No sooner had I broken the Chinese pianist’s label switch on Bloomberg than Google flashed up his new deal with Bombardier, makers of Lear jets as its brand ambassador for 2010. ‘Flying on Bombardier business jets allows me to reach audiences worldwide faster, well-rested and focussed,’ explained Lang Lang. So I guess we won’t be bumping into him again in the Easyjet departure lounge.

Before these coups, Lang Lang was in Davos last week, lecturing world and business leaders on ‘enrichment through music’. The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thought he had ‘nothing very much to say’. More likely there was nothing much he wanted to say as brand Lang Lang builds its global reach. The pity of it was the his presence at Davos rather eclipsed that of Gabriela Montero, the Venezuelan wonder whose improvisatory pianism presented a real lesson for world leaders on how to play their way out of recession.

So what’s driving Lang Lang? Setting aside 21st century greed-is-good theology, people who know him well tell me he wants to be taken seriously. At DG, he did not feel that top brass gave him the respect they showed to Argerich, Pollini and Zimmerman – unsurprising, given the length and depth of their achievements, but Lang Lang at 27 is a man in a hurry to be top pianist. At Sony he will find little competition, except from the semi-retired Murray Perahia. 

The refreshing aspect of Lang Lang is that he has no hidden agenda. Next time I see him, if I ask him what went down at DG, he’ll be open, frank and engagingly undiplomatic. Buttoned-up Sony, who are refusing to comment on the deal, should be aware that their new catch is dynamite in more ways than they perhaps anticipated.  

A hilarious blog by Gareth Davies, principal flute of the London Symphony Orchestra, tells what really happens when a conductor is unwell. In this instance, Sir John Eliot Gardiner was puking in Paris five minutes before curtain and the players were trying to remember Plan B.

Read it here.

Happily, conductors are made of sterner stuff than tennis aces – witness Rafa Nadal wussing out of the Australian Open – and Beethoven is better at concentrating the mind than another set against Andy Murray. The end result was that the piccolo player got a free beer (she often does, I hear, and well deserved).

I once heard Franz Welser-Möst heaving his guts out in the interval of a Tokyo concert. He returned from the flush to give a Beethoven Fifth of reckless intensity, so edgy that no-one’s insides were safe. That’s music – you feel something, and you share it with others.

The last time Hilary Hahn topped the classical charts, I reported that she was selling fewer than 500 copies a week. This time, after an appearance on the Tonight Show, Anne Midgette writes that she’s selling fewer than 1,000 – still peanuts on any pop scale.

Anne quotes a Sony man who says classical accounts for three percent of US record sales. No longer. It’s below two percent, and most of that is made up of non-classical crossover. Real classical music is way below the Nielsen rating line.

This stark and unchaing reality makes the Grammy classical awards materially irrelevant, even if one were to agree that Michael Tilson Thomas’s account of Mahler’s eighth symphony was the best thing to happen in the past musical year.

So where do classical recordings sell? Not in America, that’s for sure. South Korea, as I have written elsewhere, spends most per capita on classics – 18 percent of all music sales are classical. Close behind is France, with 9 percent of the music market.

What that means is that a French newcomer like Renaud Capucon or David Fray can be guaranteed bigger sales and national fame than a US star like Hilary Hahn, no matter what network show she appears on. Much the same is true for Hungary, Austria, Germany, Finland and even the UK, all of which mantain high public profiles for classical musicians.

That leaves the American classical artist in a quandary. With domestic support in steepling decline, more and more may be advised to build their careers in another country.