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Doctors who receive a rush of middle-aged men presenting with breathing difficulties can trace the source to a full-page article in this morning's Guardian, reporting that an Oxfam charity shop in rural Devon has been given a prime collection of 4,000 classical LPs.

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 first realised there was a problem with Alfred Brendel when, a decade ago over dinner with the Menuhins, he muttered 'you made an intellectual of me,' and turned his head away.

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?

The German magazine Partituren has asked 52 critics to name their current hottie. Top of the singers is Juan Diego Florez, best composer is Hans Werner Henze and fastest up-and-coming is Gustavo Dudamel. No surprises, there.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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. 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.

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 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.

A colleague in Columbus, Ohio, has alerted me to a local downturn. The city is planning to shrink its symphony orchestra into a chamber ensemble, abolishing 22 positions and cutting the concert season by half. That, they say, ought to wipe out an annual $1.5 million deficit.

"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

Joan Ingpen, whose death is reported here, was the one and onlie true begetter of the Big Lucy machine, as well as being the unseen force behind Georg Solti. A full account can be found in my book, Covent Garden:The Untold Story, and one of the joys of its research was getting to know Joan over several lunches in Marylebone. She was, by then, well into her 70s, but the memory was sharp as a pin and the tolerance for sloppiness was zero.

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?

For those still filling in their worst-ever classical Christmas track, there's a late surge of support for Robert Alagna's Sleigh Ride Medley on DG's We Wish You A Merry Xmas album. No more egregious assault on English language and cadence has been heard since the late King Lucy slaughtered cod lyrics to Adolphe Adam's Cantique de Noel - dee star (sic) are brytlee shyning, eet ees dee nyte - in duet with Crown Prince Placido on untouchable Sony.

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.