It has been an open secret in political and musical circles that David Milliband and his wife Louise adopted two children because they were unable to conceive. Mrs Milliband plays, under her maiden name, in the second violins of the London Symphony Orchestra. In the chatty corners of orchestral life, everyone knew of her personal sorrow and everyone clammed up.

Musicians, media and public officials are pretty good at keeping secrets when lives are at stake. I can think of one major problem with a prime minister’s child that never saw print and another with the wife of a well-known conductor. The decencies in these cases are almost unfailingly observed, at least in the UK.

So why did Milliband choose yesterday to go public with the tears he shed during the IVF treatment he underwent with his wife in the course of trying to have children? What public interest was served by this revelation? Why were the public decencies not preserved?

The obvious reason is that Milliband is front-running for leader of the Labour Party and wants to separate himself from the rest of the pack with a single humanising detail. That’s what politicians do: they make capital out of ordinary lives, sometimes out of their own.

I don’t like him the more for this ‘revelation’. On the contrary, I think Milliband has given too much information for no good reason. It will do him no great good, and it can only harm the conventions of decency in public life. There are some things that just don’t need to be broadcast.

Dear Mr Hill

I have greatly admired your doggedness in pursuing the paper trail that revealed Boris Johnson’s unflinching, partisan support for Veronica Wadley as London chair of the Arts Council. We always knew it was so, but it was good to see the proof.

What else have we learned? Not much. Most public appointments are partisan. Blair-Brown inserted trusted cronies into every cranny of the arts, not least the present chair and chief executive (notionally a non-political post) of Arts Council England. The heads of the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence are, it was announced today, resigning before the year is out because they were ‘too close’ to the last government. Many of Ken Livingstone’s senior appointments were old acquaintances not forgotten.

So why the fuss about Wadley? Because she’s a Tory and you don’t like them? I don’t like cauliflower, but I try not to go on about it, even when one is planted in the England goal. Of all the candidates for Wadley’s ill-paid post – £6,000 a year – she was in my view the best qualified.

I say this not as her former music critic (which I never was: fact-check, Mr Hill) but as her former Assistant Editor, who watched her closesly at work, clashed with her on many details of practice but few of principle, and cherished her unflagging dedication to the arts.

She will do a good job for London and the arts. If she doesn’t, you and I will be watching. But allow me to suggest, with collegial respect, that this is now a non-story. No scandal. Nothing happened. The Mayor got the woman he wanted into the job. End of.

all best

Norman Lebrecht  

Dear Mr Hill

I have greatly admired your doggedness in pursuing the paper trail that revealed Boris Johnson’s unflinching, partisan support for Veronica Wadley as London chair of the Arts Council. We always knew it was so, but it was good to see the proof.

What else have we learned? Not much. Most public appointments are partisan. Blair-Brown inserted trusted cronies into every cranny of the arts, not least the present chair and chief executive (notionally a non-political post) of Arts Council England. The heads of the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence are, it was announced today, resigning before the year is out because they were ‘too close’ to the last government. Many of Ken Livingstone’s senior appointments were old acquaintances not forgotten.

So why the fuss about Wadley? Because she’s a Tory and you don’t like them? I don’t like cauliflower, but I try not to go on about it, even when one is planted in the England goal. Of all the candidates for Wadley’s ill-paid post – £6,000 a year – she was in my view the best qualified.

I say this not as her former music critic (which I never was: fact-check, Mr Hill) but as her former Assistant Editor, who watched her closesly at work, clashed with her on many details of practice but few of principle, and cherished her unflagging dedication to the arts.

She will do a good job for London and the arts. If she doesn’t, you and I will be watching. But allow me to suggest, with collegial respect, that this is now a non-story. No scandal. Nothing happened. The Mayor got the woman he wanted into the job. End of.

all best

Norman Lebrecht  

Veronica Wadley has been announced as the new Arts Council chair for London, a job which covers most of the country’s largest arts institutions and comes with the backing of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

It’s a case of if you don’t succeed at first.

Last year, her candidacy was shot down by the national Arts Council chair, Liz Forgan, on the spurious grounds that she had no arts cred. Forgan’s personal and political prejudice against Wadley was backed by the Labour Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, whose disappearance from office after the election was loudly cheered across the arts spectrum. Forgan is not likely to outlast him by long.

In point of fact, Wadley – with whom I worked closely when she was Editor of the former Evening Standard – has shown more passion for the arts than any newspaper person in my experience, with the possible exception of Alan Rusbridger at the Guardian. She hired me to revitalise the paper’s arts coverage and allowed me to extend it to the limits of our budget and my own ingenuity. Often, she would call me early in the morning to clarify an esoteric point in an overnight ballet review. Her appetite for detail is ravenous. 

Since leaving the job a year ago, she has visited practically every arts organisation within radius and seen most of their shows. She certainly knows as much as anyone about the present state of the arts and is ideally well equipped to guide the sector through recession.

It’s a very good appointment and one she will carry off with her customary application.

Veronica Wadley has been announced as the new Arts Council chair for London, a job which covers most of the country’s largest arts institutions and comes with the backing of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

It’s a case of if you don’t succeed at first.

Last year, her candidacy was shot down by the national Arts Council chair, Liz Forgan, on the spurious grounds that she had no arts cred. Forgan’s personal and political prejudice against Wadley was backed by the Labour Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, whose disappearance from office after the election was loudly cheered across the arts spectrum. Forgan is not likely to outlast him by long.

In point of fact, Wadley – with whom I worked closely when she was Editor of the former Evening Standard – has shown more passion for the arts than any newspaper person in my experience, with the possible exception of Alan Rusbridger at the Guardian. She hired me to revitalise the paper’s arts coverage and allowed me to extend it to the limits of our budget and my own ingenuity. Often, she would call me early in the morning to clarify an esoteric point in an overnight ballet review. Her appetite for detail is ravenous. 

Since leaving the job a year ago, she has visited practically every arts organisation within radius and seen most of their shows. She certainly knows as much as anyone about the present state of the arts and is ideally well equipped to guide the sector through recession.

It’s a very good appointment and one she will carry off with her customary application.

Gianandrea Noseda is stepping down after a decade as chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester.

It has been a fairly glorious time in which the Italian, a protege of Valery Gergiev’s, gave the first Beethoven cycle to be made available as a free download, pursued a strong strand of 20th century Russian music and made more than 20 commercial records for Chandos.

The orchestra showed itself to be in fine form in the Mahler cycle it shared recently with the Halle and Noseda, 46, will be wanting to devote more of his time to opera. He has been principal conductor in Turin for the past three years.

When more than a million people downloaded his interpretation of the Beethoven symphonies, I speculated in print that they might be as influential as Toscanini’s. Not for musicians, perhaps, but an awful lot of listeners around the world, from Vietnam to Mexico, have received more enlightenment from this conductor than from any other.

BBC Press release follows:

Gianandrea Noseda is stepping down after a decade as chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester.

It has been a fairly glorious time in which the Italian, a protege of Valery Gergiev’s, gave the first Beethoven cycle to be made available as a free download, pursued a strong strand of 20th century Russian music and made more than 20 commercial records for Chandos.

The orchestra showed itself to be in fine form in the Mahler cycle it shared recently with the Halle and Noseda, 46, will be wanting to devote more of his time to opera. He has been principal conductor in Turin for the past three years.

When more than a million people downloaded his interpretation of the Beethoven symphonies, I speculated in print that they might be as influential as Toscanini’s. Not for musicians, perhaps, but an awful lot of listeners around the world, from Vietnam to Mexico, have received more enlightenment from this conductor than from any other.

BBC Press release follows:

Hot out of the sacred music cauldron in Fez, I came home to the heart of the opera debate. Last night, I contemplated the future of opera on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves with ENO artistic director John  Berry and ex-Arts Council chair Christopher Frayling. Tonight, I’m on BBC4 in a repeat of David Thompson’s excellent film Pavarotti: A Life in Seven Arias.

What hope is there for an art whose creative ferment ran out in the 1920s when Puccini and Janacek died? Since then, fewer than a dozen new operas have become popular fixtures. As a result, the art tries to reinvent itself in ever more bizarre deconstructions.

In Germany, the trend of staging arias among the trash cans has become so extreme that booing is frequent, especially at Bayreuth, and the conductor of the Komische Oper Berlin, Carl St Clair, has quit in protest.

Few other cultures go to such extremes, though Calixto Bieito managed to outrage Spain and subseqeuently half of Europe by opening Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera with the king and his court sitting on toilets, pants around their ankles. Die Fledermaus, in his Cardiff production, was – he said – ‘all about prostitution’.

At ENO, John Berry has eschewed the wilder shores of radicalism and placed many of his shows in the hands of tested theatre and film directors. Critics mostly hate these prespective-shift rereadings of classic situations but the audience, which has rejuvenated dramatically over the past 2-3 years, is generally enthusiastic. The Directors Cut is working for ENO.

What’s more, Berry is extending the repertory with works like Ligeti’s Le grand macabre, Saariaho’s L’amour de loin and Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers. Adventure is payng off for a house that receives £10 million less than stolid Covent Garden. 

Yet I argued with John that this is not enough to bring opera back to life as a cultural compulsion. Commissioning new works and backing them to the hilt – as ENO and the Met did with John Adams and Doctor Atomic – is the essential first step. But opera also needs to engage with 21st century technology, with screens and multimedia, with interactive flexibility. What was the last technical development in the opera house? Surtitles – and they are 25 years old.

How long, in recessional bite, can we afford such extravagance? Frayling was keen to know. You can hear the discussion here.

As for Pavarotti, what we have learned since his death three years ago is not just that the big man himself is irreplaceable but that the role of Great Tenor may no longer be tenable. With Domingo on his last legs and Rolando Villazon a sad burnout, there is no king pirate on the high Cs. That era could be over. How does opera replace the black magic? You tell me…. 

Hot out of the sacred music cauldron in Fez, I came home to the heart of the opera debate. Last night, I contemplated the future of opera on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves with ENO artistic director John  Berry and ex-Arts Council chair Christopher Frayling. Tonight, I’m on BBC4 in a repeat of David Thompson’s excellent film Pavarotti: A Life in Seven Arias.

What hope is there for an art whose creative ferment ran out in the 1920s when Puccini and Janacek died? Since then, fewer than a dozen new operas have become popular fixtures. As a result, the art tries to reinvent itself in ever more bizarre deconstructions.

In Germany, the trend of staging arias among the trash cans has become so extreme that booing is frequent, especially at Bayreuth, and the conductor of the Komische Oper Berlin, Carl St Clair, has quit in protest.

Few other cultures go to such extremes, though Calixto Bieito managed to outrage Spain and subseqeuently half of Europe by opening Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera with the king and his court sitting on toilets, pants around their ankles. Die Fledermaus, in his Cardiff production, was – he said – ‘all about prostitution’.

At ENO, John Berry has eschewed the wilder shores of radicalism and placed many of his shows in the hands of tested theatre and film directors. Critics mostly hate these prespective-shift rereadings of classic situations but the audience, which has rejuvenated dramatically over the past 2-3 years, is generally enthusiastic. The Directors Cut is working for ENO.

What’s more, Berry is extending the repertory with works like Ligeti’s Le grand macabre, Saariaho’s L’amour de loin and Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers. Adventure is payng off for a house that receives £10 million less than stolid Covent Garden. 

Yet I argued with John that this is not enough to bring opera back to life as a cultural compulsion. Commissioning new works and backing them to the hilt – as ENO and the Met did with John Adams and Doctor Atomic – is the essential first step. But opera also needs to engage with 21st century technology, with screens and multimedia, with interactive flexibility. What was the last technical development in the opera house? Surtitles – and they are 25 years old.

How long, in recessional bite, can we afford such extravagance? Frayling was keen to know. You can hear the discussion here.

As for Pavarotti, what we have learned since his death three years ago is not just that the big man himself is irreplaceable but that the role of Great Tenor may no longer be tenable. With Domingo on his last legs and Rolando Villazon a sad burnout, there is no king pirate on the high Cs. That era could be over. How does opera replace the black magic? You tell me…. 

I’ve just got back from the Festival of World Sacred Music in Fez, Morocco, positively pullulating with multiple forms of musical spirituality that ranged from Burundi war drummers to stately Cambodian ballet. I won’t fill in much detail at this point other than to lay down a personal marker for the blind Mali singers Amadou and Mariam – late stand-ins for the injured US performer Ben Harper – whose act was both ecstatic and hypnotic. I have rarely sat so breathless through a musical performance.

If you want to check what I was up to last night, visit the unofficial festival blog whose correspondent Mary Finnegan caught up with us at the start of a four-concert night. I ought to be exhausted. Instead, I’m exhilarated by the razzle of the music. See Mary’s blog for pics.