The total value is tentatively reckoned at £25,000 ($49,000) and items go on sale today priced from £1.99 to £150.

A windfall for the starving masses in Sudan? Relief for the suffering Palestinians? Gimme a break. Give your old clothes and knick-knacks to Oxfam if you like. This is a man's life being broken up, down in the knacker's yard of Tavistock.

Some poor soul had built up this collection with care, balancing the familiar with the esoteric, Furtwaengler's Beethoven with Stockhausen's Stimmung, Mozart from Bruno Walter and Machaut from whoever recorded it first in the 1950's or 1960s. This was a person of taste and discrimination whose aesthetic take on life is being scattered to the four corners of the earth.

For you can be sure that collectors will be on the 0915 out of Paddington and the 1130 from Berlin to scavenge what scraps they can in a vulture rush that is also a form of homage to the former owner. My late mate Richard Bebb used to hotfoot it off to Italy at the first rattle of a dying record collector, cheerfully spending £25,000 to preserve the integrity of the archive - which is to say, keeping the choice rarities for himself and selling on the rest at profit.

A collection, let's be clear, is not just for life. To many men - forgive me, this is not a feminine thing - a collection is life itself.

And in Devon a life has been extinguished. The manager of the Oxfam store 'had a phone call from a lady, after what I understand was a bereavement; she was ready to move on with her life...'

Widow or daughter, it hardly matters whom. Move on, dear, move on. C'est la vie. My condolences. I do understand (the hell I do...).

My wife, seeing me asphyxiate on a spoonful of muesli on reading this, dispensed sage advice. 'Sell up while you're alive, sweetie,' she said. 'I can't be responsible what happens after.'

What time's the next train to Tavistock?

I knew what he was on about, just about. Some time before, I had written a playful op-ed dividing pianists into two categories, eggheads and fruitcakes. The first are balding brainboxes who commune with Schopenhauer in their down time. The other category is full of nuts like Vladimir de Pachmann, who carried a smelly sock that he claimed belonged to Chopin, and Vladimir Horowitz who only gave recitals at 4pm and lived on a diet of Dover sole.

On balance, I reckoned, Mr B belonged to Category A. Apparently, he has never forgiven me.

Last weekend in a Guardian quiz, he was asked: 'What is the worst thing anyone has ever said to you?' Alfred Brendel replied: 'Cerebral pianist (Norman Lebrecht).'

Well, I guess no critic gets it right all the time, but when an artist cites Stendhal and Bunuel as his leisure pastimes and Peter Brook as his most admired living person, it might be reasonable to suggest that he has a whiff of bookishness about him, no matter how wacky an eccentric he would like to seem.

Even in his last season of playing concerts, I don't see Mr B coming on stage in a polka-dot tie and tutu. He is certifiably sane and fit for purpose, which is more than can be said of one or two younger colleagues. He is also unbendingly serious in his approach to music.

I am truly sorry for having cut him to the quick. I certainly didn't mean 'intellectual' in the English, pejorative sense, meaning someone not fit to be seen on BBC television.

Alfred, this is an apology. If you promise to play another couple of years, I'll upgrade you in my next piece to fruit-and-nut. Deal?

But when it comes to favourite orchestra, a large majority of critics plump for the Freiburg Baroque ensemble, followed at some distance by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie of Bremen. In third place, with just three votes, stands the Berlin Philharmonic, supposedly champions of the world.

Well, a poll is a poll is a good way to fill six pages. But what jumped out at me from this survey was the breakdown which showed that critics who live in Berlin voted more than 2-1 for Freiburg against their local ensemble. These are people who hear Rattle & Co perform week in, week out. They don't seem too impressed. Perhaps they ought to tell us why.

Elsewhere in the mag, there is a long piece of hagiolatry on Herbert von Karajan by one of his misty-eyed biographers. Say what you like about the K brand, but in his time no German magazine would have dared to place his orchestra third to some baroque outfit and a chamber phil - not without Herbie's lawyers having the issue injuncted before it hit the newsstands. Those were the days...

Here's the survey, for those that read German:
http://www.partituren.org/de/archiv/ausgabe15/umfrage/index.html?inhalt=20080226155654

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 have been assured time and time again that classical music is a respectable business these days with no brown-envelope payouts or tax-dodge kickbacks.

My guess is Mr Ijams, who looks after Marvin Hamlisch among others, must have had a lot of taxi drivers waiting to be tipped along the street, with maybe a waiter or two and a milkman. These people just won't take a credit card. That's how it is.

Anyhow, I'm launching an appeal for all artist agents who have been mugged in broad daylight, poor things (that's nebbich in New York).

Donations, please, in used bills only.

No artists need apply.

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 disabling flaws to the cultural diplomacy argument. The first is to apply it to Hitler's Germany. Would a 1938 trip by the NY Phil have averted WW 2 and the Holocaust?

In Pyongyang, New York's finest will be entertaining seasoned killers who, contrite today, may kill again tomorrow - if only by picking up the phone to Teheran and having another quiet swap of nuclear know-how.

The second qualm relates to consumption. Every calorie eaten, every bath taken, every light switched on by the 130 New York musicians and their entourage of 150 handlers and journalists is one kilojule of energy, one tub of water, one volt of energy stolen from a population that has been systematically starved by its unrepentant government. Playing a symphony concert to the Beloved Kim gives nothing back to his malnourished nation.

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. I have no idea as to whether or not he privately carried out acts of kindness more than the average person.'

Well, from the evidence in his letters and autobiography, not to mention Cosima's diaries, Wagner never knowingly performed an act of kindness without intending self-benefit. He abandoned his first wife Minna, milked the affections of rich women like Mathilde Wesendonck, seduced and impregnated the wife of his acolyte Hans von Bulow and flaunted his conquest to her father, Franz Liszt, who had done more than anyone to assist his career.

Cosima was just as bad. When Liszt lay dying in the middle of a Bayreuth Festival, his daughter was seldom at his side. Beside such wilful misanthropy, their rabid anti-semitism can appear almost incidental.

The question that arises is: did Wagner have to be such a brute in order to achieve his Ring? Every act of creation requires a degree of egotism. Do the greatest acts demand the most inhuman conduct? Discuss.

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 school... decadent, the lot of them.

Music, though, for some mysterious reason, is different. In music there are few instances of a great composer who was not, in some way, a good man. Misanthropes abound, but Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Britten were decent to the core. Bach was a friendly teddy-bear for the most part. Mozart was much misunderstood. Sibelius was a moral rock hiding behind a vodka bottle.

Mahler once said - and I think he meant composers: 'there are no great men without some goodness'. Schoenberg said of Mahler: er war ein Heiliger - he was a saint.'

There is, of course, Wagner - but he's an exception to all known rules.

So why do composers tend to the good? You tell me.

"This is to try to save the orchestra and enable us to grow it into something special," said Robert "Buzz" Trafford, chairman of the symphony board, in a comment to the local newspaper which appears to endorse the move.

Hello? Come again? Anyone at home?

Surely no-one imagines that playing Haydn instead of Mahler is going to bring crowds banging on the doors, or that kicking musicians into limbo will improve morale in the band. Cutting an orchestra is usually one short step from killing it altogether.

Columbus, where I have never set foot, has (so I'm told) an appreciative, cultured audience who don't want to fly to Cleveland or Detroit for a symphonic experience. It also has a proud and supportive NPR station.

A city of 1.75 million can surely stump up a few donors to cover a $1.5 million hole. Slash and burn, which is what the board is proposing, is a policy that went out in the 90s with the bonfire of vanities. Someone needs to take a quick rethink and a look at the map.

Without a symphony orchestra, Columbus becomes a speck.

For more information, check www.symphonymusicians.com

Pavarotti was always a bit scared of her, and Solti untypically deferential. She gave as good as she got and never knowingly foisted a dud artist on the innocent public. Now of how many concert agents and casting managers can that be said?

There's also a specially written slice of mince on that selfsame album by Placido Domingo Jr - well, it's the season when families get together, isn't it?

By popular demand, lines for your worst-ever votes remain open til New Year's Eve.

And those of you slumped before a UK telly at teatime on Xmas Eve can see a fine BBC2 doc on King Lucy's greater moments.

Among Colin's 100 worst are seven chilling Xmas albums. My list had room only for Kiri at Christmas, although a new compilation from Sony came tantalisingly close. Has there ever been a less festive track than Charlotte Church trilling Dong Dong Merrily on High with the London Symphony Orchestra? Or Bobby McFerrin's Ave Maria? Or Josh Bell's Ave Maria, with a ghostly background chorus? Oh look, and here's Kiri again with Andre at the piano...

You've heard worse?

Tell me about it, right here. Lines are open til Midnight Mass.

*

'Once music publishers had heard the cash tills ringing there was no stopping them and since the 1950s things have been steadily declining into a bottomless pit of mediocrity that now asks the perennial question, what will be the Christmas number 1?'

No less than seven Christmas records have been included in music guru Colin Larkin's 100 worst albums of all time, part of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, the critically acclaimed 10-volume work now available ONLINE for the first time this December through the subscription website www.oxfordmusiconline.com.

And, for the launch of the new online edition, Colin has charted the rise (or fall) of the Christmas record on Oxford University Press's own blog at http://blog.oup.com

'The celebration of Christmas in popular song must really be credited to the wise old men of Tin Pan Alley, USA; more specifically, the pre-Rock 'n' Roll market that existed in the mid-40s to the early 50s,' says Colin. 'Clearly there was a market for a 'great' Christmas single, but what the world would also learn, was that there was a market for terrible, wretched, awful, trite, saccharine-soaked, sentimentalist-nonsense, let-me-out-of-here rubbish.'

Colin looks at the all-time classic singles and albums ('White Christmas' by Bing Crosby and others, 'The Christmas Song' sung by Nat King Cole, and The Beach Boys' Christmas Album) and also discusses his all-time turkeys (Shakin' Stevens' 'Merry Christmas Everyone', Chris de Burgh's 'A Spaceman Came Travelling' and basically anything by Sir Cliff Richard).

'It is well over 40 years since the Beach Boys and Phil Spector albums were released, and yet nobody has come near them for quality or sheer feel-good factor,' says Colin. 'Or is it simply that we have milked this Christmas cow dry and nothing will ever match the likes of the soothing comfort of Nat King Cole or Ella Fitzgerald at Christmas?'

And Colin's greatest all-time Christmas song, ever, ever, ever? 'Father Christmas' by the Kinks, a 1977 single that never even made the charts, anywhere. Bah humbug!

Christmas culprits in Colin's Larkins' 100 worst albums of all time:

· Michael Bolton: This is the Time: The Christmas Album (Columbia 1996)

· Booker T. and the MGs: In the Christmas Spirit (Stax 1966)

· Father Abraham and the Smurfs: Merry Christmas with the Smurfs (Dureco 1983)

· Hanson: Snowed in for Christmas (Mercury 1997)

· New Kids on the Block: Merry, Merry Christmas (Columbia 1989)

· Lou Rawls: Merry Christmas Ho! Ho! Ho! (Capitol 1967)

· Jerry Jeff Walker: Christmas Gonzo Style (Rykodisc 1994)

For more details or to interview Colin Larkin, please contact Juliet Evans on 01865 353911 or email juliet.evans@oup.com.

Visit www.oxfordonline.com/epm for background information and resources or join the mailing list at www.oxfordonline.com/listserv to receive regular updates.

Emanuel Ax won and everyone got terribly pompous and aware of The Great Occasion, Rubi stood up and said to Ax something like: As the lucky winner you get a medal with my profile!

Just in case he forgets who's number one...

I wonder what Harry would have made of the coming Bernstein Festival announced this week by Carnegie Hall and the NY Phil, an over-the-top celebration of Lenny's 90th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his New York accession. All-embracing, all-forgiving, it presents some of his most egregious compositions alongside the more thoughtful and lasting legacies. Sentiment, it seems, has finally got the upper hand.

Over at the Landestheater a week later, London's National Theatre will be staging David Hare's production of Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking with Vanessa Redgrave as the elderly writer recovering from her husband's death (as premiered last March in New York). I'm guessing that this is Vanessa's Salzburg debut and I do hope she won't feel constrained in run-up interviews from venting her well-known views on poverty and Third World liberation movements at the plump industrialist couples in the $200 seats, or at the plump opera singers whose fee will be ten times hers. For the first time this century, a little frisson of controversy is returning to the summer fest.

Tasmin Little, who made a lovely recording for Hyperion with the BBC Scottish four years ago, tells me she did her best to secure a public performance in several countries and actually got it into a BBC concert, only for some chicken-heart to change the programme for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained. Tasmin's recording, by the way, is mysteriously omitted from the 2008 edition of the compendious Penguin Guide to classical records.

Meanwhile, from her home in Australia, up pops the much-loved Wanda Wilkomirska, whose recordings have become notably scarce. After a mid-night shuffle through her old concert diaries she informs me (via David Schoenbaum in Iowa) that she played Karlowicz 'in Prague in 1953, in Basel in 1961, in Minneapolis in 1962, toured the US and Canada for five weeks with it in 1964, and repeated it in Frankfurt in 1970.'

Still within living memory, for sure, but I guess the fact that she was a Polish artist, touring mostly with a Polish orchestra, may have led lazy-minded violinists and artistic administrators to assume that Karlowicz was a national specialty, like pierogi, and not one of the most affecting concertos written for the instrument since the ineluctable Bruch.

Let's hope that Nigel Kennedy's ardent advocacy will open a few more minds.