Mariss Jansons – High Drama on the Podium by Norman Lebrecht / May 31, 2000 FORTY minutes before a concert, Mariss Jansons mounts the stage and checks the musicians’ seating. The second clarinet’s chair is moved half an inch to the right, the tuba’s turned 15 degrees towards centre. Like a brain surgeon, Jansons needs to be assured that all his instruments are correctly aligned before he can start to operate. More than any conductor I have known, Jansons is preoccupied with his precision tools. Among friends, he compares the vagaries of orchestras. If he has a spare hour on…

SSUE 1818 Wednesday 17 May 2000 Friends in need?   BOC Covent Garden Festival – official site   Norman Lebrecht on the callous misnomer “arts community” THERE are one or two lessons about money that I have picked up during 20 years of unremitting arts crisis. The first is never to believe a public-funded company that says it is going broke. When the cash runs out, there is seldom enough time to sound the alarm. A funded institution that cries “bust!” is doing no more than playing the joker in a long-running game of brinkmanship. Another hard-learned tip is not…

Good Managers are Hard to Find by Norman Lebrecht / May 10, 2000 THE Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has lost its manager. What, again? I hear you cry. There is a well-established pattern in the life of London orchestras, and this one in particular, that when they return from an arduous tour to find the diary half-empty and a record company (BMG) gone cold, the players call an emergency meeting and the board, in a panic, offers up the manager as a human sacrifice. John Manger had done sterling work in the five years since Paul Findlay was ousted. He gave…

Heard But No Longer Seen by Norman Lebrecht / May 3, 2000 WHICHEVER way you look at it, and many have given up watching, BBC Television has forsaken serious music. During the 1990s, concerts, opera and music-related programming fell by half. What remains is a clutch of six or eight summer Proms and a few Christmas specials. Whenever this column reported the decline, BBC executives demanded the right of denial, maintaining that any apparent reduction was but a temporary adjustment. Now the retreat is complete. The BBC director general, Greg Dyke, has relieved television of its responsibilities for classical music.…