A double-bass player in the London Symphony Orchestra has just landed his first big job as chief conductor in Norrköping, Sweden.

Michael Francis made a habit these past few years of stepping in for Valery Gergiev when he’s late for rehearsal, or misses the concert. He has landed himself good management at Cami in New York and Schmid in Germany and that has led to dates with the New York Philharmonic and other big bands. He knows orchestras from the inside and tends to get asked back. Here’s the press release.

Norrköping has long been a nursery for good conductors. Its last successful incumbent was Franz Welser-Möst, now chief in Cleveland and Vienna.

But it’s the LSO that’s the real incubator. Ever since Neville Marriner, leader of the second violins, broke out to form his Academy-of-St-Martin-in-the-Fields in the 1950s, there has been a spirit in the ranks that some of the players could do better than the batons they booked.

Barry Tuckwell and John Georgiades were next, more at the tip of my tongue. Way to go, LSO.

I was very sorry to read that Johanna Fiedler has died.

In the 15 years she ran the press office at the Met (1975-89), she told as much truth as she was able and (to me, at least) no outright lies.

Later as an independent writer, she wrote biographies of her adored father Arthur, conductor of the Boston Pops, and a finely balanced history of the Met, Molto Agitato, which was deprecated in the New York Times for not peddling enough gossip. Read carefully, it told more than most appreciated at the time about the long-running trials and tribulations of James Levine.

Outside the Met, Johanna did not have a happy life. A difficult romance with a conductor who was tipped (like so many) to succeed Levine came to naught and I never found it easy to make her laugh, likeable as she was. Johann was only 65 when she died, too soon.

Since she left, the Met has showed a stonier face to the media world.

book jacket portrait/ Nan Talese/Doubleday