Over lunch today, Tate Liverpool announced a new director – Francesco Manacorda, who runs Artissima in Turin –

and an intriguing show next summer of late Monet, Turner and Cy Twombly.

Just thought you ought to hear about it first.

Here are the latest pictures from Slipped Disc’s special correspondent at the Vangelis Qatar extravaganza.

I’m not sure what Angela’s singing, but she seems to be having a good time.

Here’s the composer Vangelis, with his soprano and two industrious fans from the Old Country.

And here are some stage-door Johnnies waiting for an autograph – or maybe they’re Crown Princes.

And this was the final, closed patch session for the recording, scheduled for release in 2012.

Gustav Leonhardt has told the Paris journal Le Nouvel Observateur that he has given the last concert of his life.

He felt tired and weak at the Bouffes du Nord yesterday and decided that, at 83, he wasn’t going to risk it again. He has cancelled all future engagements. Here‘s the story (in French)..

In addition to his own achievements as a scholar and performer of Bach, Byrd, Mozart and much else, the Dutsch keyboardist and director was influential in introducing Nikolaus Harnoncourt to period performance, as well as countless artists of later generations.

Barry Manilow has had hip-fix surgery.

He’s 68. No longer the bouncy stuff of dreams. Sad, but true. Sorry ’bout that (sort of).

1 It doesn’t pay writers and insists on owning their copyrights. That’s theft, albeit a consensual form of the offence.

2 It’s soporific.

3 ….

101 Dozy Alan Davey, the career civil servant who manages the Arts Council on behalf of Lazy Hunt-Vaizey, has published an article there today on Art in Uncertain Times. 

Let me save you the trouble of reading it.

Like Michael Kaiser’s equivocations, it adds precisely nothing to our knowledge of how to run the arts in tough times. These people have, as their first priority, the concern not to offend the people who pay their wages. So all you get is bland blah-blah.

Why? indeed.

Well, it’s my fault. While making next Sunday’s documentary on Barbara, I emailed Nana to see if she – as a dominant performer in Paris in Barbara’s time – had any memories she wished to share.

She replied within ten minutes, asking when we could meet. A cafe near the George V  Hotel would do.

(photo:(c)  Lebrecht Music & Arts)

Barbara, Nana told me, was not just a close friend. She was a mentor who showed young Nana the ropes. As she would do with Roberto Alagna, she exemplified how to sing in every space, from tiny bar, to ampitheatre.

Barbara and Nana were both classically trained, both intensely serious about pitch accuracy. Both, too, had grown up under Nazi occupation. You will have to wait until Sunday to learn what it was that Barbara did to enable Nana to overcome anti-German prejudice and capture her biggest audience. Here’s the link to Sunday’s programme.

I’m sure there will be some who complain that Radio 3 should not be wasting good sonata space on features like this. See what you think.

John Atterbery, one of the makers of the Spice Girls, was driving his silver Merc on Friday around Sunset & Vine, minding his own music business, when a young man started shooting wildly and caught him as a random target. He died last night. More here.

Go carefully out there.

Last week, scientists were using health authority CAT scanners to discover the secrets of Stradivarius violins and make a modern replica.

This week, the violin world has recruited mycologists to treat instruments with Physisporinus vitreus, a white-rot fungus, in order to reproduce the conditions in which the great violins aged and matured. Read on here. That such intellectual effort should be expended in perpetuating and replicating a popular myth can be ascribed to a fixation either with profit or fairy tales. It has nothing to do with music.