Nothing has been solved by the British Government’s preservation order on Abbey Road studios. All it means is that the building cannot be demolished for the time being, although it can and will continue to lose money – or not make enough – for its owners, EMI, and their owners, the hedge fund Terra Firma.

So what’s to be done? I shall be talking about it at 2pm New York time today with John Schaefer on WNYC’s Soundcheck. If you’re snowbound or otherwise free, you can listen in real time or playback at your leisure just here

The studio man most trusted by Herbert von Karajan has died in Paris, aged 79. Michel Glotz was the maestro’s ears and eyes.

An EMI flak who fell out with the label’s British management when, after sacking Walter Legge, they proposed to replace Karajan with Sir John Barbirolli, he had been helping Maria Callas through her Onassis crisis when Karajan made him an irresistible offer.

As Glotz told Karajan’s biographer, Richard Osborne, over dinner in New York in 1965 he was asked ‘to coordinate all Karajan’s musical activities: conducting and touring, stage direction, recordings, films, television and, in particular, (founding) the (Salzburg) Easter Festival’ (Osborne, 531).

For the next quarter of a century, nothing significant happened in Karajan’s empire without Glotz’s say-so. He lasted longer with Karajan than any other close aide and was much resented by record producers when he second-guessed them in studio, prompting the maestro to reject an apparently acceptable take.

Never a whizz at technology or a pair of golden ears, Glotz had studied piano with Marguerite Long and possessed an aesthethic sensibility which, combined with his business sense and general good humour, was what earned him Karajan’s unwavering trust. A studio picture  by Lauterwasser shows Karajan shushing the orchestra wth one finger to his lips while Glotz, beside him, is thumbing his nose in mild mockery.

Part-Jewish by origin, Glotz went into hiding with his family during the Second World War while Karajan conducted the Horst Wessel Led in  Paris. Glotz’s brother joined the Résistance and was shot by the Germans.

But the past was not allowed to come between them. Glotz and Karajan spoke French or English together, never German, and Karajan was welcomed into Glotz’s family circle. Glotz told colleagues that the conductor was not an anti-semite and never a Nazi, just an opportunist with his eye on the main chance.  

Aside from Karajan’s affairs, Glotz ran a successful artists agency in Paris, with many Karajan allies as his clients. He was formidably discreet, deflecting my research inquiries with an affable courtesy, backed by a battery of lawyers. 

Michel Glotz was the last survivor of the golden era of classical recording, and his death, on February 15, has yet to be acknowledged by the corporate relics of that defunct industry.

The Royal Opera House Covent Garden is operating a payback policy for anyone who bought tickets for Tamerlano next month, expecting to hear Placido Domingo in the role of Bazajet. The great tenor is about to undergo ‘preventative surgery’ for an unspecified condition that will put him out of action for at least six weeks.

Although the ROH has a cast-iron policy of never giving back what has honestly passed through the box-office grille, it is breaking the rule in this case “in recognition of the withdrawal of such an exceptional artist in a rarely performed opera.” Anyone with Domingo tickets will receive a credit note for 20 percent of their value – which could mean up to £60 off their next ROH purchase. Jolly decent of them, don’t you think?

So why do I feel uneasy? Because 99 percent of the good folk who booked those dates booked not for Handel or Tamerlano or Christine Schäfer or the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with Ivor Bolton but to hear the 69 year-old legend in a baroque opera for the first, and possibly, last time in London town (he has previously sung the role with distinction in Washington, Madrid, Berlin and elsewhere).

Those people who were lucky enough to land tickets for Domingo will be sorely disappointed – and still obliged to see the opera whether they like it or not. All that Covent Garden is giving them is cashback on their next Tosca, or whatever.

Now there is no way the ROH could have offered a full refund, or the sold-out Tamerlano would be playing to a scattering of late-baroque geeks and personal representatives of the other artists. There is no placebo on heaven or earth that can compensate for a star cancellation. But Covent Garden is trying to have it both ways – and that never works. It should have toughed it out and said: no refunds.

This way, everyone who goes to Tamerlano knows they are on a bit of a loser and will feel somehow cheated. Even if Kurt Streit, the late replacement, sings like the Archangel Gabriel at matins, people will still shift in their seats and mutter, ‘he’s not what I came for’.

By paying back the Domingo Discount, the ROH does a disservice to the rest of the cast – and it inflates once more in the public mind the odious notion that opera is all about a handful of strutting stars, rather than potentially the most exciting art form on earth. Mistake, Tony Hall, big mistake.

 

EMI have moved – very slowly, after a week’s deliberation – to deny that the Abbey Road studios are up for sale. Since the original reports were planted on the Financial Times by EMI’s owners, the hedge fund Terra Firma, today’s denial has to be seen as an exercise in testing the market – an attempt to see whether the site might fetch a higher price than the £30 million which EMI now admits it was offered last summer.

As property prices in the NW8 postal district continue to heat up in rising inflation, it is only a matter of time before Terra Firma is made an offer it cannot refuse. In the meantime, the firm is discussing ‘revitalisation’ of the studios with ‘interested third parties’.

So far, the most interested party to declare itself is Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose interest tends towards self-promotion. Sir Paul McCartney made some vague noises and English Heritage made sure that the block could not be turned into luxury housing.

All agree that Abbey Road will require ‘a substantial injection of capital’ to keep it open. Terra Firma may think it can capitalise on a wave of popular sentiment to claim public funds from the National Lottery to restock and refurbish its ailing facility.

This is not altogether a pipe dream, but if such money were to be granted it must be on the condition that the studios are opened to the public, as I and others have proposed, as London’s museum of music. That concept is so compelling and so long overdue that I am putting together a proposal and a costing for the next government, due to be elected in May.

The combination of archival display and live performance coculd make Abbey Road a magnet for music lovers of all genres.  

One of the busiest events on London’s South Bank Centre next year will be a 10-day residency by the Chinese pianist in May 2011 in which children from all over the country are summoned to play.

‘We’ve inspired 40 million kids to play the piano in China,’ Lang Lang is quoted as saying, ‘now let’s get started here’. The plan is to wheel in an army of keyboard instruments for any young person to tinkle, climaxing in a massed finale when Lang Lang’s chosen talents get to make their Royal Festival Hall debut.

This is a nicely timed extension of last year’s placement of old pianos on London street corners, a return of the old joanna to the alleys of Bermondsey. But it is also a shrewd advancement of the Lang Lang brand, not just as big-buck international superstar but as an educator and role model to a rising generation that is running low on heroes.

Unlike sportsmen and rock stars, Lang Lang is untouched by sleaze and drugs. What you see is what you get – a vibrant young player who makes the piano sound the way he wants. There may be some backstage chicanery – like the pre-recorded track that he mimed to at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony – but there is no mistaking the urgency of his music making, or his desire to share it with as many people as possible.

Whether by chance or divine irony, the climax of the Lang Lang extravaganza will coincide on the South Bank with the culmination of another residency – by Maurizio Pollini, a pianist who is Lang Lang’s opposite in almost every respect. Introspective where Lang Lang is extravert, awkward and inhibited on stage, the Italian projects an altogether antipodal form of intensity, an inward contemplation that reminds one more of prayer than player. 

The contrast promises to be one of the most extreme dichotomies of piano playing since Mozart took on Clementi and had to settle for a split result.

London’s South Bank announced its 2010-2011 classical music season this morning, a season which contains no fewer than 26 Mahler performances and possibly more.

In and around these concerts, I shall be curating a series of events, interpretations, inspirations and provocations under the banner Why Mahler? – which is also the title of my forthcoming book on the composer and his intellectual legacy.

I can’t yet announce what’s in the series, but I can promise that it will not be nostalgic or retrospective. If Mahler is the biggest selling composer at the 21st century box-office, that must be because his music speaks to the issues of today. People go to Mahler seeking anything from the mysteries of the universe, to a focus of consolation for some intensely personal confusion or loss. Now why is that?

Why Mahler? will try to provide some answers, some further questions, something that relates the music we hear to the world we inhabit. The series will embrace art, politics, religion, science, communications and most other topics that dominate our daily headlines – including, not least, the idolatrous cult of celebrity.

More details in due course.

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There were more than a hundred tourists milling outside the studios in the noonday rain, a few minutes ago. The magnetism of the place is indisputable and, though the wise heads at Terra Firma, are talking of marketing an Abbey Road brand, once the place is closed to musical activity there will be nothing left to attract the crowds.

What draws people to Abbey Road is the cover of the Beatles album that they mimic in posed foursomes on the famous zebra crossing. But they are also drawn by the wisp of a chance of seeing a celebrated musician arriving for a session. When the music stops, Abbey Road will revert to real estate and the tourists will find another site for souvenir shots.

The latest reports have it that the National Trust is considering buying the site, adding it to the Liverpool boyhood homes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon that it already owns. The Sun newspaper – which this morning reports us steaming to war with Argentina – is backing DJ Chris Evans’ campaign to save Abbey Road. The Daily Mail – not yet fully mobilised – opposes any intervention.

The optimum solution is a sale that would convert the building into a national House of Music – part museum, part venue for live performance. Even a hedge fund analyst (and I’ve met a few) ought to see the potential there for rights ownership and profit. 

There was a removals van outside Abbey Road studios this morning, but I think it was for the house next door. This is not an overnight sale, nor is it the first time the studios have been floated on the market

Sir Paul McCartney’s suggestion on BBC Newsnight that a ‘solution’ might be found does not necessarily means that Abbey Road will continue as a recording venue. Those days are gone, probably forever.

What Abbey Road could become is what London lacks – a museum of music in all its forms, a place to house the visual archives of Decca and EMI, the V&A’s unwanted instrument collection, an occasional live concert and a rotating exhibition of all that was weird and wonderful in the annals of the recording century.

Abbey Road is already a vibrant tourist magnet. With a modest admission charge, the site could pay its way under enlightened ownership.

Whatever its fate, the memories will remain – and mine are rich and varied. I can’t forget the fat soprano who broke a toilet seat during an Abbey Roand session (as it were) and blamed the offence on her weeping assistant. Or the famous early music conductor who kept coming into the control room to check that the producer and engineers were using the same ‘authentic’ score as he was – ‘he can’t hear the difference,’ giggled the recording team.

Or Yehudi Menuhin, who often seemed to be there on some business or other when I was around. He had been there in 1931 with Edward Elgar, recording his violin concerto, and with his teacher Georges Enesco doing the Bach double concerto, during the studio’s first year of operation. And he was there again on the 50th anniversary in 1981, recording the Bach double with a 12 year-old Chinese scholarship student at his school, a boy called Jin Li.  

The record came out and vanished, never to be reissued on CD. Jin Li went on to make a good career as concertmaster in Singapore and soloist with many of the Asian orchestras. I asked him a while back what he remembered of that jubilee session. Here’s what he wrote:

I was very young at that time and did not know how great the occasion was. Before that,I also did not know that Mr Menuhin and his teacher Enesco recorded the same concerto fifty years earlier in the same studio. It’s only after I had done it I realized how meaningful that was.
      I remember there were lots of people in the recording session (all London Symphony Orchestra players), that caused me to feel excited and quickly I became involved in the music. At that tender age,I neither felt nervous nor being pressured. At the end of the second movement,Mr Menuhin came up to me and said :”That was  beautiful”,I was so happy when I heard that,having the praise and approval of Mr Menuhin,for me it’s a incomparable honour.
      From a very young age,I was already not a talkative person,and only knew to practice the violin and express my feeling through music, did not think about things outside music. I remember Mr Menuhin changed some bowings in the third movement to bring out the clarity from the music.The recording is made in one go and form a coherent whole.
     Now that I have grown, and read some of Mr Menuhin’s books, I have discovered that the recording he did with me was an event of profound and lasting meaning,it came down in one continous culture line, can be traced to the same origin. I hope fifty years later,I can play the same piece again with my student.
 
I quote Jin Li’s letter at length because it signifies what needs to be preserved of Abbey Road – not the recording facilities, which have become obsolescent, but the performing space of Studio One and the continuity of transmission, the passing of a tradition from one generation to the next. That was Abbey Road’s great achievement.   

News that the hedge-trimmers who own EMI are putting the Abbey Road studios up for sale comes as no surprise round here. Living round the corner, as I do, I have seen a thinning of the trail of musicians making their Monday morning slog to work, and the great orchestral pantechnicons are rarely seen nowadays in the courtyard.

It’s not just to do with the shrinking record industry. Many of the facilities provided by Abbey Road can now be emulated on a laptop in a musician’s back-bedroom. The ceremony of going to studio is no longer a necessity of musical life. 

Still, I’ll be sorry to see it go. I used to drop in to the canteen to catch up with musicians between sessions and always appreciated the informality of the place. It was not always so. Old-timers told me they used to get turned away by the doorman if they turned up for a session without jacket and tie. The grand old days of Elgar conducting Land of Hope and Glory are preserved on Youtube for all to share.

The outer wall of the studio complex attracts hundreds of tourists every day, all years round, many of them leaving grafitti that declare their love for the Beatles, who enshrined the house in legend. 

What will number 3 Abbey Road fetch on the property market? The way prices are heating up round here, I’d guess £30-40 million.

Not a bad return on the 1929 purchase price of £100,000, but nowhere near the £120 million that Terra Firma need to raise by June to service a Citibank loan – and when the sale boards go up they will offer a sorry symbol of an industry that is coming to an end.

 

 

Hats off to a pair of chums who start the week with a smart career move.

Peter Alward has become director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, carefully stepping over a hole where three million Euros used to be before his predecessor made off with it; and, even more carefully, recalibrating the balance of power between the founder’s widow, Eliette von Karajan, and its chief conductor, Simon Rattle.

Both know that Passion Pete is not a man to be underestimated. At EMI Classics, which he ran for a decade before the company was sold to hedge-trimmers, he was the only classical label boss to develop a new artists line – an initiative which introduced such young comets as Ian Bostridge, Thomas Ades, Alban Gerhardt, the Belcea quartet, Ittai Shapiro and Alisa Weilerstein. He was also very good at saying No – and meaning it – to big beasts of the podium. Salzburg is in for a good time.

Also on the up is composer John Woolrich, who is about to be named director of Dartington International Festival and Summer School in the rolling hills of Devon. Dartington has been run for the past 11 years by the ingenious Gavin Henderson, who kept spirits high and finances in order through one of the most prestigious contacts book in the kingdom. It was at Dartington that Piotr Anderszewski made his conducting debut and I achieved a rare concert billing in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw.

John W has a tough act to follow, but he beat off a very strong shortlist and he is full of ideas. Those hills are going to ring with a remarkable diversity of sounds.

Hats off to a pair of chums who start the week with a smart career move.

Peter Alward has become director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, carefully stepping over a hole where three million Euros used to be before his predecessor made off with it; and, even more carefully, recalibrating the balance of power between the founder’s widow, Eliette von Karajan, and its chief conductor, Simon Rattle.

Both know that Passion Pete is not a man to be underestimated. At EMI Classics, which he ran for a decade before the company was sold to hedge-trimmers, he was the only classical label boss to develop a new artists line – an initiative which introduced such young comets as Ian Bostridge, Thomas Ades, Alban Gerhardt, the Belcea quartet, Ittai Shapiro and Alisa Weilerstein. He was also very good at saying No – and meaning it – to big beasts of the podium. Salzburg is in for a good time.

Also on the up is composer John Woolrich, who is about to be named director of Dartington International Festival and Summer School in the rolling hills of Devon. Dartington has been run for the past 11 years by the ingenious Gavin Henderson, who kept spirits high and finances in order through one of the most prestigious contacts book in the kingdom. It was at Dartington that Piotr Anderszewski made his conducting debut and I achieved a rare concert billing in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw.

John W has a tough act to follow, but he beat off a very strong shortlist and he is full of ideas. Those hills are going to ring with a remarkable diversity of sounds.