March 2009 - Page 2 of 2

Dear Michael Ignatieff

As a former colleague of yours on the BBC’s Late Show in the 1990s, I want to draw your attention to a Canadian phenomenon which, though you are not yet prime minister, can be significantly remedied by your intervention. There may even be some votes in it.

You can guess what I’m referring to. It’s the top-down dumbing down of arts and culture.

Canada is a country that punches creatively above its weight. Its diversity of authors -from Margaret Attwood and Carol Shields to Josef Skvorecky, Mordecai Richler and Ying Chen – are read the world over. Its musicians are widely heard and its theatrical style is distinctive. Like Britain, Canada has nurtured a national cultural renaissance by means of an enlightened state broadcaster and modest amounts of public subsidy.

Those gentle boosters are now in jeopardy. CBC Radio has converted its classical station to pick ‘n’ mix, and its classical presentation to low populism, demolishing cultural confidence.

To cite one current example. CBC is asking listeners to choose 49 Canadian songs to send to President Obama. Michael, could you ever imagine such cultural cringe at the BBC?

Another instance: the Canada Council for the Arts is scrapping subsidy for controlled-circulation literary and music magazines. I can’t figure out the bureaucratic reasoning from afar and I should declare a tiny interest: my weekly column appears without fee on a website linked to one Canadian publication. These magazines nurture the grass roots of art. Scythe them down, and not much will grow tomorrow.

What can you do as leader of the opposition? Easy. The squeaky bums in broadcasting and arts councils (we have the same types over here) respond very swiftly to comments from an opposition leader shortly before an election. The bums don’t want to lose their seats.

One speech, Michael, that’s all it would take. One speech urging Canada to smarten up and stop dumbing down would put more heart into the arts and more arts in the world than a pack of Medicis. One word from you, and the bureaucrats will go upmarket.

Think about it. With a positive signal to Canada’s creative furnace, your Liberals would stand for innovation and enlightenment, as distinct from the numbskull Conservatives. To borrow Isaiah Berlin’s famous metaphor, you would be the fox and they the hedgehog – tomorrow’s roadkill.

Forgive this intrusion from abroad. I have no right to interfere in Canadian affairs, except to wish the best for its arts. My justification is John Donne’s: no man is an island. Canada’s arts are important. If they shrink, the world suffers. They help to define what you and I would call civilisation. Get behind them, Michael, before the election.

With best wishes

Norman Lebrecht

www.normanlebrecht.com

Dear Michael Ignatieff

You can guess what I’m referring to. It’s the top-down dumbing down of arts and culture.

Those gentle boosters are now in jeopardy. CBC Radio has converted its classical station to pick ‘n’ mix, and its classical presentation to low populism, demolishing cultural confidence.

To cite one current example. CBC is asking listeners to choose 49 Canadian songs to send to President Obama. Michael, could you ever imagine such cultural cringe at the BBC?

With best wishes

Norman Lebrecht

www.normanlebrecht.com

Here are some breaking updates on recent stories in this blog.

– The free Haitink downloads have gone live in Holland – and in English. The first music comes free on March 9. Thanks to Rolf den Otter for these links.

http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/kijkenluister/http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/home/80-years-bernard-haitink.html
http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/kijkenluister/

– Cincinnatti fears the demise of Telarc will consign its orchestras to oblivion. Cleveland, too, is not that happy.

– Rainer Mockert has sent me a brilliant user-friendly site for classical recordings. The group behind it, he reports, were 44 percent down on record sales in their shops but are enjoying a 5.8 percent rise online. You’ll need German to get the most out of the site, but here’s an English bite:

Our database currently includes around 390,000 CDs, 31,000 DVDs, more than 2,000,000 books, and 23,000 special interest offers like vinyl LPs, SACDs, and music DVDs, so that no wish is left unfulfilled. Moreover, we have more than 4,000 PC, console, and board games as well an amazing number of dirt-cheap offers and limited items on the offer pages and in the bargain market.

– From Australia, I’m delighted to hear that Libby Christie, who turned around the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, is taking charge of national arts funding. And from Canada …. oh, Canada. I guess that’ll have to be another day’s blog.

I try to update old blogs with Late Extra breaking updates, so do check back.

LATE EXTRA: And New York has woken up this morning to a stunning new opera reviewer – it’s the Post taking on the Times in the sleepwalker stakes. More of it, please.

Here are some breaking updates on recent stories in this blog.

– The free Haitink downloads have gone live in Holland – and in English. The first music comes free on March 9. Thanks to Rolf den Otter for these links.

http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/kijkenluister/http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/home/80-years-bernard-haitink.html
http://haitink.radio4.nl/en/kijkenluister/

– Cincinnatti fears the demise of Telarc will consign its orchestras to oblivion. Cleveland, too, is not that happy.

I try to update old blogs with Late Extra breaking updates, so do check back.

LATE EXTRA: And New York has woken up this morning to a stunning new opera reviewer – it’s the Post taking on the Times in the sleepwalker stakes. More of it, please.

The BBC’s Culture Show ran a 30-minute special last night on Alfred Brendel. It went out at 11.20 pm and showed no more than 30 seconds at a stretch – at least so long as my eyelids stayed up – of the cheeky chappie doing what he used to do best, which is playing the piano.

Instead, the media-savvy conductor Charles Hazlewood quizzed Mr Brendel reverentially about his poetry, which he recited with seesawing eyebrows, a feat I have not seen replicated since the early years of television comedy.

Mr Hazlewood expressed polite surprise that the rhythm and metre of the poems was so musical. Mr Brendel was charmed by that exceptionally acute critical observation.

What was the BBC doing putting out such obsequious blether? Nothing for classical music.

Take one of the great living pianists, but don’t show him playing a movement of a Beethoven sonata. Oh no, that might lose audience share, even when the show is carefully put out after all but the night shift have gone to bed.

BBC Television is frightened and ashamed of classical music. Mark Thompson, the director general, wishes it were otherwise. But his policy directive has so far made no impact whatsoever on the production teams and the channel controllers.

Imagine what went on at the planning meeting.

Charlie: Alfred Brendel is about to retire – you know, the great pianist.

Adam: What does he play?

Charlie: Beethoven, Mozart, a little Schubert.

Adam: Not for our audience.

Charlie: He does other things, you know. He writes nonsense verse.

Adam: That’s interesting. Like Edward Lear, you mean?

Charlie: More T. S. Eliot.

Adam: Wasn’t he the one that wrote Cats with Andrew Lloyd Webber? OK, go for it – but no classical music, mind. Not on my watch.

Mr Hazlewood expressed polite surprise that the rhythm and metre of the poems was so musical. Mr Brendel was charmed by that exceptionally acute critical observation.

What was the BBC doing putting out such obsequious blether? Nothing for classical music.

Imagine what went on at the planning meeting.

Charlie: Alfred Brendel is about to retire – you know, the great pianist.

Adam: What does he play?

Charlie: Beethoven, Mozart, a little Schubert.

Adam: Not for our audience.

Charlie: He does other things, you know. He writes nonsense verse.

Adam: That’s interesting. Like Edward Lear, you mean?

Charlie: More T. S. Eliot.

Adam: Wasn’t he the one that wrote Cats with Andrew Lloyd Webber? OK, go for it – but no classical music, mind. Not on my watch.

Telarc, the first label to issue a digital release, has ceased production.

The founder, Robert Woods, will leave this month, along with the chief recording engineer, Michael Bishop. Half the workforce has been laid off – that’s 26 jobs – and the backlist becomes heritage. More details here.

Telarc had first call, as local patriots, on the superb Cleveland Orchestra and the quality of its sound was an audiophile’s delight. The label won 40 Grammys over the years and produced 800 recordings across several genres.

My guess is that its all-time bestseller was Wagner’s Ring Without Words, an improvement in certain respects on the original in a concept created by the conductor Lorin Maazel. Of late, the label blazed a trail for Paavo Järvi and his Cincinnati band. It has yet another version of the Gorecki third symphony coming up from Atlanta.

A sound philosophy, though, is not enough to save a label. Telarc, for all its merits, never took much risk by way of extending repertoire when the going was easy. I am really sad to see its purist values fall by the wayside and I fear that executives in the major labels will be encouraged by its fall to cut corners and compromise standards still further.

Telarc’s values, however, endure as a permanent record. Its disappearance suggests that, in times of technological and financial upheaval, only by using creative imagination as a driving force can a musical enterprise be saved from extinction.

The sackings have started at Decca. Out of 32 staff at the London headquarters, just six are being retained.

That is one to manage the office, one to answer the phone and open the mail, two to look after the royalty accounts and two more to deal with whatever instructions come down from corporate headquarters.

One thing is clear: there is nobody left at Decca to make records.

Classical artists, including the now-celebrated Tutula Bartley, are being transferred to Universal Classics and Jazz (UCJ), a crossover business that produces such half-baked trivia as the boy band Blake and the East London lad who gave up his junior football career to play the saxophone. Cecilia will feel in good company.

The residual staff at Decca will report to Michael Lang, head of Deutsche Grammophon in Hamburg.

The notion that Decca will continue to function as a production centre after these abolitionary measures is a mixture of wishful thinking and corporate fiction. The author of the fantasy is Christopher Roberts, head of UCJ.

Roberts once tried to persuade me that corporate ciphers like himself earn huge salaries and bonuses in order to protect madcap artists from their wild whims and maximise the revenue potential from their works. Given that Roberts has dedicated so much of his energy to eliminating outlets for classical artists, I wonder if should perhaps think of revising his job description – so long as he still has a job.

Decca is dead. A grand tradition has been laid waste. What remains is history – and a golden opportunity to reinvent the spirit of enterprise in classical music.

Newbies and start-ups, post your plans and logos in the comment space below.

LATE EXTRA: A sharp-eyed reader directs me to a news release from Universal Music Group, the monster that killed Decca. UMG has just appointed three more vice-presidents, just what the music world most needs right now, to ‘erase lines between physical and digital’.