Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert’s centenarian Mum, enjoys mother-of-the-nation status in Australia, or at least in the environs of her stately home near Melbourne. Early this year, she co-endowed the city with the southern hemisphere’s first purpose-built chamber music hall, an acoustic marvel in a burgeoning arts quarter that briefly threatened to challenge Sydney’s role as continental capital of culture. I saw the hall as it neared completion and reported with some enthusiasm on its prospects.

What I contained at the time were my concerns about medium-term plans, once the opening budgets had been blown and the centre bedded in to the serious business of building a solid audience for chamber music around a nucleus of local performers. It was never going to be easy, and sure enough, the whole caboodle had just fizzled out.

Last month, the Dame Elisabeth Hall sacked its excellent artistic administrator David Barmby after revealing half-year losses of A$1.5 million. A decision was taken by the board to operate the facility in future as a hall-for-hire, forsaking the original artistic aims and reconstituting it as a garage, where any junk can be stored and staged.

The unimposing chief executive, Jacques de Vos Malan, explained that he was acting on the advice of independent assessors. Any person of conscience in that position would have resigned on the spot, seeing that his job description had been reduced to booking clerk. Further personnel changes are expected soon.

The best hope for the Dame Elisabeth Hall, say Melbourne’s arts leaders, is that it will be merged into the city’s Arts Centre, which is to be run by the returning Wales Centre chief, Judith Isherwood. Ms Isherwood has experience of far larger unplanned deficits – a £13.5 million red hole in her first three years – that ought to bring a dash of perspective to the petty-cash crisis. The Melbourne Arts Centre has much in common with Isherwood’s Cardiff venture. It fills up on ice-dance shows and hoary musicals (booking now in Cardiff: Les Miz and High School Musical 2).

So there goes Australia’s gentle dream of a dedicated recital and chamber music venue, named after its most gracious citizen. I wonder how long it will take for Dame Elisabeth, a genuine arts lover, to remove her name from the door, or how long it will be before another donor can be persuaded that it is not altogether impossible to raise the tone down under.  

The discussion of whether one religion is respected more than another in Daniel Barenboim’s Diwan orchestra is degenerating into a tedious slew of smug atheism. Why bother about religion at all, some respondents seem to feel, if God is dead and everyone knows it?

OK, let’s get this straight. The issue is not whether it is good or bad to be religious in the 21st century. I have a view on the matter, but it’s a private one between me and my conscience. The question here is whether the practice of Islam is treated more kindly in the Barenboim orchestra than the practice of Judaism. If it is – and there is some evidence to suggest that it is – then the orchestra needs to re-examine its attitudes towards the faith dimension of the Middle East conflict.

I get very irritated when anyone, believer or denier, claims ownership of an absolute truth and manitains that all right-minded people think the same. That is a totalitarian atittude and it is all too much in evidence in the Church of Dawkins. My guess is that this synthetic, pseudo-scientific cult will be undone like all others. In the meantime, I shall try for the sake of my good mood to avoid people who peddle spritiual certainties. 

Most musical responses, public and private, to my discussion of religious anomalies in Daniel Barenboim’s Diwan orchestra have taken a markedly hostile tone.

Several professional musicians argued that religious faith should have nothing to do with the process of making music. ‘A majority of Israeli musicians just like most of their international colleagues have no time for religion,’ is how one London violinist put it to me in an email. He, and others, go on to assert that ‘the world would be a better place without religion.’

He is entitled to that view, and can claim support from the spirit of the times whether in science or the arts. It is cool to be an atheist in the 21st century. In recent Lebrecht Interviews with Jonathan Miller and Stephen Hough, it was the God-denying director who was more certain in his convictions than the God-seeking pianist. 

Whatever one’s personal beliefs, however, all musicians ought to be aware that without religion there would be no music for them to play. It was the church that laid the foundations for symphonic music and a search for God that led most of the great composers to write as they did. Beethoven may have been anti-authority and Verdi anti-clerical, but with the lone exception of Richard Wagner it is hard to find a major composer before the 1918 who actively denied the existence of God and was not driven to compose by a religious impulse.

It is, of course, possible to separate between a composer’s intentions and the interpretation of music, but to assert that religion is irrelevant or detrimental to the art exposes what the mid-20th century psychologist Leon Festinger called ‘cognitive dissonance’ and Freud referred to much earlier as Das Unheimlich – the uncanny.

Both mean the same thing: a discomfort felt by someone grappling with two contradictory ideas. The therapeutic ‘solution’ is either to find a balance between the ideas or to rationalise one of them out of the picture. That seems to be what post-religious musicians are doing in relation to the faith basis of their art. It is not a viable intellectual position.

As far as the East-West Diwan orchestra is concerned, the cognitive dissonance is the inbuilt imbalance between a multiculturalist respect for Islam and a liberal contempt for those who observe the religious heritages of Judaism and Christianity. Fiona Maddocks argued justly that this inequality needs to be addressed. I would add that a resolution of the dissonance is essential if the Diwan is ever to have more than a decorative, symbolic and largely sentimental role in the search for a Middle East peace.

The director Jonathan Miller, inventor of time-shift opera, is in the hot seat of the Lebrecht Interview tonight at 21.15 (UK time) – and streamed all week on BBC Radio 3.

Miller confronts his guilt feelings at abandoning medicine for the arts, his anger at singers who abuse their power and his intolerance for those of lesser intellect.

His New York Mafia Rigoletto is coming back for the 27th year at English National Opera.

Criticising Daniel Barenboim’s East West Diwan orchestra of young Arab and Israeli players is not something many reviewers are prepared to do. The Diwan brings together musicians from either side of the Middle East divide and the playing is, when I have heard it, of a very high youth-orchestra standard. These young artists are playing for peace on earth and goodwill for all mankind, and reviewers treat them as if they were Mother Teresa.

So praise be to Fiona Maddocks who, in today’s Observer, detects a flaw in the enterprise that runs deeper than ‘rough ensemble and problems with tuning’. You can read her whole review here, but allow me to quote the salient passage:

It has been reported that some Muslim players in the orchestra were observing Ramadan by fasting until nightfall. It is interesting to note, in turn, that none of the Jewish players were observing the Sabbath. I have read no comment on this discrepancy. In a conflict that is avowedly faith-based, does one faith matter more than another?

She has a point, and a very strong one. All creeds are respected in the orchestra’s mission statement, but where some Moslem players maintain their observances and their pride in an ethical heritage, none of the Jewish Israelis, least of all their secular conductor, appears to show more than liberal disdain for the archaic rules of a discarded faith culture.

This is a serious shortcoming. Religious faith of all degrees, from mild affinity to wild fanaticism, lies at the heart of the Middle East conflict. If the Diwan does not represent all forms of faith, its role in the peace dialogue cannot be more than an ephemeral gesture.

A day behind the Salzburg statistics, Glyndebourne has announced 96 percent attendances over 76 performances this summer, which is four percent up on breakeven and a remarkable achievement for the marketing team in a season of corporate swine flu.

Next year will feature a new Billy Budd and Don Giovanni – plans here – and an expansion of the company’s cinema screenings.

So far, none of the fat-cat music festivals has suffered the effects of recession. But most are booked early in the year and the real test of their resilience will come in 2010.

Box-office returns from the current Salzburg festival show a 60 percent increase of ticket sales in Russia and a tripling of last year’s revenue from Chinese visitors.

The uptake is still a tiny proportion of the overall attendance which is overwhelmingly Austro-German, but the increase in new markets covered a sharp fall in the number of US visitors at Europe’s top-prestige festival, down seven percent on 2008.

Encouragingly, a ten percent drop in corporate bookings was fully covered by an increase in private uptake. Overall, the festival is running at 93 percent capacity – not bad for a recession.

Although Salzburg relies heavily on funding from the Austrian government and such long-term sponsors as Nestlé, Siemens and Credit Suisse, approximately half of its Euro 25.2 million budget comes from ticket sales – and the prices are among the highest on earth.

The Australian has just taken note of the death of the nation’s leading pianist, Geoffrey Tozer, almost a week after the sad event. But unlike the belated and bone-headed coverage in the Melbourne Age, the national Murdoch paper has got in a proper reaction – from the former prime minister Paul Keating.

Never one to mince words, Keating lays into his country’s dumbed values, saying of Tozer:

“Had he been a boneheaded footballer who was biffing fellow players and chasing women down hotel corridors late at night he would have probably had a premium on his career. But to have been among one of a handful of the world’s greatest pianists with all of that learning and comprehension was not quite up to it.”

This is pretty much what you read here earlier in the week, but coming from a national leader, it stands out as a massive indictment of Australian priorities. Not that it will make any difference.

The writer of the obit recalls that Tozer was to be found at his finest at the national academy of music, ANAM, where he taught and where I met him a couple of years back. Since then ANAM has been shut down by the federal government. In a land that abhors tall poppies, there can be no centre of national excellence.

Advance, Australia fair…

The Age in Melbourne has just posted a belated obituary of Geoffrey Tozer, five days after his death. It is a plodding recitation of career events, almost without incident and making no attempt to place Tozer in the context of his art and his profession. He was the foremost and most successful pianist in Australia. What is the point of buying a newspaper if it doesn’t give you that salient judgement?

In the three days since I posted the sad news of Geoffrey’s death, many hundreds of Australians – as well as others in all parts of the world – have visited this blog to learn more. Newspapers tend to moan about their industry’s parlous state. But when a famous city newspaper cannot report and comment on the death of a prominent citizen, you can see why some of them are in such trouble. I’m sorry to have to report it, but there it is.

Stephen Hough has slightly jumped the gun on one of the topics in tonight’s Lebrecht Interview by setting out his views on assisted suicide in his telegraph blog, here.

We were discussing the deaths of the conductor Edward Downes and his wife Joan who, in their own way, jumped the gun recently by opting for euthanasia in a Swiss clinic, Dignitas, rather than awaiting the inevitable.

Stephen, a devout Roman Catholic, argued lucidly against the legalisation of assisted suicide on the grounds that it would encourage elderly people to makes themselves ‘less of a burden’ on younger relatives, and that it would subject doctors to more moral stress and executive authority than they are qualified to exert.

Quite by coincidence, a very junior hospital doctor told me yesterday of an elderly patient in the final stages of cancer who refused to sign the DNR (do not resuscitate) forms, only for the attending physician to attempt to persuade her son to sign them by proxy. The doctor will have thought he was acting in the patient’s best interests – resuscitation of a comatose aged person is not pleasant for anyone – even as he overrode her express wishes. It is for such reasons that I believe we need to think very carefully before altering the laws on euthensia.

You may feel differently … feel free to discuss below.

In our intense and extensive conversation, Stephen – who is by far the most successful British pianists of recent times – touches upon his own near-death experience, as well his battle to convince the Church to recognise gay relationships.

The Lebrecht Interview airs tonight at 2145 UK and streams all week online on BBC Radio 3.

The Age of Melbourne used to be one of the world’s serious newspapers. During the 1990s it kept its finger on the pulse and was in the market for good journalism, wherever it reared its head. Many of my own pieces were syndicated in its pages.

Lamentably, like many city papers, the Age has gone into steep decline – especially in its coverage of anything above the middle of the brow. even so, I am distressed to learn that, four days after the death of Australia’s leading pianist, Geoffrey Tozer, a Melburnian proud and true, the Age has neither recorded his passing nor bothered to publish an obituary.

This is not just dumbing down; it’s downright bad journalism. If someone interesting dies on your doorstep and you don’t bother to report it, you are not a paper where the community, local and global, turns for news.

On a warmer note, a mutual friend in Melbourne reports a Tozer anecdote. One day a student asked if they could work together on the John Ireland concerto, a piece of considerable obscurity. No worries, said Geoffrey, sitting down at the second piano and playing the entire orchestral accompaniment from memory. He was a polymath of musical byways. And how lovely to see a video of him in an unplayable De Schloezer etude on artsjournal.tv

Some respondents to my first posting have resisted my assertion that no Australian pianist since Percy Grainger has made it onto the world’s leaderboard. One of them has posted a list of contenders. Worthy, indeed, some of them – but not world leaders.

The country’s most successful pianist, Geoffrey Tozer, has died at home in Melbourne, aged 54. A prolific, inquisitive artist, he tackled difficult and little-known works by Busoni, Medtner, Respighi and Roberto Gerhard, much of it undertaken on a ‘genius grant’ given somewhat controversially by the serving prime minister Paul Keating, whose son was Tozer’s pupil. Keating said later that he felt ‘ashamed’ to find an artist of Geoffrey’s talent had been reduced to teaching high school.

I met Geoffrey in Melbourne two years ago and we had a convivial chat, finding many points of agreement about the state of music in general and its Australian impoverishment in particular. He was good pianist and a good bloke, no vanity or falsity to him, the best possible advertisement for his art and his land. I am really sorry to hear of his passing, and depressed to find that only one Australian newspaper bothered to report it within three days.

If Tozer failed to get a firmer foothold on the international circuit, the failure was one of critical mass rather than personal merit. No Australian pianist since Percy Grainger has made it onto the leaderboard, and it always takes more than one to establish an innings. Tozer was batting alone, and in more ways than one. 

Australia, so quick to back its sportsmen – even when they lose, as the cricketers have just honourably done in England – offers little moral or media support to those who choose music as a means of self-expression. Geoffrey was a great ambassador for his nation’s culture, Much of the time it must have felt to him as if his nation didn’t care.