Valentina Lisitsa has just tweeted me that she’s got a Paris date at last, on the strength of her youtube fame.

It’s at the Bouffes du Nord on Monday, and she’s standing in for Simone Dinnerstein – apparently ‘for healthy reasons’.

The flier also urges you to discover this ‘ukranian native american pianist’

So that will be Chief Many-Fingered Lisitsa?

Previously, says, Val, she has only ever played in private Parisian homes.

A laconic leader of Austropop, famed for such morose reflections as The Big Black Bird (listen here), Ludwig Hirsch has taken his own life at the age of 65. He was being treated at  the Wilhelmina Hispital, reportedly for lung cancer, when he jumped from a window to his death.

‘Ludwig Hirsch was part of the Austrian soul,’ said Culture Minister Claudia Schmied. He was one of few living performers to see his face on a national postage stamp. His appeal crossed three generations. RIP.

Here’s an obituary, in the Irish Times, for an Austrian fellow-satirist, Georg Kreisler, who died in the same week.

The European Union has announced a 1.8 billion Euros ($2.4 billion) funding programme for arts and culture, starting in 2014.

Titled Creative Europe, it marks a 35 percent increase in EU support for ailing cultural industries. Here’s the first report on Irish TV and another on Artsinfo. It is the biggest arts initiative by far in the history of the EU.

The bad news is that half of it will be spent on film, which ought to be commercially self-sufficient. But the other half is expected to reach more than quarter of a million artists across the continent. Androulla Vassiliou, the EU Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism, and Youth, said in a statement: “This investment will help tens of thousands… to reach new audiences in Europe and beyond; without this support, it would be difficult or impossible for them to break into new markets.”

 ((Vassiliou, picured with Michel Platini)

The statement came a few hours after the German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann announced a 5.1 percent increase in state ‘investment’  in the arts. Subsidy, he said, belonged to the past. This was a stake in the nation’s future.

Could this mark a turning point in political attitudes?

Several German-language obituries point out that the great soprano Sena Jurinac, who has died aged 90, spent a formative summer in Salzburg in 1943 with the elderly Anna von Mildenburg, who was Gustav Mahler’s protégée and love object, as well as his mighty Isolde at the Vienna Opera.

Sena, who described herself as a ‘k-und-k mixture’, was the daughter of a Viennese mother and Croatian father who lived in the small Bosnian town of Travnik. She was 22 and had sung Mimi in La Boheme at the Zagreb Opera when she won a scholarship place on Mildenburg’s summer course at the Salzburg Mozarteum. That led, in turn, to her being signed by Karl Böhm for the Vienna Opera and, while she never got to sing there before Goebbels shut it down, she resumed in Vienna in 1946 and went on to sing 46 roles in 1200 performances.

She never sung much Mahler – I think there is only one recording – but she became a vital link in his Vienna tradition. Here is a picture of the young Sena with Mildenburg, published in Franz Willnauer’s book of Mahler-Mildenburg letters.

and here’s another from the resourceful Mahler researcher, Michael Bosworth