He is one of the best-selling classical artists and among the most popular with his colleagues – an open, warm, intelligent and gentle man who has never sought the limelight and is famously reluctant to talk about himself.

In the Lebrecht Interview tonight on BBC Radio 3 (and streamed all week), Vladimir Ashkenazy talks about his life in Stalin’s Russia, his sympathy for some of his oppressors, and the values that have sustained him.

Leo Smit, a Dutch-Jewish composer murdered by the Germans in 1943, will have two of his chamber works performed at broadcast tomorrow at the Delft Chambe Music Festival.

Dutch Radio will broadcast the concert on-line and it can be accessed pretty much wherever you are.

I owe this information to Rolf den Otter, who provides full details below:

The names and works of the Czech composers who were confined in Terezin and killed in Auschwitz have become widely known – Viktor Ullmann fio his opera Emperor of Atlantis, Pavel Haas for his string quartets, Hans Krasa, Gideon Klein, Ilse Weber (of whom more another time) and others.

Because Terezin was a showcase of Nazi ‘normality’, the works of its prisoners were archived on site and preserved for an unforseen posterity.

In the rest of ocupied Europe, composers suffered total obliteration – so much so that it is extremely hard to call to mind the names of Polish, Dutch, Greek or French musicians who were seized and killed because of their racial origin or political opinions.

An important piece of research has just appeared listing seven Hungarian composers who were exterminated during the short 1944-45 period of Nazi oppression – among them Bartok’s personal copyist, Jeno Deutsch, and the gifted Lazslo Weiner, first husband of Vera Rozsa, who went on to become one of the world’s most successful singing teachers (her pupils include Kiri te Kanawa, Karita Mattila and Anne-Sofie von Otter).

The research, by Agnes Kory, can be read here.

It breaks the silence on another group of the great unheard. Time to dig out their music. 

Coming up tonight on The Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3 is Michael Kaiser, in very sober mood.

Known as Mr Fix-it, or the Turnaround King, for his record in hauling back arts orgs from the brink of bankruptcy, Kaiser – presently chief of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC – surveys the post-crash arts landscape and comes up with few new solutions.

A lot of companies will go to the wall, he says. Tune in to hear which, and why.

And how Michael Kaiser ticks.

There are few heroes in classical music publishing, a musty world of well-meaning mugwumps and would-be minor villains. Not enough profit, I guess, to attract screen heroes.

David Drew, who has died aged 78, was the industry’s Humphrey Bogart. In 17 years as head of contemporary music at Boosey & Hawkes (1975-92), he stood for nothing but the truth: the music he believed in. By an unrelenting banging of his head against the wall, he brought a measure of fame and reward to a dozen composers whom posterity had left on the shelf.

Drew’s Dodos, they were called, men (and one woman) who had made some brief claim to attention and then, by accident or misfortune, got forgotten. The composers he signed include Kurt Schwertsik, H K Gruber and York Höller, three stubborn, witty voices working outside the deadly-dull Austro-German mainstream.

He retrieved Berthold Goldschmidt, once the white hope of Weimar Germany, from a cold-water flat in Belsize Park and put him, in his late 80s, on a continental tour.

Antal Dorati and Igor Markevitch, two important conductors, had their compositions brought to print and light as did Tona Scherchen, daughter of a master-conductor and an interesting fusion-maker of Chinese and European tonalities.

Most triumpantly, David turned a man he met in a bar into the first million-selling living composer on record, retrieving Henryk Mikolai Gorecki from communist oppression and modernist disdain to a place in the pop charts with his adhesive, part-sung third symphony.

David quit the job just as Gorecki became a hit, leaving the rest of his dodos in less attentive care and with far fewer performances. Now that he is dead, they risk fading to blank.

That would be a crying shame. David had exquisite taste. Not one of his dodos is a dud, though some require close and prolonged listening before the aesthetic reward shines through. B&H, like most publishers, are going through tough times. But their brand and their future lies in the talents that David Drew accumulated and the best tribute they could pay to this most dedicated of publishers would be to mount a festival of his dodos. 

I can’t see it happening, but wouldn’t it just be a heroic triumph? 

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David was also the world’s greatest authority on Kurt Weill and the greatest enthusiast. I tried for years to get him to write a popular biography for a series I was editing, but he simply knew too much to condense it and, in the end, left just the one indispensible guide to the works. Watching Weill’s Jonny Johnson the other week in a poor revival, I was minded how much fire David found in the piece. I meant to ring him afterwards, but forgot. Too late now.