The pianist and former president of the Curtis Institute has joined our debate on music education with some trenchant, painful observations.

Further to Robert Fitzpatrick’s observations regarding the unhappy state of arts education in the USA and his comments that events of the last 45 or 50 years in our country “have led to a decline in the quality of education in general, and an abandoning of the arts and arts education in particular”.

I couldn’t agree more. (Full disclosure: Bob was Dean at The Curtis Institute during my 20 years as head of that school, so we have griped about this subject on several occasions.) However, I’d like to add that this diminishment of ALL education in the USA over two generations might help to explain – and perhaps even partially excuse – the uninformed utterances emanating from the mouths of too many of our elected representatives, as well as their complete lack of knowledge or interest in anything to do with the arts. In fact, it would not be at all surprising if many of those representatives who received our typical public education during the last four or five decades have hardly ever, if at all, chosen to visit an art museum or to attend an opera, the ballet or a symphony concert.

According to all the global education ratings and indexes that I have seen, the USA lags behind many nations. But as these charts are almost exclusively based on math, reading and science, this is just the tip of the iceberg. For if the arts were included in such ratings, the standing of the USA would plummet even further.  (Of course, there are a significant number of outstanding American schools – public as well as private – that teach and produce students on the highest level. But the number of young people who are fortunate to receive such an education is a very small percentage of the total, resulting in the formation of a sort of cultural oligarchy.)

Given this pervasive decline of general knowledge in the USA, it becomes quite understandable that some of our elected leaders have become today’s equivalent of those 17th-century individuals who, decades after Galileo, still insisted that the sun circled the earth.

Obviously, I agree with Bob Fitzpatrick that the NASM should re-examine its current mission and should lobby relentlessly to see that American public education– including arts education – should be funded satisfactorily. But I fear that until such time as some of our important American public figures make this issue a major, life-or-death matter (which it is), the dumbing-down of the USA will continue unabated. This, of course, would be tragic. But it would also be stupid, because a fine, well-rounded education for all is one of the few issues that could re-unite United States, since it would clearly benefit everyone.

It will be ten years this week, April 23, 2005, that Youtube went live, and a while longer before it changed our lives.

Started by three ex-PayPal guys — Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim – it drew 65,000 videos in the first years and was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006.

The inaugural video was posted by Karim.

The next dozen were gloopy home vids.

When did classical music make it onto Youtube? Quite soon. We found this from Julianna Yau in September 2006.

And this from Mi-Young Lee two months later.

The first professional concert may have been the winner’s recital at the 2005 Chopin Competition.

Does anyone know of any earlier classical postings on Youtube?

The first classical Youtube star, Valentina Lisitsa, did not upload until April 2007, when the network was two years old. She said: ‘The first video I posted was of Rachmaninov’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Etude and it was made by a group of video students. It was basically a class project for them.’

UPDATE: Heike Matthiesen uploaded one of the earliest clasical guitar videos on 14 June 2007, receiving more than 1 million views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oScByhA15g0

UPDATE2: But here another 7-million player from Ana Vidovic, dated December 2006.

1 Maurice Ravel on the go

2 Puccini lighting up

3 Mahler has a pull, in New York

4 Gershwin can’t compose without it

5 Not in rehearsal, Lenny, please…

6 Debussy, always at it

7 Arthur Honegger smoked a pipe

8 Arnold Schoenberg inhales

9 Sibelius, with cigar

10 DSCH gets a light

all pictures from LebrechtMusic&Arts

On Friday, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra launched its new season in front of a tiny gathering of hand-picked hacks. Most local and all international journalists were excluded.

Mariss Jansons made two mild observations at the meeting.

1 Asked if he was in the running for the Berlin Philharmonic conductorship, he said: ‘We have to wait and see what happens on 11 May.’

2 Asked about the decision to deny Munich a new concert hall, he replied: ‘Hopefully, politicians have understood they made a mistake.’

The orchestra announced a new website. It is almost as dull and impenetrable as the press conceference.

In the late 1970s, classical recording was in the doldrums. The same old conductors were re-recording the same old works, issued on LPs that were so faulty the customer return rate was over 40 percent.

In November 1979, a father-and-son team of sound engineers from Essex, Brian and Ralph Couzens, founded Chandos Records. Sound quality was outstanding from the outset and the LP manufacture was vastly superior to the major labels, which were forced to upgrade their product. These differences were soon ironed out by the advent of CD in 1983, but the point was made and widely taken that Chandos stood for genuine high-fidelity values and the industry as a whole was uplifted by its standards.

An early focus on neglected English music – Bax, in particular – won a deep foothold in the home market. Orchestras in Scotland, Ulster and Wales were the label’s workhorses. Neeme Järvi covered vast swathes of repertoire, Mariss Jansons made his name on Chandos.

Brian’s second act of salvation came ten years later. Peter Andry, former head of EMI, had joined Warner with a brief to create a major label overnight. Wielding a multinational chequebook, he hoovered up half a dozen labels – Erato, Teldec, Finlandia, NVC and more. Then he met Brian Couzens, who refused his lavish overtures. So did Ted Perry at Hyperion. The corporate march was halted. Independent recording was saved.

Brian Couzens died on Friday, aged 82. He earned the lasting gratitude of all who love recorded music.

photo: family

We’ve had a tip-off from Lyon that Serge Dorny has been shortlisted for the vacancy of BBC Proms chief.

The Belgian, who was sacked last year by the Semper Oper in Dresden before he could take up the job, has a history of talking up his chances for posts across the music world, so we need to take this tip with a chunk of salt. It may be no more than self-puffery.

However, Dorny has form in the UK as a past head of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He may have a few locals who are pushing his name for the Proms. He is unsettled at Lyon Opera and has chameleon qualities that may play well with the present characterless administration at the BBC.

On the other hand, the BBC job will pay less than half of his Lyon salary.

No date has been set for announcing a new Proms boss. The job has been vacant since Roger Wright left last June.

UPDATE: Dorny, in London this week, has denied being in the running for the BBC Proms job. The pay is too poor.

A study at the University of Southern Denmark has found that peer pressure and competitive stress shortens the lives of creative people. ‘Competition has a negative and significant impact on longevity,’ said Dr Karol Jan Borowiecki.

He went on to say: ‘The stress intensified when they were living in the same cities as their peers. It is likely, for example, that limited access to concert halls may have triggered increased stress levels, especially in cities with a greater number of other composers.’

Do we believe a word of this pointless academic speculation?