Here’s a round-robin from the head of opera at the music conservatoire of Vienna:

Dear friends all over the world.
I would like to wish you all the very best and also let you know that apart of my every day enjoyment and success as a Head of Opera Department at the Vienna Conservatorium I had the privilege to sing and record with the worlds finest lyric soprano, Albanian Inva Mula.

Her new Cd “Il Bel Sogno” was released from EMI at the beginning of this September and has already reached her unnumbered fans and listeners around the world. I am so grateful to Inva to choose me to back her in Violeta’s aria, over the best tenors in the world she works with.

But I am also proud of her new achievement bringing to the world another level of operatic art.

At the same time I would like to thank all who are sending me messages and their sympathy about my singing.

I invite you to share together this Albanian Diva and wish her more great successes.

Yours truly

Agim Hushi

The album is newly out on EMI: judge for yourselves. I quite liked what I heard here 

The London Evening Standard, which I served as Assistant Editor from March 2002 until stepping down in May this year, will become a giveaway paper from next week.

The paper was selling 440,000 copies daily when I joined and about half as many when it was sold at the end of last year – after a battle with two free newspapers – to a Russian investor, Alexander Lebedev. The full-price sale in August 2009 was down to 107,000, according to the Financial Times, indicating that the new ownership and editorship have lost about two in every five readers. That would appear to be a reason for abandoning the cover price and giving the paper away for free.  

I do not wish to argue the merits of that decision, except to express a hope that the paper will survive as a quality product. I like and admire many of the people who work for it and hope they can continue to flourish.

My chief concern is what will become of the arts – not so much how they are covered in the Standard as how they are received.

The public does not, on the whole, value unsolicited opinion – which is to say, opinion for which it does not pay in some way. And the arts industry does not turn to freesheets for response, quotation and stimulation. In the decade or so of Metro’s existence, its arts pages have had no discernible impact either on public debate or on box-office activity.

A review in a free newspaper, even by a recognised writer, carries about as much weight as a plug on Amazon. Arts in the free Standard are threatened with creeping devaluation. Much as I hope to be proved wrong, I fear that the erosion of value perception will be irresistible.

At the memorial service for Geoffrey Tozer in Melbourne, former prime minister Paul Keating slammed past directors of the Sydney and Melbourne symphony orchestra for deliberate and malicious neglect of the country’s most gifted pianist. ‘This malevolence more or less broke Geoffrey’s heart,’ he said, adding that the saga was a prime instance of ‘bitchiness and preference within the arts in Australia.’

Keating has written an article to the same effect in the Sydney Morning Herald, while the Age of Melbourne carries a full text of the speech under the headline ‘Indifference to Tozer’s genius is a disgrace’ – perhaps to make amends for its own disgraceful silence over Tozer’s death. 

I endorse and applaud every word of Keating’s eulogy. Australia failed its greatest pianist and little has been done to put the arts on a more professional footing that might prevent such waste and injustice in the future – witness only what is happening now in Melbourne’s chamber music hall. I have said it in Australia and I say it here again: the arts in that country need a Royal Commission – an independent assessment of assets and future strategy. 

Meanwhile, let’s not lose sight of the precedent of an elected leader attacking orchestral administration for bias, ineptitude and flagrant favouritism. Can we hear it now from the Mayors of Philadelphia and New York? Berlin, too, should take note.

Good on yer, Paul. 

A press release from Riga informs me that the national symphony orchestra has a new chief conductor, Karel Mark Chichon, who is apparently British.

The statement neglects for some reason to mention that he is also the husband of the country’s leading international opera singer, Elina Garanca, who will no doubt wish to spend more of her time in the bracing Baltic winter season.

I had not heard of Mr Chichon before, though his c.v. lists dates with important orchestras. Perhaps they, or I, were out of town.

Also in the mailbox comes a new symphony by the Latvian composer, Edgars Kariks, another blank in my musical knowledge. According to his biography, Mr Kariks grew up in New Guinea and played flute in Australian orchestras before returning to his parents’ homeland, where he teaches at the university and contemplates Daoist philosophy.

Downloads of his symphonies are available here. I’ll get round to listening some time. 

Long before I listened to records for a living, I remember coming out of a store with an album I had chosen purely for the sum of its parts.

Unlike any compilation known to buffs, it combined a harpsichord concerto by Bach with a keyboard work of Haydn’s and a Mozart piano concerto, the 12th in A major, K414. I am not sure if it has ever been reissued on CD.

The conductor was David Zinman, the orchestra the London Sinfonietta and the soloist – who clearly dictated the quirky, uncommercial choice – the Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha, who has just died at the age of 86.

What burst off the project was the creative intelligence behind it and, the moment I heard the tender yet steely touch of its soloist, I was converted for life into a de Larrocha fan. She was quite unlike any other pianist, with a tone all her own and a taste that had to be taken on its own terms. Unmatchable in Granados, Albeniz and Turina, she brought a lilt of light and heat to non-Iberian music – Chopin, Schumann and Mozart, most of all.  

She was treated with great reverence at Decca and left a discrete and indelible legacy on that label until it was corporatised in 1990. Herbert Breslin, her US manager, once said: There are two kinds of repertory Alicia plays … Things she plays extremely well, and things she plays better than anyone else.’ I would not dispute a word of that assessment.

Allan Kozinn captures her well in a New York Times obit.

Who says Cremona always sounds best? A blind testing by Matthew Trusler, the Paris-based British violinist who once went searching with me on a BBC quest for the ideal fiddle, yielded some remarkable results.

Playing behind a curtain for a jury of musicians and 180 members of a forestry conference, Matt did his riffs on a 1711 Stradivarius and on four new instruments by the Swiss maker, Michael Rhonheimer, two of them treated with an organic fungus and two au naturel.

In all tests and different repertoire, a nine-month old fungal fiddle came out tops for warmth and clarity. The Strad came second.

A forest-steeped Rhonheimer costs $25,000. A Strad can expect to fetch 1,000 times as much. Go figure. The story’s here.

And check out Matt’s new recording of the Korngold concerto.

Twelve hours after the curtain fell on Le Grand Macabre at English National Opera last Thursday, there were three reviews online – from Richard Morrison of The Times, George Hall in The Stage and myself in this space.

Later in the day, we were joined on Google News by Andrew Clements in the Guardian, Edward Seckerson in the Independent and Barry Millington in the London Evening Standard, the last of whom was in print but not searchably online. 

On Saturday morning, 30 hours after curtain, reviews appeared in three papers – but not in the Daily Telegraph or the Financial Times, both of which chose to ignore one of the signal events of the new arts season. On Sunday, there were enthusiastic reviews in two out of four papers, nothing in the Sunday Times or (apparently) the Telegraph.

What we are witnessing is not so much a variance of arts priorities between newspapers as an all-round confusion of purpose about the role of reviews in a changing print/online universe. Every serious newspaper retains dedicated artform critics, yet none seems to know what to do with them – whether to lead the online debate or to carry on printing first reports of a performance days – or up to two weeks, in the Sunday Times – after the event.

In the instant information age, the arts review has fallen off the pace of progress. It now hangs by a thread in an endangered industry, awaiting a reconfigured strategy. 

(see also In a critical condition, 1 to 5)

The composer György Ligeti once said that every note he ever wrote reflected his formative experiences as a teenaged slave labourer under the Hungarian Fracists and German Nazis in 1943-45.

Never was this truer than in his only opera Le Grand Macabre, a farce about the imminent destruction of a city, which somehow fails to happen. In the finale, survivors looks around and wonder what they are doing on stage when so many others are gone. Put yourself in the broken shoes of a liberated prisoner in April or May 1945, and the outrageously absurd opera makes sudden, shocking sense.

Staged for the opening of English National Opera’s season at London’s Coliseum, Le Grand Macabre was first performed in Stockholm in 1978, the Swedish text of a Belgian libretto (by Michel de Gelderode) giving it added dimensions of the surreal. Ligeti revised it in 1996, designating English as the preferred language, perhaps because one can be ruder in English than in any tongue except his native Hungarian.

Some of the rudeness is downright silly. The secret police is known as the Gepopo, a play on the Nazis’ Gestapo and on the German baby word for ‘bottom’. At other moments, the supposed obscenity of simulated copulation and sado-masochism are made to seem ridiculous beside the smug haplessness of governments in the face of deepening crisis.

Le Grand Macabre can be viewed as a simultaneous image of two decades, the 1970s when the opera was written and the coming 2010s when we shall suffer the after-shocks of financial collapse. In 1970s terms, there is an awful lot of make love, not war along with hints of Barry McGuire’s ‘ah you don’t believe/ we’re on the eve/of destruction.’ Apocalypse always seemed to be just around the corner.

As a present-day metaphor, the preposterous Prince Go-Go (beautifully sung by countertenor Andrew Watts) could be George Bush, Gordon Brown or Vladimir Putin, pursuing trivial personal agendas while markets melted and millions of lives were wasted. Le Grand Macabre is a satire on the futility of political power.

Beneath both timelines runs the liberation instant of 1945, when there was no turning forward or back for young men like Ligeti, who came to see the world in a curved mirror of absurdity. I may be oversensitive to that moment, which is the hinge of my novel, The Game of Opposites, but having known Ligeti quite well I am beginning to see the opera more as a parable on modern history than as an exercise in post-modern nihilism.

The staging by the Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus is visually unforgettable, a giant fibreglass centrepiece of a naked plump woman, turned every which way around and inside out as the opera ups the ante in defying conventions of the genre. At the very least, the show is an advanced lesson in anatomy.

The music is intermittently arresting – a sumptuous Pain Aria during an act of sexual humiliation and frequent orchestral references to Berg’s operas, Wozzeck and Lulu. Some of the best music echoes the score that Stanley Kubrick stole from Ligeti for his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Baldur Brönniman conducts with discreet efficiency and Susanna Andersson was a stunning chief of po-po-police.

But the production, which is shared with Brussels, Barcelona and Rome, belongs less to the world of opera than to performance art and stand-up, slapstick comedy. Those sections of the audience that appreciated the show were mostly under-35s of the internet era who do not recognise barriers between art forms. That is where ENO is pitching its future, and the strategy is beginning to pay off both in artistic stimulus and at box-office. The Edwardian pillars of London’s Coliseum have become home to the unpredictable and the young music director, Ed Gardner, is taking every worthwhile risk in the catalogue.

Last weekend in Bonn, I heard an a capella group, the Atrium Ensemble, perform the Abbey Road album as if it were a formal Lieder cycle like An die ferne Geliebte, by the town’s best-known native son.

While the arrangements were too homogenous – a creative dissonance or few might have made the time pass faster – the serial concept has kept my mind occupied ever since, both about the Beatles’ working method and about musical globalisation.

As I report on Bloomberg today, the German experience of the 1970s was very different from America (Watergate, gas crisis), Britain (industrial warfare) or Spain (post-Franco awakening). Yet all three societies, and many more, were affected by Beatles afterwaves, not only in their music – much of it counter-responsive – but in more pervasive forms of Zeitgeist. The love you take/is equal to the love you make was, I seem to recall, embedded in the ethos of the era.

Which brings me back to compositional method on the final Beatles album. Consulting the world’s greatest Beatles’ authority (name and serial number withheld), I was informed that the question of joined-up writing was a matter of dispute between producer George Martin, backed by McCartney, who urged the group to think in larger forms, and Lennon on the other side who believed that the song was the thing.

The schism was one of several attitudinal differences that caused the Beatles to split. The way you listen to Abbey Road (or Rubber Soul, for that matter) dictates whose side you are on in the great break-up. Playing the Beatles as Beethoven was by no means illogical. It is exactly what half of them would have wanted.

Or not? 

The BBC Proms have ended with another set of record attendances, five percent up overall and 87 percent averages at the Royal Albert Hall, night after night over eight weeks.

More encouraging still, 37,000 attenders were first-timers and there was a sharp rise in the number of under-16s in the hall. Several of the new-music nights were sell-outs

Following on good returns from Salzburg and Glyndebourne, the classical audience appears to be holding steady and even increasing during the recession – at least in those festivals where innovation weights just as heavily as tradition.

The full BBC press release follows:

There was mild bemusement among hard-core concertgoers and after-show drinkers at the end of the Vienna Philharmonic performance of Haydn’s 98th symphony and Schubert’s Great C major under the late-replacement baton of Franz Welser-Möst.

Nothing to do with the playing, which was glorious and impeccable in every respect bar one slightly sour movement fadeout in the Schubert. Nothing to do either with the conductor’s interpretation, which was uncluttered, organic and irresistibly energising.

So what was missing? An encore, for starters. Every travelling orchestra carries a quiver of crowd-pleasers and this one, despite prolonged applause, refused to deliver.

Some listeners mentioned a lack of ‘greatness’ in the performance. That’s exactly what I found most refreshing. Any third-rate conductor can posture the big occasion at the Royal Albert Hall, underlining every fat tune and swaggering through the tempo switches in Haydn and Schubert to make them seem magniloquent and meaningful.

Welser-Möst resisted the temptation to over-adorn. This was not so much a big performance as a collegial conversation over a hotel breakfast table, at which conductor and musicians were speaking the language of Haydn and Schubert as mother’s tongue, able to leave lines hanging in the air, unresolved, for later contemplation.

It was, for me, a memorable performance and one that augurs well for the future dialogue between this conductor and the orchestra when he takes over next year as chief at the Vienna State Opera.

Welser-Möst, who broke his vacation to save the gig when the venerable Nikolaus Harnoncourt called in sick, has not forgotten his rocky beginnings as 20-something music director of the London Philharmonic. Nor has the press in this town, which is forever urging him to prove a point and erase his early embarrassments. It takes moral courage to resist such challenges and do as he did at the Proms – to dare to perform the great classics as an everyday conversation, without pomp or posturing. Just as the masters intended.