as Cavaradossi in Tosca, the role he has returned to this week for his farewell appearance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. To describe his London performance as embarrassing is not even to come close to reporting the cringing which seized the audience.

His voice remains remarkable, given that he is nearly 70. And yes, it was a great pleasure to hear him sing music at which he excels. But to watch? As the Metropolitan's audience are seeing, so fat and immobile is he now that, to prepare for his final moments, when his character is shot by soldiers, he laboriously manoeuvred himself in front of a large pile of soft pillows, which just happened to be next to him at the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo-well, they would, wouldn't they?

After being shot to death, he carefully bent down and lay on the pillows, rather as if he was preparing for a gentle nap. Literal reality it was not. I do not exaggerate when I say that the sound of laughter from the audience almost drowned out the music. If he had sung the role in a concert performance, the voice would - quite rightly - have been all that mattered. Onstage, it was a tawdry, grotesque, awkward evening, which served neither the composer, the music, the singer nor the audience.

Indeed, the very role from which Ms Voigt has been fired, Ariadne, was performed two decades ago at Covent Garden by Jessye Norman at the height of her powers. Ms Norman is also a large lady. So large that when she came to embrace her fellow performer, Kathleen Battle, Battle disappeared from view under Norman's flowing robes. The image remains my lasting memory from the evening, rather than the quality of her singing.

When Ms Voigt performs Sieglinde in Wagner's "Walkure" at the Met later this month, she will no doubt triumph, musically and theatrically. Neither the role nor the production require her to look one way or another. But sometimes-as in the Royal Opera's production of "Ariadne"-they do. It's as simple as that. If that means there is an even scarcer pool of talent on which to draw, so be it. Singers such as Renee Fleming, Karita Mattila and Angela Gheorghiu show that it is possible to both look and sound sensational.

The whole point of opera is that it is a theatrical experience. Yes, it is possible that Mimi, the consumptive heroine of "La Boheme," could be sung sensationally by a soprano who looks as if she once competed as an East German shot putter. If you close your eyes, it can work. But opera is about sight as well as sound, and it's time that those critics who think that producers and directors are parasites on the otherwise pure operatic body learn that both hearing and seeing matter.

There's a fascinating interview with the great Bernard Haitink in today's Guardian.

Haitink has a wonderful ability to cut to the heart of a piece of music, avoiding imposed emotion or anything which is not drawn from the score itself. You know when you hear Haitink that you will get, above all else, an honest performance.

Here's an interesting interview with the world's greatest living conductor, Mariss Jansons.

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.

Well, the second part of my Viennese cultural extravagaza showed the other side of Vienna.

I saw Tosca at the Staatsoper, in what was a decidedly average performance of Puccini’s shabby little shocker (to use Joseph Kerman’s marvellous phrase).

When I say average, I mean it. It wasn’t bad – with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, it could never be that bad – but it wasn’t much good, either.

Desperately ham acting, pretty low rent voices and – perhaps worst of all – a really, really awful audience.

So in awe was I of the sound of the VPO in the Musikverein that I let pass the dreadful behaviour of the audience. I had a pretty good idea what we were in for when I saw them traipse in to the hall – a mix of those whose political views I cast aspersions on in the post below, kitted out in their finest echt-Austrian dress, what looked like Prussian Junkers and their wives, and the odd – yes, in this context very odd – person under seventy.

Sure enough, they chattered, they coughed and – really – they stood up and moved around. Not before the performance, or after it. Oh no. During it.

I’ve written some strong words before about the behaviour of British audiences. I stand corrected. We may have our fair share of poor behaviour, but I’ve never seen anything to compare with this.

Well, actually, I have: the audience at the Staatsoper which was exactly the same in its composition and behaviour. The difference was that the VPO performance was so spellbinding that I managed to let the audience wash over me.

My conclusion: Vienna may be cultural heaven in a lot of ways, but we shouldn’t be cowed by a British version of what (I think) Clive James has referred to in an Australian context as ‘cultural cringe’. I’ve been to many average performances at the Royal Opera House, and that average standard is decidedly higher than at the Staatsoper, which has the ambience of a house – and audience - stranded in the mid 1950s.

Even the Vienna Philharmonic, about which I raved in the post below, is to a large measure simply the beneficiary of its astonishingly wonderful hall, the Musikverein. Such a hall would never be built today – way too small, and far too basic – and so we’re stuck with, at best, a hall like Symphony Hall in Birmingham, which certainly represents the very best in ‘modern’ acoustics (but without even a smidgeon of the Musikverein’s warmth) and, at worst, the Royal Festival Hall and Barbican. (I exempt the Wigmore Hall, my favourite hall in the world – and better than anything in Vienna, the Musikverein included – because it is solely a chamber music and recital venue).

I was castigated by a friend the other day. I have a large CD collection – nearly 3000 – of which fewer than a hundred are anything other than classical music: some jazz, some 1960s pop, and some embarrassing presents which I have to keep on my shelves lest their absence be noted by their donors.

It showed, I was told, that I am far too narrow in my tastes. I should open my ears to the wonders of…well, I forget which popular beat combination he suggested I try. As far as I’m concerned, you see, they are almost all a waste of time. I would rather listen to the cacophony of an orchestra tuning up than to the finished efforts of almost every pop, rock, soul, call it what you will, ‘musician’. Some – the Beach Boys or the Beatles, for instance - are perfectly fine as background music, but the idea that any otherwise intelligent person would choose to sit down and listen to them while doing nothing else, or even go out of their way to hear them perform live, strikes me as truly bizarre.

And that, it seems, brands me not just as a cultural snob but as an especially ignorant one at that.

Fine. If that’s what my passion for classical music, and my inability to see merit in rock music, means; fine. My unwillingness to fill up my shelves with CDs of men and women shouting to make themselves heard on top of the noise from their drums, electric guitars and shuddering bass – or, worst of all, the worthless noise known as rap – affects no one except myself. And I’m perfectly happy, thanks.

But as I was watching this weekend’s Leeds Piano Competition (broadcast live on BBC4 and Radio 3), I realised that my response isn’t really good enough. There has to be something more than ‘I like that and I don’t like that’.

Out of the six finalists, each of whom played a piano concerto with the Halle Orchestra in Leeds Town Hall, it was clear to me – and, given the result, also to the jury – that there were two competitors who were head and shoulders above the others: the Finn, Antti Sirala, and the competitor from Uzbekistan, Evgenia Rubinova. The former had won three other competitions, and his performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was indeed excellent: note perfect, classically styled, and fully in command of the musical argument. But Rubinova’s account the previous night of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was all that - and a lot more. It had something to say. It was of the moment - a real performance, which took off and left everything else behind. It took risks.

The result, of course, was the wrong way round. The Finn won. It was no wonder he added Leeds to his three previous competition victories. His playing was the sort of note perfect, scrupulous playing which juries love: the safe rather than the risky. There was nothing wrong with his playing; but that was its biggest fault. It lacked what Rubinova’s performance had: the spark engendered by real personality and real musical imagination.

I know that the jury are wrong and I am right. I assert it as a fact rather than as a mere opinion. And that, surely, is cousin to my assertion that Beethoven is a genius and REM, and their fellow rock bands, a waste of time. Both assertions are statements of artistic merit, ranking performers and composers on a continuum from the worthless to the genius.

We’ve been here before. Christopher Ricks came at it from the opposite perspective in the 1970s, arguing that Bob Dylan’s lyrics were great poetry. A couple of years ago he argued that Dylan’s song Not Dark Yet ranked alongside Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Others have made similar comparisons, such as Eric Griffiths’ consideration of Talking Heads alongside William Empson in his Cambridge lectures during the late 1980s.

I look at what they say, at their specific, detailed, academic attempts to equate the two, and my reaction is simply to laugh. To me, it’s self-evidently preposterous – about as convincing as arguing that a finger beating time on a desk is as musically rich an experience as an Angela Hewitt performance of a Bach Partita.

But not to others. To them, a Bach Passion is an interminable drone, a Bruckner symphony an hour long yawn. Does that mean they have a point – that the appreciation of all art is only subjective, and that there is no such thing as a scale of excellence?

Of course not. Unless you really do believe that the finger tapping on the desk is as good as the Bach Partita – or even as good as the Bob Dylan song – then you believe in a scale of excellence. And once you acknowledge that, then there is only one conclusion. A is better than B who is better than C. And if you are trying to tell me that Dylan is better than Bach, then I suggest you lock yourself in a dark room and wait for the fairies to rescue you. Bach elevates, transports, is capable of constant re-interpretation, speaks to generation after generation, and is a composer of near inconceivable perfection; relative to Bach (and, to my ears, in absolute terms, too) Dylan is an unpleasant groaning noise. Turner, Titian or Tintoretto do the same; Tracey Emin can’t even make her bed.

And if you disagree with me? You’re wrong. That, at any rate, is what my friend says to me.

The Proms, which started on Friday, are every bit as good as the hype would have it. By far the most varied and consistently high-class music festival in the world, they are in almost every respect a model of British cultural life.

In almost every respect. There is, however, one big problem with the Proms: the Prommers. Somehow the myth has taken hold that the people who pay £4 to stand in the arena - the area that would normally have stalls seats, which is handed over to the Promenaders for the duration of the Proms - are the greatest audience on the planet.

Nothing would, of course, suit the prevailing ethos of our time - access - better than those Prommers being the ideal mix of decorum, good taste and calm enthusiasm. It is an article of the arts establishment's faith, after all, that it is the people in the cheap seats who are the real fans, showing up the more expensively-seated philistines who snooze through Ein Heldenleben until it is time for a G&T in the interval.

Talk about the wish being father to the thought! There is no other audience quite so noisy, fidgety, intolerant, smelly and plain bloody awful as the Promenaders. I know how bad they are because I used to be one of them. I started when I was a student and for more than a decade I put up with their din, their restless twitching, their inanity, their cliquiness and, perhaps worst of all, their appalling personal hygiene. I did it because of the astonishing value of a £4 entrance fee. And if the Albert Hall audience was so awful, well, that was the price to be paid for obtaining such a fabulous musical education.

As I got older, work commitments meant that I was not getting good enough value from my season ticket and so I decided to buy normal tickets - seats, that is - for the half a dozen or so Proms that I could get to. And guess what? I discovered that it is possible to listen to a Prom without being surrounded by chatter, without having to put up with couples, oblivious to their surroundings, eating each others' cheeks, without having to hear crisp packets being opened during the softest pianissimo, without having to watch your neighbour pick her nose during the slow movement and without having to ration your in-breaths to avoid being asphyxiated by body odour.

The mythology is all wrong. The Prommers may seem a wonderful, romantic ideal of an arts audience. But they are not. It is the Prommers who talk to each other in the middle of the St Matthew Passion, and the boring people in the seats who listen attentively. It is the Prommers who lie flat on the floor and fall asleep and the seated enthusiasts who hang on the orchestra's every note.

The real problem about the Promenaders is that they are not there for the music, but to be part of a rather sad club that meets nightly at 7.30 and is defined by a series of inane rituals. So the highlight of their evening is not Martha Argerich playing Ravel, but the chance to chant "heave" when the piano is shifted onto the stage, or their asinine mock applause when the orchestra leader plays a note on the piano for the orchestra to tune up to.

I have always wondered what they do between October and June when there are no Proms to go to. Stay at home, I hope, for the rest of our sakes.

So who would you say are the three greatest composers of all time? Bach, certainly. Mozart, of course. And no such list would be complete without Klass.

You?ve never heard of Klass? What kind of philistine are you? You must, surely, have come across some of her many wonderful contributions: Angel In My Heart, You?re All I Need To Get By and Back Down To Zero, to take just three from Klass's oeuvre. Who needs the St Matthew Passion when you can have Straight From The Heart?

Myleene Klass is a 25-year-old musician and composer who is, in the words of Bill Holland, the managing director of Universal Classics, ?one of the greatest talents I?ve ever heard?. So great is her talent that Ms Klass has just signed a £1 million, six- album ?mega deal? with Universal.

She was also a singer with Hear'say, a pop group established by Popstars, one of a spate of indistinguishable TV programmes in which youngsters are invited to sing their way to stardom. And she is also, to use the technical term, ?fit?; Ms Klass looks very fetching in a T-shirt.

She is a pop singer. And, according to friends who are familiar with her works, a pretty average one at that. She has, however, a mission: ?to eradicate the barriers between pop and classical music?. To that end, her first classical album will comprise pieces by Bach, Mozart and that other titan, Ms Klass herself.

To be fair, I have never heard what we might call her Klassical pieces. It could be that she is indeed a major talent who just happens to look like a model and who found fame in a pop group by mistake. And she did study at the Royal Academy of Music.

Or it could just be that she is a pawn in a patronising exercise in ripping off the public, an averagely talented musician who has stumbled into a million-pound deal because she will look good on album covers. But her work is as likely to have as much in common with classical music as Jeffrey Archer's has with Dostoevsky's.

Mr Holland's claim ? that she will ?eradicate the barriers? ? is the worst kind of cynicism, a typically foul piece of marketing that patronises the listener as it claims to elevate him. It pretends to be ?inclusive? (to use the jargon de nos jours), but is in reality designed simply to give easy listening pap a false veneer of sophistication. It's tried and tested, and sells: the likes of Charlotte Church, Richard Clayderman, Russell Watson and Vanessa Mae have been covering this ground for years. The string quartet, Bond, is the latest addition. But they are no more classical musicians than were the Spice Girls, and no less the creations of the marketing men than Posh, Sporty and Scary.

People buy their pap for no other reason than they bought Klass the pop star: because it gives them instant gratification.

The idea of breaking down the barriers between Bach, Mozart and other classical composers, and Oasis, Hear'say, Jennifer Lopez and other pop stars is preposterous for one simple reason: the latter are all, relative to the former, trash. They may succeed in what they set out to do; but they are mere musical McDonalds, compared with Gordon Ramsay dinners.

You can?t ?eradicate the barriers? between pop and classical: one is designed to last and requires thought and involvement from the listener while the other is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator and is, to use the correct musicological term, crap.

My Indie piece a couple of weeks ago on terrible behaviour in the concert hall prompted a flood of e mails. Almost all contained examples of similarly awful behaviour. Here are some of my favourite examples:

"There may well be a generalisation of annoying behaviour at concerts that is new. However, I can recall a couple of incidents from 1960s Edinburgh Festivals that were pretty intrusive, although shorter than those you endured.
The first was at during a performance of the Schubert Octet. The slow movement had just begun when the audience was startled by the slamming of the Assembly Hall door. A grand dame made her entry, progressing to the front row, clacking her heels all the way. After much bustling about seating herself, she took out her spectacles and shut the case with a snap audible all over the hall that made the bassoonist start
perceptibly.
Then there was the man in the audience who co-conducted amicably enough through first movement of a Sibelius symphony at the Usher Hall. However, during the second movement he began to lean over the balcony, shaking his fist and screaming "Faster, faster, you swine!" at the principal conductor. At that point Security removed him."

"I am still fuming at what happened to me on Saturday night at the balletÖMy husband and I were seated in the front row of the balcony in front of which is a wide wooden polished rail. To the right of us were 2 seats initially empty, but sadly not for long. Beyond those seats the row ended and you looked across the middle of the concert hall to the other side, the stalls being below. You probably get the picture. Two quite large ladies in voluminous attire, probably in their early forties, arrived to take up these seats. No problem, until one of them, fortunately the one on the far side, shook off her sandals and placed her plump, plainly dirty and certainly extremely smelly feet on the rail and left them there for the remainder of the performance. I suppose I should have been grateful that this person wasn't sitting directly behind me or else I would have had afore mentioned porkies poked next to my ears. At any event it was extremely difficult to concentrate on the ballet. It was one of those memorable nights, but for quite the wrong reason."

"As I read your article on the Offensive-Morons I couldn't help but think
that I too have encountered many branches of that family. As a regular attendee at the Barbican I have often had the displeasure to sit next to their cousin Mr Pretentious who likes to show off his musical knowledge by following the score, something he fails to do quietly. This fellow is not always as bright as he likes you to think as I have occasionally noticed that he is in totally the wrong place.
This horrible family are not confined to the concert hall; they spoil the
theatre as well. I could write a book as long as War & Peace relating tale of their inconsiderate relations. There is the German student branch who thought that because they could speak little or no English that gave them the right to talk during a performance of Richard II. Then there are the family friends who came along to watch Little Johnny's playmate in the chorus of Oliver. I don't think they even knew what the musical was about as they spoilt the evening for everyone in the vicinity with their cries of "there he is!". My heart went out to Nancy as she was giving it her all with "As Long As He Needs Me" for all we could hear above her magnificent effort was Little Johnny & his siblings slurping their drinks & crunching their crisps.
Another offshoot of the Offensive-Moron family is the member whose companion is so thick that she needs the plot explaining to her every few seconds. This particular O-M is usually a male who has taken out an educationally challenged female in the hope of impressing her with his intellect but has bought tickets for something far above her level of understanding; she would have trouble deciphering Teletubbies & thinks that opera is an American chat show host.
I must not forget the geriatric branch of the Offensive-Morons. One old dear brought the second half of a play at the National to a halt when she had trouble with her hearing aid. She may have been deaf but the actors & the rest of the audience heard her loud & clear. She has an assortment of brothers & sisters who think it their duty to pass comment on the action of a play in the most inappropriate moments & have even been known to sing along, bad enough if this is a musical but even more annoying in a serious play.
It also seems a shame that people do not make an effort when going out any more; yes I agree that the concept of black tie was stifling but now we are surrounded by theatre-goers who look like they have just come from the garden centre. I am also perplexed by the need to consume vast quantities of food when in the theatre or concert hall; why the need for a big box of chocolates to accompany a play. I stopped going to the cinema may years ago because I couldn't bear to be surrounded by an audience who were munching on popcorn & discussing all their friends love lives.
I remember attending a concert at the Barbican a few years ago; the London Symphony Orchestra were performing to their usual brilliant standard but I was aware of someone humming along to the music. It took me a while to realise that it was none other that the conductor for that evening Sir Colin Davis!"

"I agree with you, but where I live in the US, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, my most frequent cultural activity, since there are few concerts, is movie going. There is an art in the theater I like the best, which is only open in the summer, to finding a quiet seat. This theater is a work of art with a huge mural (if you can call it that) by Rockwell Kent of mystical figures in a dance of love that stretches from end to end and across the curved ceiling of the theater, descending right to eye level on the walls. It was the theater where The Wizard of Oz debuted. But you would think people were watching TV when they go to the films there, which are mostly a mix of foreign and low budget American films. Not only is popcorn crunched throughout the film, but people just talk. Did you see that? or they get into arguments about what is going on. No, he didn't do that, what he did is.... So you have to find a seat with an aisle to the exit behind it, up front because most of the talkers sit in the middle. In any case, you must be prepared to do what I did three times this summer, stand up, walk over to an arguing couple and whisper through teeth clenched in anger and frustration: You are not at home watching a tape on your VCR. You are in a theater with other people. Would you please be quiet. At least when I do, there are a few moments of shocked silence, and I feel better.
Annoying mother and daughter at a showing of Wallace And Grommit at the Roxie, a San Francisco rep theatre. The staff threw them out. Daughter was put up to write a letter to the paper about how this never happened back home in Israel, among other absurd charges. Many other letters followed from regular punters telling the annoying mother and daughter exactly where to go."

"Spot on!! It is no better on this side of the pond. I go at least twice a month (symphony, opera, chamber music) and it is very, very rare when someone around me is not being a complete and total distraction. The worse time was the adult (40's) couple sitting in the $70 seats carrying on a loud, giggly, slurping romance during Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting his own Concerto for Orchestra; or perhaps it was the 20ish woman sitting 2 feet away from me at Handel's Ariodante who absolutely could not sit still for 5 seconds, culminating in her standing and walking the aisle, repeatedly."

"I recently attended a performance of All my Sons by Arthur Miller in Exeter. It is a set text for A level, and the evening was ruined by a coach party of 17 year olds on their first ever theatre visit. They took page after page of notes throughout the performance ripping out sheets of paper at regular intervals - it was gruesome.
When I complained to the teachers I was abused, as they felt that as they
needed to pass the A level, they should work through their list of questions during the performance.

According to the reviews, the performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony that I went to last week was "transcendent", "emotionally perfect" and "violently good". A friend called me the following morning and told me that it was one of the most powerful experiences of her life. I wouldn't know. My body was in the concert hall, and my ears are in full working order. But neither were any use to me. The London Symphony Orchestra might as well have been playing "Chopsticks" for all the impact the Mahler had on me. Sitting in the row in front of me, you see, was the family from hell. I don't know their names, but let's call them the Offensive-Morons.
The parents - I assume they were the parents rather than brazen child molesters - spent the entire time stroking and kissing their kids, mock conducting, stretching out their arms across the back of their seats as if they were on the sofa at home and, just for good measure, bobbing their heads up and down in time with the music.
They were cocooned in their own world, with not the slightest concern for anyone around. I doubt that it even crossed their mind that they were doing anything wrong, so unabashed was their behaviour.
Oh yes, I should also have mentioned that Mr Offensive-Moron also seemed to think that the finest expression of his love for his children was to whisper in their ears as the concert wore on and the poor little mites - they were about 10 years old - got bored. When they started getting restless, he didn't whisper to them to sit still, but smiled at them and blew them kisses.
I attempted the tried and tested method of shutting up an annoying neighbour: a well aimed kick in the back of the seat. Nothing. A killer combination of the family's total self-absorption, and the Barbican seat's wooden solidity, meant that the only effect was a painful toe. And Mrs Offensive-Moron made herself fully at home when the mood took her during the quieter passages, snuggling up to her husband and blowing him kisses.
This particular family may have been especially horrific, but they are merely grotesque extensions of the downside of the increasing accessibility of culture. The old formal rules of behaviour at the theatre, concerts and opera - dressing up in black tie and all that, and the feeling that unless you were part of a closed circle then it wasn't your lot to attend - were indeed far too stifling.
The laissez-faire attitude of today may have opened up cultural institutions to millions, but there is a downside. Today, you come as you please, and behave as you please. It's your right. If you want to flick through your programme, fine. If you want to use your programme as a fan - a particular favourite during the summer Proms in the Royal Albert Hall - fine. If you want to cough, fine.
If you want to unwrap sweets, fine. If you want to fidget, fine. If you want to wander off to the loo, fine. If you want to chat, fine. And if you believe some of the stories - I have to confess this is not something I have (yet) witnessed myself - then if you want to have sex, fine. When going out is as easy, and as normal, as staying in, then we behave the same in the theatre, or the concert hall, as we do in the living room. And so we don't have a thought for those around us.
But we are not at home. The very point of the theatre is to be out of the house, and part of a crowd. And being part of a crowd has obligations - not shouting "fire" for devilment, for example, in a crowded room. When I go to White Hart Lane I do not want to hear someone near me shout "come on Arsenal". I behave as is expected of me.
The root of the problem is that we have moved too far from the oppressive rules of old in the other direction. Culture is now too readily accessible. We don't need to make an effort with it.
You wanna hear Beethoven's Ninth? Pop on a CD. Fancy the St Matthew Passion? Which version?
We have forgotten - or, more truthfully, never learned - how to listen. When the St Matthew Passion was written it was heard at Easter, once every very few years. A performance was an event, an event which we had no way of even attempting to recreate. Today, we can record the performance and then listen to it in the bath. We can have its choruses playing as background music while we eat.
When was the last time you sat down in your own home to listen to a full performance of a piece of music, with no other distractions? When, in fact, was the last time you spent an hour focused on any one thing, and that one thing alone?
It's hardly surprising that we take that behaviour, and that attitude, into the concert hall with us. Mr and Mrs Offensive-Moron, and the little Offensive-Morons, might indeed have ruined my concert last week, but one thing is for sure: they are going to ruin quite a few others as they get older.

There are three types of international conductors: hacks, who stand in front of an orchestra and beat time; real musicians, who inspire orchestras to produce performances which lift the notes off the page; and Sir Simon Rattle.
On 7th September Rattle lifted his baton to inaugurate one of the most eagerly awaited partnerships in music history when he conducted his first concert as Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Rolls Royce of world orchestras. There was never any doubt that the concert (which is being shown on BBC2 on 21st September) would be a triumph: the combination of Rattle and the BPO has always seemed like a dream team, long before it became a reality when he when he was elected to the post three years ago by the orchestra"s musicians. Cynicism is the default option of the modern world, but Rattle is one of the few contemporary figures who disarms cynicism in an instant.
Last week"s concert had two works: Asyla, by the young British composer, Thomas Ades; and Mahler"s Fifth Symphony. Beginning his tenure with Asyla was a neat piece of programming, as it was the final piece he conducted as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony, the orchestra with whom he earned the reputation which led to his Berlin appointment. Mahler"s Fifth, however, is typical BPO fare; typical in the sense that the orchestra has played it so often they must know it by heart. Yet nothing Rattle ever does is typical. As the conductor John Carewe, Rattle"s teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and still his mentor, put it after the applause had died down last week: "Tonight we heard the first authentic performance of this symphony. We were brought up on Bruno Walter"s recording with the New York Philharmonic, but Walter could never have dreamed of a performance like that. It has taken 100 years to come this far". If you think that is simply the hype of a teacher talking about his star pupil, you could not be more wrong. As one of the orchestra members put it: "I have never worked so hard since Bernstein".
Superlatives and Rattle tend to go together. In a profession, however, where hype is the norm, Rattle lives up to every word. Teenage wunderkinds are ten-a-penny; on the strength of one decent performance, a young conductor can be hailed as the new Karajan. But at the same time, musicians are perhaps the most difficult of all professions to impress. Orpheus himself would today be dismissed as having "too dated a sound". Sir Simon Rattle is an exception. It is difficult to find a musician with a bad word to say about him. When he took over the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1980 at the absurdly young age of 25, it was a decent, staid provincial orchestra, going nowhere. By the time he gave up his directorship in 1998, the CBSO was a world class orchestra, regularly wooing jaded critics and audiences in the world"s toughest venues: Vienna, New York and London.
In Berlin he is charged not merely with forming an orchestral partnership which most aficionados are already convinced will rank with the all-time greats, but with re-inventing the very notion of the symphony orchestra, taking one of the world"s greatest orchestras and charting it into waters it never knew existed.
Rattle is in many ways a throwback to another generation. The "golden age", especially in music, is an ever present commentary on the paucity of modern day greats. The pre-war generation of Willhem Furtwangler, Bruno Walter and Eric Kleiber had natural and obvious successors, the likes of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Carlo Maria Giulini. But even the cream of the next generation - the Abbados, the Dohnanyis and the Masurs - lacked that final spark which propelled them into the musical stratosphere. For years it seemed we were condemned to live in an age where an ability to beat time properly was the best we could hope for.
That fear seems bizarre today. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Maris Jansons and, from the next generation, Christian Theilemann stand comparison with the best in history. Indeed, even a conductor such as Sir Colin Davis, who for years was taken for granted here in his home country, is now getting the recognition he deserves as one of the most transcendent musicians on the planet.
Yet even in such exalted company, Sir Simon Rattle somehow stands apart. For one thing, most conductors - even the true greats - specialize in one, maybe two, areas of the repertory. Rattle appears to have no limitations; whether it is baroque, classical or modern (he has even recorded Duke Ellington), he is utterly at ease, and equally outstanding. His very different musical self-education is in large measure responsible for his musical sweep. Most conductors begin with the classics - Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, perhaps Bach - and gradually move into later pieces - Mahler, and other twentieth century greats such as Bartok and Shostakovich. Rattle has developed in precisely the opposite way. As a precocious schoolboy he put together scratch performances of Mahler and learned first of all to love twentieth century music. As a young conductor he moved backwards, only very gradually gaining his confidence in the classical repertory of Mozart and Beethoven as time, and performances, went on. His first Beethoven symphony recording was, incredibly for a man of Rattle"s stature, only released last summer (with the Vienna Philharmonic - not a bad orchestra with which to begin). Yet it is precisely that sort of behaviour which is the measure of the man. He will not be rushed. For the past decade he has turned down lucrative positions with some of the world"s best orchestras because he felt he had more to achieve in Birmingham, and plenty of time left in which to do it. American orchestras offered him sums for which most other conductors would not dare ask. He would not have been taking the money and running: they all had outstanding artistic possibilities. Yet still he said no. His record company, EMI, have long wanted a Rattle Beethoven cycle for their catalogue; he refused until he had something to say about the symphonies.
But he also stands apart in another respect: whilst he is not the only conductor to work with both "authentic" and traditional orchestras, none other synthesizes the styles so well. Rattle"s ongoing work with the authentic instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is more often than not sensational ("more often than not" being the operative phrase; in June he conducted the OAE in a performance of the St John Passion at the Queen Elizabeth Hall which was not so much disappointing as shocking - a poor Rattle concert is such a rare occurrence). Rattle"s gift is to bring the best of both worlds together -bringing to the refreshing, crisp, bracing sound world of authentic orchestras the benefits of a proper interpretation, rather than the glorified run through of the score which is the usual fare of the authentic brigade. His first experience of authentic instruments was a concert performance of Mozart"s Idomeneo in 1987. Those who were there remember it to this day, as one of the most sensational experiences of their musical lives, a revelatory experience which opened up previously unrealized musical and interpretative possibilities of such instruments. A recent Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, also with the OAE, is similarly eulogised.
Classical music audiences outside London (and often within, too) are famously conservative: anything after Mahler is considered far too modern for a hearing. Rattle set about building programmes which balanced the old and the new and mixed warhorses with rarities. He introduced living composers such as Nicholas Maw and Mark-Anthony Turnage, and showed the audience that they did not to be afraid of listening. He quite literally changed the musical tastes of a city. His Sounding the Millennium project, performing works composed in the 1900s in 1990, in the 1910s in 1991, in the 1920s in 1992 and so on, was the archetypal Rattle concert series: bold, tough - and popular. He has left Birmingham with a legacy which will outlast him for many years: a world class orchestra, possibly the finest new concert hall in the world (built almost single handedly by his force of will), and an audience willing to take risks, a precious commodity for any orchestra.
His impact goes well beyond the concert hall. When Rattle speaks, others listen. Last month he gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Zeit, in which he attacked British attitudes to culture and dismissed modern British art as "bullshit". Germany, he said, was willing to spend money on the arts in a way that Britain never could. He also dismissed the "anything goes" attitude of British so-called post-modernism: "That is the problem with Brit Art, with artists like Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and the others. I believe that much of this English, very biographically-oriented art is bullshit." Dinos Chapman, one of the more talentless of a generally talentless group, responded with a remark which revealed only his own deep ignorance: "Simon Rattle is a twat and his music is boring. He's a very conventional person with very conventional ideas who simply believes that if something is new, it must be crap." There is, literally, no one on the planet who has done more for modern art, in his music making, than Sir Simon Rattle. Where he parts company with Chapman is that his criteria for support is excellence.
Critics who take up Rattle"s observation about the relative funding levels of Germany and Britain are, however, missing the point. Rattle has not moved to Berlin because of money. The BPO is paid less than some other German orchestras. He has moved because there is nowhere else where he could grow to a still higher plane. Rattle has already more than proved that he is capable of great music making, and he will carry on making guest appearances elsewhere (in December he conducts the world premiere at the Royal Opera House of Nicholas Maw"s Sophie"s Choice, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn and one of the most eagerly awaited new operas for decades). The German musical tradition is unparalleled, and the challenge of marrying tradition to the demands of modern audiences is uniquely powerful for an orchestra with the BPO"s history. Unlike most worthwhile challenges, however, there is no doubt whatsoever that he will succeed.

This link from Diana Moon. I wondered how long it would take before we had affirmative action orchestras - ie orchestras with people who can't play. Not long, if Aaron Dworkin (I've edited this post - I had erroneously said, before, that it was Andrea Dworkin; I guess that would have been too good to be true...)has his way:
"Orchestras need to widen the criteria of what makes a good orchestral musician. I don't believe it's just how you play an excerpt [at a blind audition]. It also should be how you are as a musician. This is an argument that a lot of educational institutions are making. We don't see the work we do as affirmative action. We see it as trying to achieve diversity. Having a diverse student body, for example, benefits the educational experience for everybody. It is not something schools are doing to serve the minorities who are participating. It's the same thing with orchestras. If the CSO were even 5 or 10 percent minority musicians--African American or Latinos--it would have a different sound. The artistic result would be served by diversity."
A "different sound" indeed.
His point is so completely and self-evidently stupid that I can't even be bothered to point out...nope, I can't be bothered.

Leos Janacek was the greatest opera composer of the twentieth century, and arguably the greatest composer, period. Leave aside all other considerations, his operas pass one key test: they are performer proof. Just as a poor performance of Don Giovanni or the Marriage of Figaro can nonetheless still give much pleasure, it's also true that, whilst a great performance of Katya Kabanova or Jenufa is emotionally shattering, a poor performance can also be transcendental, such is the power of Janacek's ability to blend story and music. His gift was to be able to take a powerful story and make it better by honing in on the most powerful and truthful elements. Shakespeare's Othello may be a masterpiece, but Verdi's Otello, the essence of that masterpiece, is if anything a still greater work. So Janacek's From the House of the Dead takes Dostoyevsky's silver and turns it into gold.
Today it seems almost inconceivable that it took us so long to discover Janacek, and that it is only in the past fifty years or so that his operas have become part of the repertoire. If it had not been for the efforts of Sir Charles Mackerras, the greatest Janacek conductor of our age, it would have taken even longer, and audiences would have been denied access to a string of blazing masterpieces.
Reading Mirka Zemanova's biography, perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised. It took until 1916, when he was 61, for Janacek to have anything resembling a success with the premier of Jenufa. Just two years before Czech independence, one might have thought, given the nationalist climate and the avowed and obvious Czech identity of Janacek's work, that such a success, even at the age of 61, would have given him the acclaim his music merited. Not so. Janacek had been ignored throughout his life by the Prague chattering classes as a country hick and no more than a workmanlike composer, and they weren't going to change their minds after one triumph. But such was the sheer weight of masterpieces which poured out over the next decade - the likes of Katya Kabanova, The Makropoulos Affair and The Cunning Little Vixen - that eventually they were forced, grudgingly, to acknowledge that he was more than a musical hack.
Zemanova leaves musicology to others, and concentrates on the life. What emerges most clearly is that, great composer as he was, Janacek was also a first class shit. He seems not to have had the slightest care for the way he treated others. As a young man he had to leave Vienna, where he had been studying, because his pieces were held to be beneath the required standard of entry to the all-important Conservatoire competition. For the next forty years or so he eked out an existence as a provincial music teacher. Zemanova wisely ignores cod psychology, but his frustrations are surely one plausible explanation as to why he was such an awful man and behaved so badly. At 25, for instance, he fell in love with one of his music pupils, Zdenka, who was just 14. He married her two years later and then almost immediately decided that he no longer loved her and effectively ignored her, as well as their child, for the rest of his life. He conducted a series of affairs and made no attempt to conceal them from Zdenka. A year after his Jenufa triumph he started sleeping with a singer 24 years his junior. Zdenka then tried to kill herself and, while she was recovering in hospital, he went on holiday, from where he wrote to Zdenka suggesting that, since his mistress would be passing their home in Brno on her way to join him on his holiday, she might spend a night at that home.
He then became infatuated with a 35-year old, who remained his obsession until his death in 1928. One night he suggested to Zdenka that the three of them go to the opera together, and that she should pose as his mistress' mother "who had", as he charmingly put it, "passed on everything beautiful to her daughter".
One long-standing criticism which can now be seen to be entirely wrong has been that Janacek's operas are too literal, and lend themselves only to one style of interpretation - as naturalistic and text-bound as possible. Nikolaus Lehnhoff's ground breaking (and continuing) series of productions at Glyndebourne has shown that they are works which are indeed greater than any performer is capable of demonstrating and which can respond to any amount of 'produceritis'.
The great pianist Artur Schnabel described Mozart's sonatas as "too easy for beginners, too difficult for artists". A similar sentiment applies to Janacek's operas.
Janacek
Mirka Zemanova
John Murray, £25

Am I a snob? When I see the Classical Brits and the million selling CDs in the classical bestseller charts, my reaction isn't to think 'hurrah - lots of newcomers are discovering the joys of classical music', but to despair that the likes of Vanessa Mae and the string quartet, Bond, can possibly be thought of as being classical musicians. They aren't. They, and their music, are easy-listening pap. Their music is popular and sells millions of copies. Wonderful. I hope they, and their record companies, run all the way to the bank. But they are no more classical musicians than the Spice Girls, and no less the creations of the marketing men than Ginger, Posh and the other spices.
I guess on some definitions that makes me a music snob. Well frankly, my dears, I couldn't give a damn.
The popularity of Nessun Dorma during Italia 90, and the subsequent success of Classic FM, showed record companies that that there was money to be made. The marketing men started to get involved in what had always been the most staid of industries. Out went ageing, balding, pianists, and in came, for example, pouting Ofra Harnoy, whose CD cover poses with her cello are as near pornographic as you would ever have imagined seeing on a recording of a Vivaldi cello concerto.
Ms Harnoy, and our own Lesley Garrett, are properly trained musicians. They may not be the most gifted in the world, but they perform real music. Their CD covers try to draw in new listeners to hear genuine music. Anne-Sophie Mutter is one of the most beautiful women on the planet, and the portraits on her CDs don't hide the fact. She is also one of the greatest violinists in history, and if the use of her beauty to sell her recordings means just one new listener discovers the beauty of, say, the Berg Violin Concerto, that's a job well done.
The likes of Vanessa Mae and Charlotte Church are something altogether different. Put Miss Mae in front of an orchestra and get her to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the result would be embarrassing. Ask Russell Watson sing Mozart or Verdi and you would want to run a mile. They are good at what they do - producing pap which people want to buy. But they are no more classical musicians than I am.
Test Matches and One Day Internationals exist side by side at the moment. The worry is that, as in cricket, the more stretching techniques required by serious music and Test matches will lose out to the crash bang wallop of the musical one day game.

A week ago today, Daniel Barenboim raised his baton to begin Wagner's Flying Dutchman. By next Saturday evening, he will have spent 41 hours, spread across two weeks, conducting his Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin company in every one of the German composer's major stage works: The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhauser, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremburg, Parsifal and the four Ring Cycle operas. So intense is the challenge set by just one Wagner opera that many conductors go through their career without performing a single one. No one has ever before attempted Barenboim's task of conducting all of them in immediate succession.
In most conductor's hands, the idea would be dismissed as a gimmick. A few years ago, Barenboim's contemporary, Lorin Maazel, conducted the nine Beethoven symphonies in one day at London's Festival Hall. As an athletic challenge it had some merit. As a musical event it was worthless. But such is Barenboim's stature, and his personal integrity, that one knows that the only purpose to his venture is musical.
Barenboim's Judaism and Israeli citizenship are at the core of his personality and have prompted many of the ventures which have taken him beyond the musical world and into a form of politics. So it is all the more remarkable that it is Wagner with whom he is now associated above all other composers. The German, who died in 1883, was, of course, Hitler's favourite; his music sometimes accompanied Jews as they were sent to the gas chambers. But the current Wagnerthon in Berlin is merely Barenboim's latest attempt to rehabilitate Wagner, especially in the eyes of his fellow Jews. As he puts it: "Wagner was not responsible for Auschwitz". Barenboim is now the main conductor at Bayreuth, the annual festival in deepest Bavaria devoted to Wagner's operas. Last July, conducting his Staatskapelle Berlin Orchestra at a concert in Tel Aviv, he prompted calls (which were not acted upon) from Israeli politicians from all main parties that he be banned from future public performance in Israel when he conducted the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde as an unprogrammed encore. Not a note of Wagner's music had ever before been played in concert in Israel.
The Tel Aviv Wagner performance is typical Barenboim. It is not enough for him to transport his audiences through the power of his musicianship.
Like other musicians before him, such as Yehudi Menuhin, Albert Schweitzer and Jan Paderewski, Barenboim uses his talent on a far wider stage, a concern which surely stems from the remarkably varied life he has led.
His first incarnation was as a child prodigy pianist. Barenboim was born in November 1942 in Buenos Aires to parents of Russian descent. He gave his first official concert when he was only seven years old. The Barenboims moved to Israel in 1952, and Israel has been the constant thread running through his life ever since. He flew back there to play for the troops at the start of the Six Day War in 1967. He did the same thing in 1973 during the Yom Kippur war. And one of the enduring images of the Gulf War is of Barenboim and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra giving concerts in gas masks as the Scud missiles rained down. But although he was, and remains, a passionate Zionist, he has also pioneered his own dialogue with the Arabs. First, in February 1999, he became the first Israeli to perform in Palestinian territory when gave a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University on the West Bank. "It was mind-boggling and terrifyingÖI got very frightenedÖI thought, ëWhat am I doing here?'ÖI knew that anything could happenÖFinally, I forced myself to walk out there and the whole auditorium stood up or reached out from where they were hanging. My heart was beating so strongly and as I sat down to collect myself together I found I couldn't calm down, I was so internally agitatedÖIn the end it worked, but I was really not sure until the moment I began playing." Three weeks ago he was banned by the Israeli authorities from giving another such concert in Ramallah; Israelis have not been allowed to travel into Palestinian areas since the second intifada.
In August of the same year he organized an unprecedented summer school in Vienna. A group of 31 Israelis and 32 Arabs (Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian) aged between 14 and 25 came together for three weeks to play in one orchestra. "The Israelis and Syrians had never had any contact before. For the Israelis," Barenboim explained, "Syria was only somewhere to think about if a missile comes over IsraelÖThe only connection they had was a lethal combination of fear and ignorance. And suddenly there they were sitting on the same stand of cello or violin, side by side, trying to do the same thing, trying to play the same note, to play together with the same colour and inflection. It was a revolutionary thing and their passion for music in common was the key".
Barenboim used his own mixed heritage to explain his aim to the orchestra: "I was born in Argentina, my parents were born in Argentina, and my grandparents were Russian Jews. I lived nine years in Argentina, I lived ten years in Israel, I lived 15 years in London, and then I lived 15 years in Paris. Now I live between Chicago and Berlin. Eighty per cent of the music I play is German, and the rest is Italian, Russian and French. When I conduct Verdi I feel Italian, but I am no less Jewish or less Israeli because of that." This unique venture, entirely Barenboim's, has now become an annual event.
Such extra-curricular activities mean that he is far from universally popular. Many point to his overweening ego and self-belief and his refusal to acknowledge any alternative points of view. The Wagner performance in Tel Aviv, for instance, was genuinely upsetting to many in a nation founded in the wake of the Holocaust. But because Barenboim was convinced that the ban on Wagner is misguided, he simply ploughed on, regardless of others and the hurt he would cause.
Unlike most prodigies, whose flame extinguishes once they reach maturity, Barenboim made the transition to genuine musician with ease, with a reputation for searing, fresh interpretations of the cornerstones of the classical repertory. His recording of Beethoven's monumental Diabelli Variations, made when he was 22, has just been re-released for the first time; it is a bracing, stimulating performance of a depth which most pianists with a lifetime of thought behind them would still be incapable.
By the 1960s, Barenboim was established as the leading light in a group of musicians, such as the violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, and the cellist Jacqeline du Pre, who were transforming musical life with their energy. Barenboim's marriage to du Pre was one of the iconic relationships of the Sixties. They were treated more like the Beatles than classical musicians. An entire industry has grown up around the relationship, most recently the film Hilary and Jackie which was widely regarded by those who knew du Pre - and Barenboim - to be a travesty. Although Barenboim refuses to discuss the relationship, and especially none of his rumoured affairs during her incapacity from Multiple Sclerosis, he was deeply shaken by the film's unrelenting portrait of a sexually ravenous du Pre and his own callous behaviour towards her. Du Pre died in 1987, fifteen years after being diagnosed with MS, and Barenboim is now married to the Elena Bashkirova, with two teenages sons.
Although when Barenboim first took up the baton there were some pianists who occasionally conducted, it was generally frowned upon. You either did one or the other. Barenboim simply ignored such views and, from the mid 1960s, struck up a close relationship conducting the English Chamber Orchestra. Their legacy is in recordings which endure to this day. In 1975 he took up his first Music Directorship, with the Paris Orchestra, which he led for fourteen years. So closely is he associated with Berlin today - two years ago, for example, the Staatskapelle Berlin elected him their chief conductor for life - that it is easy to forget how he once dominated Paris. But in 1988, having barely moved in to his office as director of the new Bastille Opera, he was sacked after accusations of greed following the revelation of his conducting fees. Today he is reputed to earn over one and a half million pounds a year from his two conducting positions, in Berlin and as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which he took over in 1991.
When he took over the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 1992, it was an opera house which had not lived up to its traditions for decades. He has turned it into one of the most renowned opera houses in the world. It is not just Barenboim's attempt to conduct the Wagner operas which should inspire awe; it is almost impossible to think of another house which could manage to let him try.
His life has been one long whirlwind of activity, the musical inseparable from the rest. Another great musical life force, the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, celebrated his seventy fifth birthday last week. Rostropovich is so much the Grand Old Man of classical music that it is difficult to think that only fifteen years separate them. Barenboim remains as youthful in spirit, and as keen to provoke and to challenge as ever, as he ends his sixth decade.

Twenty years ago, it seemed as if there would be no 'next generation' of great conductors. Although the baton had passed seamlessly from the pre-war generation of Willhem Furtwangler, Bruno Walter and Eric Kleiber to their successors, the likes of Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Carlo Maria Giulini, the generation below them looked, in comparison, pygmies. There were no more greats, and we seemed condemned to live in an age where an ability to beat time properly was the best we could hope for.
It was no wonder that this fallow period coincided with the rise of the 'authentic instrument' brigade, many of whose early adherents made a supposed virtue of time beating: the time they beat, they claimed, was more authentic than that of traditional conductors.
How bizarre that fear seems today. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Maris Jansons and Christian Theilemann stand comparison with the best in history, as anyone who has experienced the sheer excitement of their concerts will surely agree. Gergiev is incapable of the dull or routine phrase. Indeed, even a conductor such as Sir Colin Davis, who for years was taken for granted here in his home country, is now getting the recognition he deserves as one of the most transcendent musicians on the planet.
It is thus a sign of just how great a figure is Sir Simon Rattle that even amongst so many wonderfully gifted peers, his is the talent which is genuinely unique. Most conductors specialize in one, maybe two, areas of the repertory - and are no less worthwhile for that. Just as marathon runners do not also compete in 100 metre sprints, so one may long to hear Gergiev in nineteenth and twentieth century music - but not in Bach or Mozart. A very few - Furtwangler and Walter, for instance - have been equally adept in every area. Rattle too appears to have no limitations; whether it is baroque, classical or modern (he has even recorded Duke Ellington), he is utterly at ease, and equally outstanding.
As is clear from Nicholas Kenyon's admirably straightforward and readable book - as he puts it, journalism rather than biography or history - Rattle's very different musical self-education is in large measure responsible for the his musical sweep. Most conductors begin with the classics - Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, perhaps Bach - and gradually move into later pieces - Mahler, and perhaps other twentieth century greats such as Bartok, Shostakovich and Britten. Rattle has developed in precisely the opposite way. As a precocious schoolboy he put together scratch performances of Mahler and learned to love twentieth century music. As a developing professional he moved backwards, only very gradually gaining his confidence in the classical repertory of Mozart and Beethoven as time, and performances, went on. His first Beethoven symphony recording was, incredibly, only released this summer.
Rattle is unique in having something - not just something, but something wonderful - to offer across the board. But he is also unique in another respect: whilst there are other conductors, such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Sir Roger Norrington, who work with both 'authentic' and traditional orchestras, none synthesize the styles so well. Rattle's work with the authentic instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is more often than not sensational. He manages to bring the best of both worlds together - combining the refreshing, different sound world with a proper interpretation, rather than the glorified run through of the score which is the usual fare of the authentic brigade. I count his concert performance of Mozart's Idomeneo some fifteen years ago, and a recent Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, both with authentic instruments, as amongst the highlights of my concert-going life. Add to that a Parsifal, any number of Mahler performances and a Haydn oratorio with traditional orchestras and you get the drift of his astonishing range.
Unlike most wunderkinds, who usually decline into dull middle age, Rattle is already a great, but a great who - without losing the vigour - is clearly maturing with every performance. The thought of what he might do over the next twenty or thirty years is mouth-watering - all the more so now that he is about to launch on a new phase as musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Simon Rattle - From Birmingham to Berlin
Nicholas Kenyon
Faber £20 358 pp

For nearly two decades I had a season ticket to the Proms - until fast dawning middle age meant that sitting, rather than standing, started to have its attractions. It was, and is, the best cultural bargain in the world, working out at less than £2 a concert. In fact there was only one thing wrong with it: the looks on the faces of my friends who weren't interested in music when they found out what I did of a weekday night. All they knew about the Proms was the Last Night. As far as they knew, the Last Night was the Proms. Every night. Did I really choose to spend two months a year belting out Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia in the company of those puerile, gormless, chinless, charmless flag waving idiots, in their not-quite-fitting dinner jackets?
I've always hated the Last Night. It represents everything loathsome about a certain strand of British life: insular, trivial, irrelevant and utterly lacking in self-awareness. But for most of my time as a season ticket holder I managed to turn it to my advantage. Along with many others who had similar sense, I'd turn up on the day and flog my season ticket (for more than the face value), thus neatly enjoying a free two months of decent music and making a profit in the process. (The humourless authorities now insist on pictures on the season tickets, ending a practice that managed to be at once culturally, musically, politically and socially worthwhile).
Did it really take such a tragedy to get rid of the Last Night, and all that it celebrated? The last time anyone dared interfere was during the Gulf War in 1990, when the scheduled conductor, Mark Elder, expressed the outrageous view that singing Rule Britannia at such a fraught time was perhaps not such a good idea. The reaction was as if he had suggested that it be replaced with a ceremonial burning of the Union Jack. He was invited to fall on his baton and was promptly replaced as conductor.
It's all very well dismissing the entire event as an irrelevance, but music does matter. There have been few more divisive issues in Israel than whether or not Wagner's music should be played live. When Daniel Barenboim decided to do just that as an encore this summer, the music was heckled, dozens walked out, the Knesset debated his actions and there were calls from influential figures for him never to be offered engagements in Israel again. More constructively, Barenboim's ongoing project to bring young Arab and Israeli musicians together in a youth orchestra has the power to heal. And when the great Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini defied Mussolini's direct orders and refused to play a fascist anthem, he not only bravely risked his life, he made a statement which echoed across Italy and the world.
It is probably too much to hope that the new look Last Night will be anything other than nausea interruptus, given what it took to bring about just one year's change. But there could not have been better choices than Barber's Adagio, Tippett's Spirituals and the final, Ode to Joy movement from Beethoven's Ninth, to represent what Leonard Slatkin, the American conductor of the Last Night, called "unity through musicÖto help underscore the long healing process that must take place".
Barber's iconic Adagio shows that music can be both popular and elevating. It's more than just the familiar soundtrack from films such as Platoon and Elephant Man; indeed, its emotional power was never more evident than in when it was played at both FDR and JFK's memorial services.
Saturday's performances brought home that, however many times we might hear some pieces, context is all. Benjamin Britten argued that recordings could undermine the power and intent of music. Bach's Passions, for example, were written for a specific religious occasion - Easter; not to be heard year round or, even worse, whenever we feel like turning on a recording. But over familiar as we might be with some works, their greatness lies in their ever present power to move. Some years ago I was present at a Verdi Requiem given in the Royal Opera House in honour of a stage hand who had died in an accident there. Tears streamed down the faces of the entire audience (or, more aptly, congregation). Again, although Beethoven's Ninth may now be an orchestral staple - let alone its Ode to Joy theme doubling up as the EU anthem - in the right circumstances it loses none of its potency. Leonard Bernstein's decision to change Freude (joy) to Freiheit (freedom) in his performance in Berlin marking the fall of the Wall, may have seemed schmaltzy in prospect but the power and sense of occasion were so palpable that they shine through in, ironically, the recording made on the day.
There were genuine and powerful objections to the idea of Sir Simon Rattle performing the same symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic on the site of the Mauthhausen concentration camp in May 2000, only a few months after Jorg Haider's Freedom Party entry into the Austrian government. I found it unsettling, to say the least. But Rattle's justification, that "music is intimately bound up with all the events of its planet", cannot be disputed. Great music is not just a collection of notes in a noise. It can express something to which no other form of communication can come close. That's why the embarrassment of the usual Last Night matters, and why last Saturday's was something to remember.

What could be more perfect? Tonight at the Proms, the St Petersburg Philharmonic will play Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. They are an orchestra whose very name excites any music lover, so my reason for staying away is taboo: they aren't much good any more. Like many iconic cultural exports from Russia, they are trading - surviving - on former glories. The globalisation of music is steadily destroying the richness and variety that once we took for granted.
The experience of Russian orchestras is typical. For years their appearances in the west were so rare to hear them play was an astonishing, unique experience. When the then Leningrad Philharmonic arrived here in the early 1960s, their deep string tone, precision and rasping brass sound was something altogether different. To this day the recordings they made under their martinet conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, remain classics with a soundworld like nothing else.
It wasn't just Russian orchestras: Dutch woodwind, Viennese strings, the Berliners' smooth blanket of sound, the Americans' attack - they all had a unique style. Put on an old recording from any of them today and you can identify the orchestra in seconds.
That has almost entirely disappeared. Today the differences are merely between good and bad orchestras. The culprit is globalisation. As orchestras open their doors to players from all over the world, so they are losing their individuality. Conservatoires are forced to teach students to play not in national styles but with the same, international, one-size-fits-all technique which can get students jobs anywhere. Today it's almost impossible to tell the Vienna Philharmonic from the Berlin Phiharmonic or the Chicago Symphony from the London Symphony.
For orchestras from the former Soviet Union, however, the globalisation of music - the same is true for other forms of culture, too - has had an even more unremittingly destructive effect. Good orchestras are the result of many factors, but a prerequisite is money. Lots of it. The best western orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, gobble it up. Even the Berlin's DM24 million a year grant wasn't viewed as enough by Sir Simon Rattle, who held out for an increase before accepting his appointment as its Principal Conductor. The same was once true for the likes of the St Petersburg Philharmonic; under communist rule its players were cosseted and rewarded with all sorts of perks. With the fall of the Soviet Union, that comfort factor disappeared overnight. Today, survival - let alone pre-eminence - depends upon the ability to pull in money. That means that they must tour - and earn dollars - to survive.
Over the next year, the Royal Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra will play three times in London. But the Concertgebouw, like other Western orchestras, tours for prestige, not because it has to to survive. For most of the year they perform at home, in programmes which develop their skills and stretch both audience and players. Russian orchestras cannot. If they don't tour, they don't earn. And if they don't earn, they disappear. So the St Petersburg Philharmonic is constantly on the move, and plays little except the Russian repertoire which foreign audiences want to hear.
It shows.
The same holds for the Mariinsky (formerly Kirov) Opera. Last month it held court at the Royal Opera House, one of the most artistically dispiriting occasions I have ever endured. I saw two performances, the standard of which was far below anything the British regional companies offer. It's not surprising. So far this year the Mariinsky has performed in Rotterdam, Brasilia, Athens, Versailles, Baden Baden, Madrid, Barcelona, Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris - not forgetting Italy, Finland and Lithuania.
Of course the Mariinsky, like the St Petersburg Philharmonic, is still capable of producing an awesome evening. I hope tonight will be one of them. But the tragedy is that, like most Russian cultural exports, they are caught in their own Catch 22. Like orchestral Flying Dutchmen, they are doomed to tour the world for ever: both their financial saviour and their artistic death warrant.

Ask almost any pianist - one could almost say any musician - who was the greatest of the twentieth century, and the chances are that you will be told 'Sviatoslav Richter'. Music is, of course, not a competition; there are few more pointless pursuits than the musical equivalent of deciding whether Jack Hobbs or Don Bradman was truly the greatest. Schnabel, Fischer, Michelangeli, Gilels, to single out - quite arbitrarily - just four: all were unique geniuses. But none had the combination of range, depth, technique, sound, command and sheer musicianship of Richter. To hear Richter play was to be transported from this world into another universe where nothing else mattered but the sound coming from the piano. (Not least because he insisted in his last years in playing in near total darkness, with the single, small stage lamp which illuminated his score having the effect of both drawing you in to focus on the piano, and closing off any possibility of watching the man rather than listening to the music.)
I was lucky enough to hear him play a number of times: the composers he chose were typically varied: Bach, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Chopin, Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, Prokofiev and Hindemith. But for me, above all else, it was his Schubert which was truly miraculous. I can still remember the effect of his G major sonata, a decade after the concert.
Recordings, of course, never do justice. But for all Richter's ambivalence to the idea of capturing for eternity a moment which, by definition, should be spontaneous, Richter left a large legacy, many of them worthy of his memory. His Bach Well-Tempered Klavier, his Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition, his Liszt Sonata and the recent BBC archive releases of his Schubert give a wonderful illustration of the sheer variety of his mastery.
But for a rounded indication of Richter's genius, Bruno Monaingeon's edition of his notebooks and edited conversations is indispensable - as well as being pure joy from start to finish. Monsaingeon has taken his conversations with Richter recorded in his compelling documentary, 'Richter: The Enigma', and edited them into a narrative which, wisely, does not attempt to be comprehensive or chronological but rather aims to give a flavour of Richter's often willful personality. Like almost all truly great artists, he was full of paradoxes. He hated arranging anything, whether it was a concert or a journey, and he hated traveling as part of a schedule. But he was, of course, utterly rigid in his practice method: constant repetition of the same prase, then the next, then the next.
Although for he was effectively trapped behind the Iron Curtain until 1960, he felt no pressing urge to see outside. Indeed, as he puts it: 'How many times afterwards have I thought of how happy I'd have been if only I'd missed the train (at the start of his first journey to America). I'd never have got to know America, and would have been all the better for itÖThe noise, the cheap culture, the advertising and the language!'.
But when left to his devices - no promoters, no advance bookings, no scheduled programmes - he loved to travel. He was at his most relaxed when he simply got behind the wheel of a car, stopped wherever he fancied, and gave an impromptu concert. When well over 70, he drove from Moscow to Japan and back, giving nearly 100 such concerts in a few months crossing the Urals and Siberia.
Monsaingeon also includes selections from Richter's notebooks, into which he poured his thoughts, whether it was after performing or listening. These two hundred pages alone make this a book to savour. Thus is Vladimir Horowtiz despatched in one paragraph: 'Phenomenal and off-putting and excellent and fantastic tone, and thoroughly contradictory. Such talent! And such a trivial mind...Such a sympathetic person, so artistic and yet so limited. It's all so strange.'
The great conductor, Kurt Sanderling, said that 'not only can he play well, he can also read music'. That just about says it all.
Sviatoslav Richter Notebooks and Conversations
Bruno Monsaingeon (translated Stewart Spencer)
Faber and Faber £25