I don’t normally agree with Niall Ferguson, neo-liberal America’s idea of an English intellectual. But while reading my briefing notes for a debate at Hay on the notion of progress in the arts, I was suddenly distracted by the latest salvo in Newsweek from Dubya Bush’s pet historian. Ferguson claims that contemporary Britain is a mirror image of the Habsburg Empire a century ago as depicted by Joseph Roth in Radetsky March. Having spent much of last year in Roth’s company, I was looking forward to disagreeing with Ferguson but – oh dear – I rather share his view. He takes a very annoying route to reach his destination but it’s worth the journey.

Briefly, he contrasts the anxiety of austerity Britain in 2012 with the orgy of cultural celebration planned for the Jubilee and the Olympics. He compares all this dancing on the volcano with Austria between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of war a few weeks later. Hence the reference to Radetzky March, one of literature’s two greatest evocations of the end of the Habsburg Empire. A bit hysterical? Well this is Newsweek and he’s short of space. Not so short though that he can’t add Karl Kraus’ celebrated description of fin-de-siècle Vienna as “a test-bed for world destruction.” Kraus diagnoses the sickness of his world through the collapse of language. Roth symbolises it through the squabbles of Czech, Hungarian, Ruthenian and Croatian officers banged up in a frontier garrison. That other great Austrian novelist Robert Musil reflects Vienna’s moral chaos in the futile plans of a group of etiolated intellectuals to celebrate the Emperor’s jubilee

In the words of BAFTA’s latest honorary fellow Rolf Harris, “can you see what it is yet?” Yes, the warring Mitteleuropa minorities are our Welsh and Scots and Ulstermen. The Kaiser’s jubilee is echoed in the extended celebration of our own dear monarch. Today’s equivalents of Roth and Musil’s marginalised Austrian Jews are the Moslems of Rochdale. And so on. He doesn’t let us know exactly where a revolutionary is lurking with an improvised explosive device but I’m sure that was also due to lack of column inches. Not being a historian, I won’t take issue with Ferguson on a few of his more far fetched parallels. Was the Habsburg Empire in 1912, still ruling all of Central and Eastern Europe, really just like our nation today with only faded memories of an empire that’s been dead for half a century? And why 1912? The touchstone year was surely 1908, when Franz Joseph celebrated 60 years on the throne by annexing Bosnia.

But let that pass. I’m shoulder to shoulder with him on the quote from Karl Kraus. Apart from anything else, the idea that great art is born from destruction gives me something useful to say in response to the question “are there times when culture seems particularly susceptible to change?” It certainly was in Vienna in 1908. And all that creativity was born from destruction. Schoenberg was dismantling functional harmony, Wittgenstein was pulling apart linguistic philosophy, Schiele was eviscerating portraiture, Kraus was blowing up journalism and that’s only for starters. Michael Frayn described it perfectly when we made a film together about the city in its intellectual high season. He said that “the Empire was going out with the brilliance of a star burning itself up.” What inspired all that feverish innovation in Vienna was the collective sense of a huge gulf between appearance and reality. Here was an imperial capital paying homage to continuity and prosperity while bits of Bohemia, Slovenia, Hungary and Ruthenia kept threatening to fall off the edge. Here was the gleam and glamour of Jugendstil art and design in the Secession building while just round the corner there was prostitution on an industrial scale.

All those great Viennese thinkers and creators were testing the imperial proposition to destruction. For a century and a half, the symphony had been a musical model of cultural order. Then first Mahler and subsequently Schoenberg and Berg pushed the form to its limits. Out of its destruction emerged the new language of 20^th Century music. Adolf Loos did the same with his buildings and his windows “without eyebrows” which appalled Franz Joseph but are now the default of all contemporary architecture. These seismic shocks followed three decades of cultural complacency. And perhaps Niall Ferguson is right for all the wrong reasons. He doesn’t just describe the parallels with fin-de-siecle Vienna, he embodies them. After all, his recent television series lauded the triumph of the West just as the East was overtaking it. He’s still stuck in the neo-con 90s when history was supposed to have ended. I recall artists complaining then that there was nothing left to react against. Well there is now.

Does this mean that the political and economic paralysis which seems to afflict our coalition of the unwilling is the prelude to cultural rebirth? I’m not putting money on it. The theatres may be full but with the exception of the National, the Arcola, the Tricycle and a few other subsidised good deeds in a naughty world, they are mainly packed with musicals. London is a centre for the visual arts but largely so that they can be bought and sold. And this is at the end of a cultural blaze ignited by Chris Smith in happier economic times. Jeremy Hunt’s custody of the DCMS may soon be terminated by the curse of Murdoch but the legacy of his cuts will be with us for a few years yet. Meanwhile I don’t detect many seeds of new artistic endeavour in the jubilee festival or the cultural Olympiad. These will be planted as usual by the awkward outsiders who aren’t invited to the party. But then, “artistic progress” isn’t linear – it’s dialectical. I suppose that we need Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull to provoke genuine iconoclasts into creative destruction.

This is just one question we will be required to answer in Hay at 10.30 a.m. on June 5^th (http://www.howthelightgetsin.org/tickets/all-sessions) I’m still pondering the others. Is progress desirable or necessary for quality? For whom is it most crucial – commentators, artists or the audience? Are the arts a reflective rather than a proactive medium? If we accept that the arts cannot progress what would we lose? And all that in forty five minutes. But at least the questions are being asked. If you glance across the Atlantic to where the Jeremy Hunt model of private patronage holds sway, you’ll find scarcely a single arts executive prepared to risk such a discussion. For a decade or more, on and off Broadway, America has looked to the subsidised UK for cutting edge theatre. The Metropolitan Opera, which Professor Ferguson compares unfavourably with Covent Garden, gets most of its new work from ENO, which in turn finds its future talent on the fringe. As usual the dialectic cuts both ways. Vienna needed the smug establishment painter Hans Makart to provoke Egon Schiele. Adolf Loos wouldn’t be the same trail-blazer without the reactionary bulk of the Ringstrasse. So I’m happy for London to cheer the jubilee flotilla as it passes through the raised platforms of Tower Bridge, while I head off to the Welsh marches to raise a glass or three to the awkward squad.

For most of my professional life I’ve been a poacher rather than a gamekeeper. As a television producer and an arts executive, for thirty years I was firmly on the side of the creators rather than the judges. Yet in my youth I sometimes wore a gamekeeper’s deerstalker and sat in judgement over others’ creative efforts. I can recall writing dismissive op-ed pieces about the Proms in the 1970s and the Royal Opera House a decade later. Then to my embarrassment at the BBC in the 1980s and 1990s, when I took on responsibility for televising the Proms and operas from Covent Garden, I had to hang up my gamekeeper’s hat. Even when I returned to writing and broadcasting, free at last to be as severe as I wished, I still couldn’t work out which side I was on. Perhaps that’s the ideal position from which to ask “whether the critic is a dying voice.”

I’m certainly still confused on the subject. There’s a new reason for my confusion which also happens to be the springboard for the debate – the exponential growth in online criticism over the past decade and the parallel decline of the print media. My friends who are critics (yes, I have a few) are all pretty desperate about the influence of the blogosphere. It’s not just the dilution of judgement when the internet allows everyone to set themselves up as judge, jury and executioner. For the professional critic, online competition hits the wallet as well as the reputation. The amount of paid space in the serious press devoted to criticism has almost halved since the turn of the millennium. This means that salaried critics are now an endangered species. One former broadsheet reviewer who regularly hauled me over the coals when I was at English National Opera recently begged my sympathy because he no longer has a regular by-line. I can’t say that I’m brushing away the tears but the general critical climate worries me.

Forget the arts for a moment and consider the impact of online criticism on the hospitality industry. TripAdvisor has actually faced legal action over anonymous reviews of hotels and restaurants. When serious money is at stake, unattributed criticism is more than an irritant – it’s a financial threat. It’s not quite the same in the performing arts. At ENO I was surprised and delighted to discover that the elusive force known as “word of mouth” can overcome even the most savage press reactions. More than one show panned by the press still played to full houses and put two fingers up to its detractors. But these days rumblings on the net spread even faster than word of mouth. In the age of social media and 4G phones a show can die while the performers are still on stage singing or acting their hearts out. Viral opinion can kill as well as promote. Which drives me back to the single question: what is criticism actually for?

For consumer websites the answer is obvious. They are there to help punters choose in an overcrowded market. A trusted site can warn you off a lousy dinner or a grim hotel bedroom. But what engenders that trust? Is it simply finding a critic whose tastes you share? In that case anonymity isn’t very helpful. And what about criticism of one-off unrepeated events – a concert or a television programme? This was my own problem thirty years ago and remains so today. I remember arguing with one distinguished arts editor about the way in which TV columnists had turned into up-market court jesters. And that was in the days when celebrated playwrights and novelists like Dennis Potter, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes regularly reviewed for the New Stateman. It wasn’t that their reviews were superficial or unfair. They weren’t. But their flippant style encouraged a climate of opinion which dismissed all television as trivial and ephemeral. As a producer of serious arts programmes I was worried that it threatened the genre as a whole. Thirty years later, this prophesy seems to have been fulfilled. When some critics complained last week that challenging arts documentaries were being jostled off the screen by programmes like Maestro at the Opera, you might say that they only have themselves to blame.

Isn’t there another role for the critic beyond awarding points? The greatest critics of the past certainly thought so. Shaw and Granville-Barker considered themselves responsible for the future of the art form itself. But of course they were poachers and gamekeepers combined. So were Potter, Amis and Barnes whenever their reviews engaged with serious issues. And this is not just nostalgia for times long past. In our own time, Tom Sutcliffe in the Independent and Miranda Sawyer in The Observer both maintain the highest standards even though they know that creative broadcasting dissolves into the ether within days. But they are honourable exceptions. Even if broadcast criticism survives the online onslaught other genres are much more vulnerable. When the broadsheets devote four times as much space to commercial pop as they do to classical music it’s as demoralising for the critics as the creators. How does it feel being jointly marginalized by the internet and shifting taste? I hope that the session at Hay on June 5^th (http://howthelightgetsin.org) will be about more than just the future of criticism in a multi-platform world. It should really be about our collective responsibility for the future of the arts themselves and who guards the guardians. If you happen to find yourself in the Welsh marches at the beginning of June, come along and argue the toss.

At the end of May the Brighton Festival is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral with a concert performance of Tippett’s masterpiece, the opera King Priam. This reflects the key themes of the festival – the artistic depiction of war and peace and the legacy of classical Greece. As an introduction to the opera, I’ve written an essay for Opera Magazine and this is how it begins:

When I think of King Priam, one image forms in my mind. It’s not from the opera or even from the Trojan War. It comes in the first half of Pasolini’s masterly movie Edipo Re and it recurs like a nagging ostinato. After the Sibyl’s prophesy that Oedipus will murder his father and marry his mother, he traverses a barren landscape punctuated by crossroads. Every time he arrives at a junction he covers his face with his hands and spins around. Then he opens his eyes and walks straight ahead. Time and again, as he clears frame, the film cuts to a signpost bearing the single word “Thebes”. It is the most vivid filmic demonstration I know of implacable fate overwhelming personal choice. Pasolini uses a single shot to signify the conflict between decision and destiny. In his second and arguably his greatest opera, Michael Tippett achieves a similar effect with a few fractured bitonal chords. They punctuate every choice made by Priam from his son’s birth to his own death. Like Pasolini’s cinematography, they do not just illustrate the story. They are the story.

Although Tippett insisted that the subject of King Priam was choice it is still regarded as a work about war. It’s a natural reaction. Priam was first performed as a piece d’occasion in Coventry in May 196 2 in a festival celebrating the re-consecration of the city’s bomb-struck cathedral. The impression that Tippett had composed a meditation on the consequences of war was reinforced by the premiere in Coventry the following day of Britten’s War Requiem. In a single week we were offered two works by pacifist composers, both dealing – in the words of the poet Wilfred Owen – with “the pity of war, the pity of war, the pity war distilled.” And they were both unveiled in a space which still carried the scars of saturation bombing. However, what may be true of the War Requiem is certainly not the case with Priam. Tippett began to sketch its libretto five years earlier. It was commissioned not by Coventry or even Covent Garden (who produced it the following month) but by the Koussevitsky Foundation. So it was not a response to the destruction of the cathedral and it is not really an opera about war.

Tippett made this clear in a BBC broadcast a few weeks after the premiere. In it he said that “there is no description of the war. There are just the necessary formal musical gestures. It is the persons within the war that matter.” If we read his letters and sketchbooks from 1958, written while the work was gestating, we can see that the theme of Priam is not war but the decisions which provoke it.  What drew Tippett to classical myth was not the military conflict or its Trojan setting but his personal search for “a sense of the timeless in time”. In his essay on Troy in Music of the Angels Tippett explains that “although the story is from the past, the sense of our performing this story in our own present….is consciously underlined.” So his choice of the Trojan War as a subject was not a retreat from the 20^th Century into distant legend. By presenting war not as something which we suffer but as something we choose, he makes Priam a figure as modern as Magnus the psychotherapist in The Knot Garden or the Russian dissidents in The Ice Break or Jo-Ann the social worker in New Year………

You can read the full essay in the May issue of Opera Magazine

I have known Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece for almost a quarter of a century. I have watched it three times on stage and once on video. I have seen it played grandly operatic and frighteningly intimate. At the Adelphi last week I saw something that was almost the perfect fusion of the two. My first encounter with the demon barber of Fleet Street was in Hal Prince’s Broadway premiere of 1979. It was the most elaborate of all its stagings and after I saw the Channel 13 relay in the mid 1980s, I bought and broadcast it on BBC Television. The barest and most stripped back version was Declan Donellan’s Cottesloe production where Alun Armstrong’s silent psychotic slit throats only a few feet from the front row of the audience. And surprisingly the most operatic was not the Royal Opera revival starring Sir Thomas Allen and Felicity Palmer but Jonathan Kent’s recent transfer from Chichester which opened a few days ago in the Strand. I am not sure whether I agree with those critics who considered it the finest of all Sweeneys. I cannot forget the genuine terror which I experienced at the Cottesloe where Donellan gave us nowhere to hide and brought Sweeney’s monomania into bloody close-up. But Jonathan Kent and Michael Ball run it a very close second.

Fifteen years ago, when I tried to acquire the rights for English National Opera, I learned that Sondheim had granted them to the Cottelsoe.  He was eager to return the work to its intimate roots in Christopher Bond’s Stratford East melodrama. I was disappointed but had to admit that Sondheim was almost certainly right. Jonathan Kent’s achievement is to retain the harsh Brechtian austerity of the original play but to allow it to spread into the deepest recesses of the Adelphi stage. A substantial West End size chorus and company of supporting actors evoke a dysfunctional London underworld where poverty, madness, predatory toffs and rough sleepers coexist in nightmare proximity. Wozzek meets The Rake’s Progress. Far from distracting from the central performances, the supporting cast throw Ball’s deranged barber and Imelda Staunton’s infatuated and driven pie-maker into vivid relief. Ball’s transformation from cuddly comic to pallid psycho has attracted most of the critical attention. But Staunton’s subtle balancing act between motherly affection, pragmatism and amoral greed is even more impressive. Anyone who has seen her in Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh already knows her versality. As Mrs Lovett she employs every weapon in her dramatic armoury and also sings up a storm wherever required. As the run is limited, if you haven’t yet seen Sweeney rush to reserve a seat for music theatre at its most chilling.

How sad that Judith Weir, who is one of our most gifted operatic composers, should fall so far short. I have known her work ever since I broadcast A Night at the Chinese Opera on BBC Television. I commissioned a short music drama on film from her a couple of years later and a much more substantial work Blond Ekbert for ENO in the 1990s. In all of them she demonstrated a sure theatrical touch, haunting harmonies and a talent for the unpredictable and disorientating. All of these are missing from Miss Fortune. Her modernised Sicilian folk tale about a rich girl who falls on hard times is oddly anorexic. The characters are all stereotypes. The graph of the plot from comfort to poverty to unexpected wealth to riches rejected for love is the stuff of Mills and Boon rather than myth.  I will pass over the weird misjudgement of accompanying the action with a group of African-Caribbean break-dancers who trash the set in a tasteless echo of last summer’s riots. I’ll assume that this naivety was Covent Garden’s rather than Weir’s. The score is equally thin gruel and rarely exploits the resources of the full Covent Garden orchestra. Perhaps it would have fared better in the cramped spaces of the Linbury but unlike Sweeney, Miss Fortune simply doesn’t have the musical material to fill two hours in a grand theatre. If you want to hear Judith Weir at her considerable best, go to the recordings of Chinese Opera or The Vanishing Bridegroom. If you wish to be frightened or haunted, try the second act of Blond Ekbert. But for real terror and pity, you are better off with Sondheim.

With the publication of Michael Hofmann’s edition of Joseph Roth:A Life in Letters by Granta and my own Wandering Jew by Notting Hill Editions, a Roth revival seems to be heartily under way. Here are the comments from the broadsheets on the latter:

Simon Schama in Financial Times: As Dennis Marks points out in his brilliant little study Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth, published last year, the facts of his life are notoriously difficult to disentangle from his autobiographical inventions.

Lara Feigel in Guardian: These letters prove the ideal medium to get to know a man who resisted conventional biography, occluding his own life in myth. In Wandering Jew, a fascinating exploration of Roth’s Galacian origins, Dennis Marks describes Roth as “one of literature’s most prodigious liars”. Roth continually reinvented his birthplace and early history, and often contradicted himself.

William Boyd in Sunday Times: For English readers who love Roth’s work (these letters) are the closest thing we have to a biography of Roth, although Dennis Marks’ shrewd and engaging monograph The Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth is  perfect accompaniment.

Paul Bayley in The Independent: As Dennis Marks notes in his thoughtful monograph, The Radetzky March could have been one of those sagas tracing a family’s fortunes over several generations, but it isn’t. It is an enduring masterwork by virtue of encompassing the lives of the unimportant who were happy with their lot as long as the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary was allowed to flourish. Roth’s birthplace was part of that once mighty empire, and his most original novel is an elegy, often comic, for its loss. Marks is probably right when he calls Roth a “self-hating Jew”. Yet I think the self-hatred goes deeper than that.

In point of fact, what I actually said was that some Jewish commentators considered him a “self-hating Jew” but never mind, it all adds to the dialogue about his importance in the German literary canon between the wars. If you can rustle up the cover price (Amazon is, needless to say, discounted) then please buy Hofmann’s irreplaceable collection of the letters. It’s a revelation and the last hundred pages are heart breaking.

Now I have to encourage an equivalent revival in the study of the impressive life and wonderful music of Michael Tippett in the biography of the composer which I have just started to research..

Last week a great Hungarian musician – the pianist Andras Schiff – announced that until the current regime in Budapest changed their social and cultural policies he would no longer perform in his homeland.

For those of you who missed the stories in the press, not only is the Orban government discriminating against Roma citizens and allying with anti-Semites in the coalition, it has removed the inspired directors of Budapest’s New Theatre and replaced them with nationalists. Their next year’s programme has been cancelled and that dangerous radical the German romantic poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller has been replaced by “indigenous Hungarian work.” This has not impressed the European Union who are currently under-writing Hungary’s massive national debt, most of it a direct result of the neo-liberal policies which the country adopted when their post-communist flirtation with the global market-place began to unravel. It is possible that Budapest’s cultural life may be protected not by artists or performers but by the European Central Bank.

But don’t hold your breath. Many Hungarians have a residual stubbornness and sense of victimhood which may prompt Orban and his colleagues to press on with their economic and political programmes. Hungary has historic form. When I filmed in the Buda national gallery, all the heroic paintings from the 19th Century seemed to celebrate great defeats. I’ve visited the country half a dozen times since the fall of the iron curtain and watched how it has been comprehensively asset stripped by multi-nationals. A former colleague in Hungarian TV (now directly controlled by the right wing faction in government) once remarked that a sign should be erected at Budapest’s Ferihegy airport announcing “You are now entering Hungary; everything is for sale.” Fifteen years later Hungary is paying the price for selling off the family silver too cheaply and too early. In the early 90s there was a general exodus of artistic talent to Germany, Austria and other parts of the more prosperous West. It was the inspired leadership of creative figures like Schiff and the conductor Ivan Fischer who founded the prodigious Budapest Festival Orchestra which reversed the outflow. Now both of them have threatened to turn their backs on the country unless the government’s policies are abandoned.

In these tough artistic times in Britain, Hungary’s problems may seem remote. They aren’t. The UK is a world centre of artistic activity and musical management. IAMA – the international body which represents musical agents – is based in London and this year they have chosen to stage their annual conference in Budapest. Their board doesn’t meet again until the conference in the spring but they might like to have an emergency session to consider whether a city whose politics is driving out some of its most talented performers is the best place to celebrate worldwide musical achivement. There’s still time for IAMA to reconsider. While this year Britain welcomes two great artists – Daniel Barenboim and Gustavo Dudamel – both of whom believe that art and politics DO mix, it would only be consistent and ethical to refuse to meet in a country which is currently showing scant respect to artistic and political freedom. If you have any dealings with IAMA, you might like to write to the chairman John Willan. You can contact him via info@iamaworld.com . And watch this space for further news.

‘My subject is War and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.  All a poet can do today is warn

Thus, in celebrated and much quoted words, Wilfred Owen drafted the introduction to a collection of poems only published after the end of his brief life. I first came across them in my early teens, not once but twice. The first time – as it must be for most adolescents – was in the classroom. Works like Elegy for Doomed Youth are darkly appealing to impressionable fourteen year olds. But in 1963 it was its second appearance which lodged most deeply in my imagination. That year Britain’s two most prominent composers delivered their responses to a commission from Coventry Cathedral to celebrate its re-consecration after its near-destruction in the Blitz.

Benjamin Britten appended the quotation to the title page of his War Requiem which interweaves Owen’s war poetry with the Latin mass. His music is as poignant, dramatic and accessible as the poems he set. It has all the theatrical skill of his operas and it is the archetypical piece d’occasion.

The other Coventry commission could not have been more different. Michael Tippett chose to offer not an oratorio but a full length opera. Like Britten he was a pacifist and unlike him he had been imprisoned for conscientious objection in the Second World War. One might have expected a response even more pained and angry than Britten’s. However, King Priam is not an anti-war work. It is not a warning and it is not an appeal to pity. Tippett had already warned and pitied to memorable effect in A Child of Our Time, inspired by the pogrom of Kristallnacht which took place while Chamberlain was still appeasing Hitler, and Molotov and Ribbentrop were contemplating their disastrous pact. In that work he placed responsibility firmly in the hands of all humanity. As his libretto states: “I would know my shadow and my light so shall I at last be whole.” Note the verb “I would.” War, says Tippett, is not something that happens to us. It is something we choose. Hence the subject of Priam is not sacrifice but choice. The response of the two composers suggests a dichotomy which has characterised “war music” for centuries.

Half a century later I now love both works, albeit for very different reasons. Yet the dichotomy remains and I was reminded of it during Armistice Week when I read an article by the music critic Jessica Duchen in The Independent. She wonders “where are the war requiems for the early 21^st century? Maybe there’s simply a feeling of hopelessness about new wars – that no amount of new requiems can undo the damage or even help the healing.” She cites Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of wars too daunting to inspire a musical response.  Do we assume therefore that in the 21^st Century terror and pity are the only possible musical reactions to war?

You can read the complete essay on the Notting Hill Editions website

A colleague in Moravia wrote me the following message today:

I´ve been at the festive production of Bartered Bride on the  eve of Czech/Slovak national day, October 28th. Before the production the director of the Brno Opera Daniel Dvorak wanted to make his usual speech but the audience started to whistle and boo so he couldn´t say a single word. Then conductor lifted the baton for the first tones of the Czech national anthem.When Dvorak added a few sentences about how wonderful our opera ensemble is and how everybody could work for the republic there were laughs from the audience. The performance was unusually good; the ensemble felt such support from the people. The lyrics sounded surprisingly fresh in the  current situation. At the end there was a 15 minutes of standing ovations (the performance is 6 or more  years old)…..

On Nov 8th the city will declare the result. It seems that it is now politically impossible to close the house. But of course the problems will remain.

If you wish to add your voice to the protests, click on http://zachrante-operu.cz/english/….

So why haven’t you seen it? The former Head of Music at BBC Wales wanted it but he was shifted sideways and then left the BBC for the conservatoire in Cardiff. Channel Four and ITV were both cutting back heavily on arts and music and the rest of the BBC seemed indifferent to such a distiguished cast list and such diverse and glittering content. I should add that  six weeks before the festival we received the sad news of the death of the great Mstislav Rostropovitch. His former pupils at the festval – now all acclaimed virtuosi – lined up to pay tribute. Another reason why this film should be screened. I make no claims for it as piece of film-making but as a testimony to great musical art it’s an essential document. OK, it was the final festival and it was almost four years ago but with some judicial re-editing it would offer an hour of passion and inspiration.

I would like to upload it here but as there are performances whose rights are not yet fully cleared we need a broadcaster to commit to screening it. If you would like to see it, contact Mark Thompson the Director General of the BBC or Alan Yentob, the Creative Director or Richard Klein Controller of BBC4. The average per hour cost of BBC4 should pay for it to be seen across the country. Over to you Mark, Alan and Richard.

A couple of short strolls through memory lane this week. At the Royal Festival Hall, the consummate viola player Laurence Power revisited Mark Antony Turnage’s ten year old concerto On Opened Ground. At the Duke of Yorks Theatre Backbeat, the story of the Beatles in their early Hamburg days, opened to mixed reviews. The Turnage is a work of memories in several senses – reshaping elements of the opera The Silver Tassie which I commissioned at ENO fifteen years ago and transforming them into a dialogue between an anguished soloist and an implacable orchestra. It’s a reminder of Turnage’s unique voice in the years before he was distracted by turning the tale of glamour model Anna Nicole into a Covent Garden money spinner and it’s all the better for it.

Backbeat is as mixed as its reviews. A juke-box musical it most certainly isn’t. The audience was dominated by my nostalgic contemporaries reliving their Beatlemaniac teens. They seemed relieved every time the Fab Five (John, George and Paul plus Stuart Sutcliffe and with Pete Best drumming in the pre-Ringo days) delivered very convincing tribute cover versions of early Beatles numbers and Chuck Berry staples. But this isn’t really a celebration of the group’s early triumphs. It’s an intimate drama about the triangular relationship between the conflicted Sutcliffe, who can’t decide between music and painting, the driven, manipulative Lennon and Sutcliffe’s other great love, a German photographer. It’s never resolved because, as we all know, Sutcliffe’s career was cut tragically short by a brain haemorrhage at the age of twenty one. It’s touching and frustrating at the same time but the music is full of committed energy and David Leveaux’s production did it more than justice. What it meant to the young woman next me, who wasn’t born when the Beatles disbanded, I have no idea. She has loved the music ever since she inherited her father’s vinyl collection and the smile on her face when they played a medley of early hits at the curtain call was probably the best review the show could have.