by our Crime Correspondent

Garth Drabinsky, the dodgy organiser of this summer’s Black Creek festival in Toronto, began a jail sentence today after losing the last of a decade’s worth of appeals against a fraud conviction.

We warned here last month that all was not well at Black Creek and some singers were going without their supper. We also reported that Lorin Maazel was shuttling that weekend between two Beethoven Ninths in Tanglewood and Toronto. One got cancelled by a hurricane. I hope he and the London Symphony Orchestra got paid up-front for the other.

There was ‘a difference of artistic opinion’ during rehearsals of Gounod’s Faust and there was only one possible outcome.

Roberto Alagna got his way, and conductor Alain Lombard is on his way. (His stand-in is Alain Altinoglu).

As Roberto would say, ‘nobody ever came to Faust to hear the conductor’.

Full Journal du Dimanche story here. And here’s more from Le Figaro.

In the UK, apparently. See press release, just in:

Sony Music is delighted to announce that the UK is the fastest-selling market for superstar Chinese pianist Lang Lang’s new album ‘Liszt – My Piano Hero’.  The new recording,  featuring the renowned Vienna Philharmonic under acclaimed conductor Valery Gergiev, was released on 5^th September (cat. no. 88697891402) and is Lang Lang’s personal tribute to Hungarian composer, Franz Liszt (1811-1886) on the occasion of Liszt’s bicentenary.

Myung Whun Chung, conductor of the Seoul Philharmonic who visited Pyongyang this week, has told a press conference in Paris that he has reached agreement to conduct an orchestra comprised of musicians from both sides of the tense border.

Here’s a first report from France 24:

A renowned South Korean conductor said Friday he has reached agreement with North Korean musicians to hold regular joint performances by the two countries’ orchestras to ease political tensions.”I think music can move the hearts of people a little bit, although it wouldn’t do such a thing as to change the entire regime,” Chung Myung-Whun told a press conference, a day after his return from a rare visit to Pyongyang. Chung, who leads the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and doubles as a UNICEF “goodwill ambassador”, made a four-day trip with two senior orchestra officials to meet his counterparts in the North. “All musicians reached consensus that we want a regular joint orchestral performance as well as musical exchanges,” said Chung. He said musicians from both nations signed an agreement to promote the joint performances and a project to nurture talented North Korean musicians. The agreements still need approval from both governments. Chung’s trip followed months of high tension on the peninsula and was part of a series of apparently conciliatory gestures by the South. He said the joint orchestra, if approved, would be made up of an equal number of musicians from each country. Performances would be held alternately in Seoul and Pyongyang, with the first scheduled in December. The two sides “connected through our passion and desire to spread music”, said Chung, who watched and conducted performances by the North’s state symphony orchestra and its Unhasu Orchestra. “I wanted to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony but young North Korean musicians said they had never played it before… they said it would be a historic day for them,” he said, adding they had played the piece. “Their classical repertoire wasn’t that rich but their techniques were good… they were trained never to get it wrong.” Chung, who is also music director of Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, received his invitation after former French culture minister Jack Lang introduced a North Korean musician to him. “I always wondered how I could meet North Korea’s musicians, and I heard the new French government was promoting cultural exchanges with Asia, especially North Korea. So I contacted Jack Lang,” he said. Chung, 58, had been scheduled to visit the North in 2006 but had to cancel at the last minute following its nuclear test. “I’m grateful I had this chance, something others have wanted for a very long time… and I am sure the results will be meaningful and good,” he said. The South’s unification ministry must by law approve all visits to the North, which remains technically at war with its neighbour. Relations turned icy after Seoul accused Pyongyang of torpedoing a warship in March 2010 with the loss of 46 lives. The North denied involvement in the sinking but killed four people in a bombardment of a South Korean border island last November. The South has recently made a series of conciliatory gestures, including offering flood relief aid. Earlier this month it allowed leading Buddhist monks to visit the North. Music has been used before in an attempt to break down barriers. In February 2008 the New York Philharmonic paid a historic visit to North Korea for a concert beamed round the world.

The BBC reports that Roman Polanski is expected in Zurich next week to collect a lifetime award from the film festival.

Why would he do that? Last time he went to the fest in Zurich, they arrested him and kept him indoors for ten months while the courts chewed over the pros and cons of an ancient US extradition warrant for an unproven offence which may not have ben extraditable at the time under Swiss law. In the end, they let him go home to France, where he has never been under any threat of extradition.

This time, the Swiss say they won’t arrest him.

Polanski is 78. The award is trivial. Why would he want to go back?

Times are tough in Portugal, so they’re putting on the whole Ring in half a day, with just 18 players.

Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove of Birmingham Touring Opera, Remix Ensemble and conductor Peter Rundel

are the driving forces. After opening in Porto, the show goes on tour to Strasbourg, Nimes, Luxembourg and Riems. Here are the venues and dates:

And here’s the promo video and a news report

He is Sweden’s most important symphonist, its equivalent to Finland’s Sibelius, and he was born 100 years ago next Monday.

Yet hardly any musicians outside his own country have remembered the occasion (his publisher excepted) and within Sweden itself the response is decidedly muted.

Why is that?

Because Allan Pettersson was ultimate outsider, a composer of Barefoot Songs who denounced the nanny state and went his own stubborn way, cradle to grave. Two great conductors – Rafael Kubelik and Antal Dorati – championed his work. Ida Haendel played his second violin concerto. Old recordings can still be found. Only one new release has landed on my desk in his centenary year.

The seventh symphony is an extraordinarily powerful work, and I discussed the rest in some detail in my Complete Companion to 20th Century Music.

‘I am not a composer, I am a voice crying,’ said Pettersson.

‘He started drilling, and it still hurts,’ says an article in Svenska Dagblad.

Sweden’s ambivalence has damaged his legacy.

There’s another John Cage festival in the offing, this one in Germany.

North German Radio (NDR) are putting on a three-day Cage fest with pianos (prepared and raw) and orchestra. It celebrates the great man’s 99th birthday this month and his past association with NDR (pic below). Details here.

pictured: Carolyn Brown, Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham at NDR, 1958.

In a commentary in today’s JC, I argue that the London Philharmonic had no choice. Four of its players had used its name in a political statement, calling for the Israel Philharmonic to be banned from the Proms. They had no authority to make a corporate statement of this kind and the company was put in a position where, by doing nothing, it appeared to endorse their action.

The musicians who own and operate the orchestra decided otherwise and took the exceptionally harsh step of suspending four of their colleagues for up to nine months. The JC, in its leader, applauds that action.

My view is that the punishment is too harsh. The suspensions need to be set aside after a brief period and the matter laid to rest.

There has already been a minor outbreak of para-antisemitic tittle-tattle, suggesting – without saying so explicitly – that a Jewish cabal forced the musicians’ suspension. The LPO, like all London orchestras, has a certain number of Jewish supporters, some of them wealthy and influential. They will have made their views known. However, the suspension could not have been imposed without the endorsement of a significant majority of players,executives and donors. Those, like the New Statesman, who point a finger at the Elders of Zion, merely expose their innate racism,