News is just in that the Odense Symphony Orchestra in Denmark has refused to work with Roberto Minczuk, who has sacked half of the Brazil Symphony Orchestra and is scouring the world for replacements. The Odense action, backed by the country’s musicians union, represents further isolation for Minczuk and the rump of his orchestra.

Here are the documents:

To Mr Roberto Minczuk:

Reading the German newspapers last week on a train from Berlin to Leipzig, I was startled to read the name of the firm that is designing the stadium for the 2022 World Cup – a tournament clouded by imputations of bribery and corruption on a colossal scale.

The firm of architects is called AS&P. That’s short for Albert Speer & Partner.

The original Albert Speer, as Hitler’s architect, tried to rebuild Europe on slave labour and fooled the Nuremburg judges with fake contrition.

Qatar is a state built on slave labour, many of the victims supplied by gangmasters. Qatar imports tens of thousands of workers from Asia, herding them in camps and depriving them of all human rights as they work in heat of up to 50 degrees. According to the US State Department, Qatar “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.”

The firm of AS&P has no connection whatsoever with the Nazi past or with slave labour, let that be absolutely clear. Albert Speer’s son, born 1934, founded the firm in 1964 and has an impeccable record in public service on the German Acade­my for Urban and Re­gion­al Spa­tial Plan­ning. AS&P, based in Frankfurt-am-Main, has been active in Arab government projects since 1977 and in China since 1997.

AS&P will, however, be under scrutiny in Qatar. It will be expexted that any work Speer contracts on the 2022 World Cup site will be done by properly paid labourers whose rights are fully protected under international law and who are housed in humane conditions. It should also assure the rest of the world that the labour camps will be open to independent international inspection, as they are not today.

The international pianist and pedagogue Vitalij Margulis died yesterday in Los Angeles after a long illness, at the age of 83. His last recital was given in California in November.

Born in Kharkov, Ukraine, Margulis studied with his own father, whose teacher, Alexander Horowitz, had been a pupil of Skryabin’s.

After a busy, though not heavily promoted, performing career in the Soviet Union, he became professor of piano at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, holding a paralle post at Freiburg, in Germany. His pupils included Bernd Glemser, Alexander Djordjevic and Axel Schmitt. Bach and Beethoven were the source of his musical outlook. His teaching personality was tempered by historic cataclysms and Jewish wit.

Joachim Kaiser, the influential German critic, called him ‘the secret genius’.

More information at his (unusually modest) website here. To hear Vitalij play Rachmaninov, click here.

Rest in peace.

A book on Mahler in Leipzig, published for the city’s historic cycle, reveals a mass of unsuspected detail about his life there in 1886-88. Nothing that changes our fundamental perception of a very young man in an impossible hurry, oblivious to social courtesies. But there are fresh details of his living arrangements in Leipzig and his human relationships that substantially enhance our understanding of his development in his mid-20s.

At the heart of the matter stands the enigmatic figure of Marion von Weber, wife of an army officer and mother of three, with whom Mahler fell headlong in love. The romance took place while Mahler was working with her husband on a completion of his grandfather’s opera Die Drei Pintos, and it provided the impetus for Mahler composing his first symphony. That much is known and uncontested.

An essay by Sonja Riedel in the new book reveals that Marion was born in Manchester in 1856 as Marion Mathilde Schwabe. Nothing more is known of her antecedents and I’d be grateful if anyone can help me trace them. Ms Riedel takes issue with my assertion that Marion was Jewish, pointing out that a Saxon officer could not have married a Jew and that she was buried, in April 1931, a Roman Catholic. Schwabe, however, is often a Jewish name and it may well be that she discarded her original faith (as Mahler did) in order to achieve social advancement.

Manchester in the middle of the 19th century was a world centre of textile manufacture, attracting many immigrants from Germany, among them many who were Jewish.So what else can we find out about Marion, Mahler’s English love? All clues gratefully received.

I had a call this morning from the conductor Thomas Sanderling, presently on Mahler tour in South Africa.

He has been approached by Mikhail Pletnev to conduct the Russian National Orchestra in the city’s tenth-anniversary commemoration of the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001. The work he will perform is Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony.

Good call.

I wonder if anyone else had the same idea.