The Brazilian Symphony Orchestra has dismissed 44 players for ‘insubordination’, according to representatives of the musicians who have contacted me by email.

See here for details.

The orchestra is now officially a war zone. Foreigners might be well advised to stay away.

– London Review of Books did not apply for renewed funding after being warned it would not get.

– Fellow-publishers were amazed at £40,000 for ‘not-for-profit’ Faber and Faber.
– Poetry Book Society, which manages the T S Eliot prize, was scrapped altogether. ‘I’ve not idea what they’re trying to tell us,’ said PBS chief Chris Holifield. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy called it ‘a disgusting decision’.

– Southwest England got left out again. And again. And again.
– Southwest London also also screwed. Sir Peter Hall’s Rose Theatre at Kingston was turned down. Its artistic director Stephen Unwin told The Stage:
“With cuts announced for the Waterman’s in Hounslow, the Orange Tree in Richmond, the Battersea Arts Centre in Wandsworth and Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, the funding situation in south west London is now worse than ever and the contrast with east London – especially the Olympic Boroughs – is stark. It’s clear that a large part of the Mayor of London’s cultural strategy has been ignored.”
Ockham's Razor
Ockham’s Razor at the Rose

– Hampstead Theatre was saved at the very last minute, after a majority wanted to cut it off for being too Hampstead, meaning too white and middle-class. Hampstead is run by Ed Hall, Sir Peter’s son.

– The Almeida Theatre, also in prosperous north London, was penalised by 39 percent, partly (I am told) due to bad blood between its director Michael Attenborough and ACE officials. ACE chief Alan Davey said: ‘they can do the same on less money.’

– Debate was suppressed on Welsh National Opera, which receives most of its funding from England. Why? Just don’t ask.

– Information about the cuts was released with what appeared to be deliberate disorganisation, avoiding a simple alphabetical catalogue and burying some of the biggest changes in small print. It may not, of course, have been deliberate. Never rule out incompetence as a factor at the ACE.
– 

Ummentioned in his acclamation last week as the new head of London’s Royal Opera, Kasper Holten’s first film opens next week in Copenhagen.

Titled ‘Juan’ and based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it opens with a rather fetching man in a hot shower (rear view) and seems to treat the subject with serious intent.
Here are some promo shots.
Christopher Maltman with Maria Bengtsson
Elizabeth Futral
Holten himself
And here’s a smashing video clip in the shower.
Don’t miss it.

Not all of my analysis during this hectic day has been pinpoint accurate, and I have had to adjust some of the earlier posts according to information that has rushed in later. Such are the risk one takes when reporting at the speed of light.

The overall picture, however, is as I described it: the ACE has performed a paper-pushing exercise in which bureaucratic convenience took precedence over artistic merit and need. Much of its work could have been done by a robot.
But what’s this from the BBC’s arts editor, Will Gompertz? Read it, blink, and then ask yourself what planet Will Gompertz inhabits:
It didn’t need to be like this. Arts Council Englandcould have chosen to apply a 15% cut across the board and thereby avoid the inevitable hullabaloo of those who have had all their funding taken away questioning the decision.

Will Gompertz

Gompz, who had previously written a puff piece on the ACE’s lacklustre chief executive Alan Davey, does not seem to understand that the ACE exists to make choices. If it made no choices, as he recommends, it would have no function whatsoever and his ‘heroic’ Davey no desk to sit behind.

Gompz has not lost the plot. He never got it in the first place.

Dame Liz Forgan, chair of Arts Council England, has been asked to justify her cuts live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme this evening.

I was asked by the programme’s editor to appear opposite her.
Liz has just told the BBC that she won’t appear with Lebrecht – ‘and you can tell him I said so’.
Unlike her to run scared of a fight. She must be feeling on very shaky ground.

                                          photo: ACE
Either way, one of us will have to record our comments beforehand so that Liz does not have to face me.
Appropriate conduct for a public official? Hey-ho.
LATE  EXTRA: Arts and Business chief Colin Tweedy tells me she made the same condition with Radio 4’s World at One when he was due to debate cuts with her last November.

Press reports from Rio say that 41 to 44 players in the Brazil Symphony Orchestra are to be dismissed for ‘insubordination’ – their refusal to attend re-auditions for their own jobs.

The news, carried also in the authoritative O Globo, contradicts the official version that this process is not about sacking musicians.
A youth orchestra is appearing at present in place of the OSB and foreign soloists are being approached not to appear with it, or with its chief conductor, Roberto Minczuk.  

The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London should, by all reasonable criteria, have been dropped from the Arts Council’s list of benefit claimants.

The ICA all but went bust last year after a lot period of decline. Its chairman, the BBC arts fixer Alan Yentob, and its executive director Ekow Eshun both resigned.The ACE pumped in emergency funding of £1.2 million and a new team took over.

But the venue is off the map of contemporary art activity in London, the audience has fled and despite many brave words of renaissance the ICA is just delivering same-old, same-old.
During the ACE’s discussions on funding cuts, several around the table were of the opinion that the ICA should be left to sink since it cannot swim unaided and serves no apparent purpose.
However, at the selfsame table sat Ekow Eshun,

Ekow Eshunwho was responsible for its decline. It would have been impolite to Ekow to slaughter his former cash cow. So the ACE collectively agreed to throw it a lifeline. Another one. Good money after bad.

And they say the process is unbiased. That makes two members of the ACE who have a direct interest in its grants. No doubt they both left the room at the appropriate time, but still…

At a time of national cuts, when centres of excellence are having 15 percent sliced off their funding over the next four years, Arts Council England has awarded a massive 108 percent grant increase to London’s Barbican Centre.

Why is that?
Because of its East-of-City role in the 2012 Olympics, apparently.
The Barbican is funded by the Corporation of the City of London. It was never intended to be a recipient of central government funds.
However, its director Sir Nicholas Kenyon is a very persuasive man. He has talked himself onto the board of Arts Council England. He is party to its decision.
Sir Nicholas Kenyon

He leaves the room, of course, recuses himself in ACE jargon, whenever the Barbican is discussed. That’s only right and proper. But Nick is a nice man and everyone wants to be nice to him back. So they vote him a 108 percent increase while he’s out of the room and are rewarded by that great big beaming smile on his return.
No harm in that. Is there?

The Arts Council announced today that it was applying the cuts strategically – ‘no equal cuts for all’.

And then it promptly did the opposite with the nation’s orchestras.

ACE has refused to judge orchestral performance, giving the same 11-15 percent treatment to all symphony orchestras across the board, regardless of merit or recent progress. One band, Bournemouth, perhaps the least deserving of the regionals, gets a small increase – entirely for regional reasons.
Everyone gets prizes is the slogan.
Apparently, the ACE is talking about talking about orchestras – another four-year review is being mooted within the organisation. They’ve been talking about this since 1963.
Strikes me as a terrible dereliction of ACE responsibility.
Some small ensembles – the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Academy of Ancient Music and Aurora – were included only in the final reckoning, I hear, having been ruled out beforehand.

A snap assessment of the Arts Council’s major grant cuts – broken here this morning – is that Liz Forgan and Alan Davey have gone down the obvious route, top-slicing their biggest gas guzzlers in order to sustain the lower levels of ecology.

If that were the case, it could be justified – even applauded.
But the ACE has fallen into its usual traps of prejudice and favouritism.
Of the five top grants, only ENO’s near-standstill can be seen in a rational light. The Coliseum has recovered greatly in the past two years and any loss of funds at this point – especially when its own fund-raising operation is rudimentary – would have risked killing a patient in the recovery room by premature withdrawal of medication.

The decision to apply the maximum permitted cut – 15 percent to the Royal Opera House Covent Garden smacks of the ACE’s old fear of ‘elitism’ – a word that arose with tedious repetition during last week’s heated grants debate. The ROH has been hit mainly because its profile is wrong for the image the ACE wants to project – young, diverse, non-London.
The two theatre companies – the National and RSC – were penalised for reasons even more obtuse. The RSC is region-based and has one of the youngest audience bases in the land. Nevertheless, both have taken top-line hits.

All four companies are on top of their game, producing work that claims worldwide attention and attracts the finest artists in their field. Why cut them now? The only way to interpret that decision is bureaucratic convenience – easier to save money with a few big cuts  than a lot of small ones – and an inbuilt suspicion of hard-won success.
English National Ballet, presently enjoying its greatest TV exposure on BBC4, is penalised by 15 percent. 
These bad decisions are compounded by one that is simply the worst.
The South Bank Centre, Britain’s largest fund guzzler, was originally protected from the worst of the cuts by virtue of its favoured-child relationship with the Arts Council, which saved it from privatisation when Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council. There was a good deal of debate about this at the ACE and the final execution, left in Alan Davey’s hands, was harsher than the council intended. Nevertheless, although the South Bank is claiming a 15 percent cut, it will return to present funding levels in just two years.
One opera boss, normally restrained, told me this morning that the South Bank grant of almost £20 million was ‘a national scandal’. The South Bank does not originate or innovate art. It merely organises. It is a clearing house, a receptacle. Yet it has received better treatment from the ACE than hundreds of inventive, imaginative, progressive and educative institutions.
That, I’m inclined to agree, is a scandal.

My first leak of the morning gives a rundown on the ACE’s five biggest clients.

Royal Opera House
National Theatre
Royal Shakespeare Company
all three are hit by above average, double-figure cuts. Numbers coming soon.
English National Opera gets a standstill grant, on the grounds that any cut ould jeopardise its recovery.
Most contentiously, the South Bank Centre receives a standstill grant – in recognition of its far-too cosy relationship with Arts Council England.

More details and commentary to follow

In its second swoop of the week, predatory Sony Classical has poached the world’s most prestigious string quartet from rivals Deutsche Grammophon.

The Emerson Quartet will open this November with a Mozart release.
Their output on DG has slowed of late and their relationship with head office has become more distant than it used to be.
Sony are crowing that they have snatched the ‘pre-eminent’ string quartet. A video interview has been posted on the Sony Classical window, ariama, ahead of tomorrow’s press release.



pictured: President of Sony Classical Bogdan Roscic, Co-principal violinist Philip Setzer, Violist Lawrence Dutton, Co-principal violinist Eugene Drucker, and Cellist David Finckel (Photo by Tristan Cook)