I was as distressed as everyone else to read that an artist manager from CAMI, the biggest classical agency, was robbed in broad daylight on a busy Manhattan sidewalk after withdrawing $100,000 from a nearby bank, or $150,000 according to the New York Post. That anyone should want to attack a fine upstanding artist manager, day or night, will be a mystery to all decent readers. And what Mr Seton Ijams was doing with that amount of cash in his sack might be an even greater mystery. After all, we … [Read more...]

Responses to my personal mailbox are running 3-1 in support of my commentary on Bloomberg that the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea is morally and culturally unacceptable. That's high, but not overwhelmingly so. There is, if course, considerable substance to the opposing case - that is is usually better to make jaw-jaw than war-war, and that the way to unfreeze tensions is not by hiding behind high walls of political preconception. It seems to me, none the less, that there are two … [Read more...]

This weekend, CBC Toronto will be airing a conversation between Dominic Lawson and me on the question of Herbert von Karajan, and whether (as discussed on this blog) a bad man can make good music. A comment by Richard V Harris has been rolling round my mind. Biology, he writes, 'is the science of exceptions, and we are not dealing here in absolutes (of goodness), only tendencies. Wagner was a great composer, but we do not see him as having been a good man, largely because he was an anti-Semite. … [Read more...]

Dominic Lawson, in a typically thoughtful Independent op-ed, took my Karajan column last week as a springboard for contemplating the connection between genius and virtue. I am inclined to agree with his argument in respect of original creators. Aesthetically, and scientifically for that matter, lack of moral fibre is no impediment to genius. Byron was a rotter. So were Shelley and Dylan Thomas. Picasso was no paragon. Rodin was a bit of a shit, and as for Klimt, Schiele and the Viennese … [Read more...]