In the May issue of The Strad, out this week, I discuss the turbulent state of classical management, where personnel changes and recessional panics have caused a series of personnel upheavals. The latest, announced today, involves severe cutbacks at the world’s largest classical agency, the monolithic and secretive Columbia Artists Management Inc, known as CAMI.

Cami’s president and largest stakeholder, Ronald Wilford, is 82 and he’s not stepping down any time soon. It’s the lower echelons that have been under-performing. Concert fees are down by an average 15 percent and that means agency commissions are taking a hit, so a whole load of artist managers are heading out the door.

IMG Artists, the second largest agency, is in all sorts of trouble since its owner, Barrett Wissman, pleaded guilty to securities fraud in a New York state investigation.

In London, agents and artist are playing musical chairs through fast-revolving doors. Gustavo Dudamel has switched homes and more stars are considering their options.

It’s too early to start listing winners and losers but the music business is going to look very different a year or two from now. I have some ideas as to how attists can protect their careers, but I confide them for the moment only to those who read The Strad in print. These are, for many players, the most private matters in their lives. 

 

 

Kudos to The Times, which splashed today with a picture of Polish mourning. It was the only British daily to do so. The others disgraced themselves, using their front pages to trail ‘exclusives’ of the Labour Party manifesto, which has been heavily leaked and will anyway be public knowledge before noon. The small matter of a stricken nation orphaned of leadership is relegated to the lower reaches and the inside pages.

Most shameless is the Guardian which fills its front page with a picture of the young Germaine Greer, who dredges ‘exclusively’ in her column the distant memory of a fling she once had with the film director Federico Fellini. Greer wants us to know that she wore no underwear at their first meeting. I know that ladies of her age have a habit of forgetting things, but she seems to have suffered premature Alzheimer symptoms, if the piece is to be believed.

Why the Guardian duty editor thought this revelation more significant than a nation in mourning is pretty obvious. He – I cannot imagine it was a she – thought it would sell more copies on the newsstands than ‘a faraway country about which we know little’, in Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 betrayal phrase.

But is that really the case? Up to a million Polish citizens live in Britain and millions more of us share their lives and concerns. Most British people remember that we once went to war for Poland. None of these readers will have wanted Ms Greer’s seedy memories thrust in their faces on this day of mourning. Nor will many ever consider buying the tabloid Guardian again.

On Sunday, the British press virtually ignored a cataclysmic event. On Monday, they mock it with trivia. These are dreadful symptoms of an industry that has lost its bearings.  

Waking up this morning, I turned to radio and television for updates on the Polish disaster, then bought the newspapers. Wish I hadn’t.

Both the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph splashed a grinning jockey on their front pages. The Observer featured a third-party leader and his wife. Two papers noted the Polish tragedy in a squib beneath the fold. The Observer found no space for it on its front page.

Even in the most retrained light, this was an event that defined an epoch and will redound for generations. It is the first time in living memory that the governing elite of a large country has been wiped out – the first time, perhaps, since Stalin’s Katyn Massacre of the Polish intelligentsia, which the neighbouring nations were about to commemorate after almost seven decades of Russian denial.

The repercussions for Polish-Russian relations and for the balance of power in Europe are incalculable. In much the same way as football is shadowed by the 1958 Munich crash that destroyed the Manchester United team, politics in Europe will never be the same again.

Yet none of the British Sunday newspapers saw fit to change their lineup in the 24 hours before publication, dropping some articles and shrinking others to make space for detail and analysis of the terrible event. Columnists would have been called back from the races to write a fresh op-ed on the developing situation.

A decade ago, editors would have followed their news instincts and cleared the front pages. Today, the watchword is ‘resources’. When an event of historic magnitude hits the desk 12 hours before publication, there is no money, no flexibility, no reckless pursuit of journalistic enterprise. Editors stick to the flap plan. Managers count the beans. And readers are left in the dark. At moments like these, the newspaper industry declares its redundancy.

 

 

Many of the obituaries of Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols manager who has died aged 64, note that his first job was making costumes – with his partner, Vivienne Westwood – for Ken Russell’s 1974 bio-doc on the composer, Gustav Mahler.

Russell’s film was not in the least bit authentic. It was shot in the English Lake District and in an apartment in Notting Hill, several of its characters adopting East End accent to emphasise their Jewish origin. McLaren, raised by his grandmother Rose Corre in Stoke Newington and familiar from boyhood with leaders of the London rag trade, added a heavy possessiveness to the scenes inside Mahler’s family home.

I always felt there were nuances around that table which Russell cannot have known without an adviser who added them intuitively in peripheral details. That would have been McLaren: perhaps Ken can tell us more.

So much for pop trivia. More significant, in my view, was McLaren’s avowal that he went into the fashion and entertainment industries ‘for the sole purpose of smashing the English culture of popular deception’. If so, it was a noble aim.

Mahler never quite put it that way but, when he denounced Viennese tradition as an excuse for sloppiness, he was launching a frontal attack on a cover-up culture that used popular entertainment to conceal the vicious undersides of reality. Mahler was never the impresario of outrage that McLaren became, but his motivation as a social critic was not dissimilar.

More on both subjects in Why Mahler?, coming on 1 July.

  

This morning’s coffee concert by the Panocha Quartet was disrupted at the outset by a woman in one of the back rows, who started shouting something incoherent. She was removed by ushers and the recital proceeded without further incident.

The Panocha Quartet are Czech. They played Mozart and Dvorak and there was no possible political dimension. Since such occurences are mercifully rare, it may safely be assumed that today’s imagine that the eccentric disturber of today’s peace was in some way motivated by last week’s protest at which the Jerusalem Quartet were targeted by agitators.

One audience member who was present Monday told me she felt scared and helpless during the disruptions. Another endorsed the point I made in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph that once the hall’s seal of isolation had been broken by demonstrators it will be hard to restore its role as a sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

All told, it’s a sad moment for civilisation.

 

It has been a while since I last booked a teacher but the rates don’t seem to have risen much in recent years.

A survey of 1,100 instrumental and singing members of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) shows rates ranging across Britain from £24 ($35) an hour to £34 ($50). The average rate is £29.

Comparisons are always invidious, but it does strike me that music teachers are seriously underpaid. A science tutor can claim at least fifty percent more, and any kind of therapist, no matter how specious, can expect twice as much.

So, are we underpaying music teachers? And are things better in other countries? Your views, please…