main: June 2010 Archives

Will Gompertz, the BBC's highly paid arts/news editor, is about to be put on the spot. A former Tate Gallery staffer who lives in freely admitted awe of its director Nicholas Serota, Gompertz has given large dollops of attention to the Tate and such favoured artists as Francis Alys, Louise Bourgeois and Yinko Shonibare - and that's in the past month alone.

But when it comes to the big Tate issue, his reticence is stupefying.

The Tate, along with other UK arts bodies, is facing waves of protest from environmental campaigners, outraged that a massive global polluter like BP can seek to cleanse itself in large donations to British art. The Tate's chairman is Lord Brown, former head of BP. Next week, Brown will preside at the gallery's summer fundraiser. Greenwash Guerillas intend to picket the party. It will be an uncomfortable occasion.

The Tate, along with the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery and Royal Opera House have issued a statement defending their relationship with BP as legitimate and essential. The company is not, on the whole, an enemy of the people and the art it supports will last long after the last of its oil spill has washed away, along with its hapless present management. Indeed, without BP funds much grassroots art might never develop.

I happen to support that position. The arts cannot afford to be too scrupulous about sources of funding. If cheques are accepted from Russian robber barons and pension-stripping bankers, there is no reason to refuse them from BP, no matter how dirty its seas. The arts are not arbiters of morality or marine police. The arts have a right to accept BP cash.

Nevertheless, there is a heated public debate around BP's arts role and the BBC ought to be reporting it. So far, not a peep from Gompertz. Not a hint that the Tate party might be less than jolly. Not a word on the Ten O'Clock News about the collision between arts and ecology, although several newspapers have reported it.

That may be an oversight, an error of judgement, or a quiet word from his former boss. Not for us to know. But the BBC needs to be impartial. If Gompertz won't report the anti-Tate demos, someone else should cover the story. Where's Razia Iqbal when we really need her? 

I was just back from a research trip to Vienna when the phone rang and a friend offered me a part in a major feature film about Gustav Mahler. If it had been the lead role with a credit above the title, I might have given it more than a minute's thought, but the best I was told I could hope for was a non-speaking part in the scrummage at a high-society orgy. In short, I could have been a Hollywood stud.

The film was Bruce Beresford's Bride of the Wind and it sank into video oblivion without proper cinema release, weighted by the silliness of its paltry fictions.

It came to mind this morning when someone directed my eye to a Los Angeles Film Festival premiere of Mahler on the Couch, Felix and Percy Adlon's fancification of the composer's encounter with Sigmund Freud. You can tell that it's fiction because Mahler was never on the couch. He met Freud in a small Dutch town in August 1910 and they set off on a four-hour walking cure. The rest can be read in Why Mahler?, newly obtainable on amazon. 

The first critical grab on Mahler on the Couch suggests that it is afflicted by the same silliness as Beresford's wretched effort. I don't expect to watch Johannes Silberschneider, Barbara Romaner, Karl Markovics struggle through 101 minutes, and I don't object on the whole to the fictionalisation of historical incidents, so long as they enlighten us in some way about the human condition.  The trouble with most such biofilms is that they are riddled with cliches. I hoped for better from the Adlons, but I fear the worst.

Let me know if you've seen it.

You can post reviews either here, or on the Why Mahler? facebook page.

The London Jewish Museum of Art last night opened an exhibition of crucifixion images, called Cross Purposes. It contains some extraordinary interpretations from varied collections, by artists Jewish, Christian and neither.

The centrepiece is Marc Chagall's chilling 1945 analogy of Hitler's assassination of the Jews and their faith, along with a 1942 companion work by Emmanuel Levi in which a man in prayer-shawl and phylacteries is crucified beneath the sign 'Jude' in Gothic script.

There is a skeletal Graham Sutherland, a stagey Maggie Hambling and an unforgettable Duncan Grant that accentuates the Christ-figure's sexuality. A post-colonial triple crucifixion of black men and white, by the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza (1824-2002), somehow follows you around the room and out of the door into the sun-baked street.

But what's a Jewish art gallery doing putting on a show of crucifixions? The idea has drawn torrents of abuse from Jewish supporters of the museum, who argue (rightly) that the crucifixion image has been the incitement for 2,000 years of Christian persecution of Jews. The gallery counters that the man on the cross was Jewish; it's time to reclaim that heritage and discuss the terrible act from the victim's viewpoint.

I don't subscribe to either standpoint, but the issue is worth examining with greater intellectual clarity and the show should certainly be on your calendar.

LATE EXTRA: The story has been taken up by the JC:

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/33409/jewish-art-museums-crucifix-exhibition

Before your brains get addled by the soundbite merchants from Government and Opposition, I've looked at one headline figure in the Budget and come to the conclusion that the arts are going to get off lightly - much more so than they would have done under Labour.

In the months before the last election, major arts instutitions were told to plan for succession ten percent cuts over three years - that's 27.1 percent.

George Osborne spoke to day of cutting government spending by 25 percent over four years - that's two percent less and over an extra 12 months.

Crunch this one whichever way you like, but it means the arts ought to get away with less pain under the LibCon coalition than under the feckless hand of Ben Bradshaw.

And if Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt decides to shake down the Arts Council, that measure would be cheered from Land's End to Hadrian's Wall. The southwest of England, a LibDem stronghold, has been cruelly neglected by the mandarins of the ACE.

Ahead of today's austerity Budget the Arts Council of England, which distributes government subsidy across the lively arts, has cut £19 million from its purse. Half of the money is being dredged up from 'reserves', but arts organisations have been strimmed for the rest.

All 808 receipients of ACE grants receive a 0.5 percent reduction, spread evenly across the board. That means the Royal Opera House will lose £142,000 - that's about two-third of its chief executive's salary, not that he will be taking a pay cut - while your local ethnic arts centre may be down as little as £200. Fair's fair, right? Everyone must have prizes, and everyone must share the pain in equal measure.

Wrong. The Arts Council was set up by Royal Charter 1945 to nurture creativity by supporting promising start-ups. It was designed to favour excellence and shun mediocrity. Its unstated motto was along the lines of: the best is the enemy of the good.

Today, it delivers equal shares and pain to everyone, regardless of merit. A London orchestra notorious for its minimal rehearsals receives the same grant as a world beater. A theatre in Hampstead that should never have been publicly rebuilt is pumped full of subsidy while little startups like the Broadway-storming Menier Chocolate Factory get nothing.

Given a challenging opportunity to make choices on where it should cut, the ACE simply shut its eyes and spread thin gruel across the board. This is institution that has loss all will and right to exist. Its chief executive, Alan Davey, a former Culture Department bureaucrat, said limply: 'there really is no more to save.'  

Really? He could start with his own six-digit sinecure and work his way down through an eight-person executive that has proved itself incapable of making decisions, big or small.

The ACE is presently advertising a vacancy for an officer in Corporate Communications. Have they lost all semblance of plot? The ACE is a government welfare agency. It has no corporate function and it can barely communicate the time of day. It should be cutting itself.   

The hedgetrimmers who own what was once the flagship of the music industry have appointed yet another corp-speak soundbite to head the ailing giant. His name is Roger Faxon and he comes from the music-publishing side, which he will merge with the recording business.

He seems to think it's all about brand, but judge for yourselves. I attach his golden hello letter to fellow executives, along with the press release.

If there are any bookmakers out there, you might like to give me odds on how long before Faxon Faxoff. Tenure at the top of EMI since Terra Firma took over averages around two years.

Among those presently being moved on are John Birt, former boss of the BBC, and Charles Allen, cultural wrecker of ITV.

----------------------------------------------------

Here's Faxon's fax-on:

Ever since Labour lost the election and started collecting the dole, its former Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has hardly been off the BBC, day or night. Switch on PM, and there he is. Slump in the sofa at Question Time, and Ben's back. What's going on?

Bradshaw, an ex-BBC news reporter of no visible merit, was the most anti-BBC of the last five DCMS Secretaries, attacking the institution in venomous language, both verbal and bodily. Unpopular when he drew a BBC wage, he was roundly loathed when he wielded power.

Yet no sooner is he out of a job than the BBC are plugging his down time with chat stints. It may be that he's the only ex-Cabinet minister not to have cancelled his pager, or that he is a little more fluent than the rest of the defeated rabble. But what is the BBC doing giving him air time? Bradshaw was a bad minister with a sack of predictable whinges about broadcasting. His party has been turfed out of office. We should hear no more of him for the next few years.

Especially now that one his pet projects, the £166 million BFI Film Centre has just been scrapped by the new Government. Spend £166 million of public money on a glorified cinema? You see what I mean by a bad minister...

In my current conversation in The Strad, I raise the issue that most afflicts the lives of modern musicians:

We fly to live. Anyone in classical music who is grounded for more than a month is commonly presumed to be hungry, heavily pregnant or halfway to oblivion.

What are we to do about it? You'll have to buy a copy of the magazine, or subscribe, to discover the alternative models that I propose - but you'll also find a bonus between the same covers. The Strad has commissioned a survey of string players on which airlines treat them worst (and sometimes best).

Since writing the piece four weeks ago, more than 1,000 players have joined the Facebook group Musicians against Ryanair, raising the total to 12,400. Ryanair are by no means the worst offenders.

We must find a better way of organising our musical lives. 

I was sad to read of the death of Maurren Forrester at 79, after a long, debilitating illness.

I met her only once, during the Cardiff sessions for Gilbert Kaplan's first recording of Mahler's second symphony in July 1987. Although slightly over the hill, she had recorded the work in 1957 with Mahler's disciple, Bruno Walter, and brought along a kind of secondhand authority that she bore with consummate solemnity.

'Doctor Walter did it like this,' she pronounced in orotund tones, or 'Doctor Walter said that'. It would have been inappropriate to remind her that Walter had left at least three recordings of the work - his arch-rival Otto Klemperer made six (see Why Mahler? for comparisons) - and that hers was by far the smoothest and most benign of the bunch.

Walter understood that performing Mahler is a matter of mood. Mahler told interpreters to follow momentary feeling. There is no cast-iron rule in the Resurrection. Maureen never quite got that, but she was lovely to have around and her slightly faded grandeur remains, for me, unforgettable. The recording, with the LSO and Benita Valente, is pretty good, too.

Almost everyone who knew him has memories of Ernest Fleischmann hitting the roof. He had a hair-trigger temper and could turn from sunny smile to screaming rage in an instant. I saw him blow his top on many occasion and my email inbox is full of people telling me how he fell out with them yet, scanning my internal hard drive, I cannot recall one occasion when Ernest and I had a serious falling out.

On the contrary, in deference to our common German-Jewish ancestry, we almost fell over one another in competition to be polite and after-you. Four years ago, when I reported that Esa-Pekka Salonen was planning to leave Los Angeles for the Philharmonia in London (where his wife used to be a player and with which he was sentimentally attached), Ernest wrote me a very gentle email, wondering if I mightn't consider publishing a correction since, to the very best of his personal knowledge, Esa-Pekka was staying put in LA.

I checked back on my sources and they assured me that Salonen was, as I had written, heading for London. I replied to Ernest, standing my ground, and we agreed to differ. When, some weeks later, the Salonen move to London was announced I realised that he had raised the objection more from heart than from head. Ernest, though no longer running the Philharmonic, remained a fervent fan and an incorrigible local patriot. He couldn't bear to see LA lose an asset. He took every little thing to heart, and that's what we loved about him.

It was a treat to read today's Guardian obituary written by Alan Rich and illustrated with a photograph (not online) by Betty Freeman, both sadly no longer alive. I first met Alan at a Sunday brunch series at Betty's where he would introduce a living composer and his works - on that occasion, George Perle. Ernest, who instigated the series and took me there, loved nothing better than to engage people with music they had never heard before. Betty had the most discriminating ears I ever met and Alan was an immaculate presenter. Of such characters is great music made.  

Regime change at the leading classical record label stepped up a gear yesterday when Michael Lang, head of Deutsche Grammophon, was ordered to report to his parent company's German HQ instead of the Universal New York office. This is a small but significant shift.

Lang, an American, was installed at DG as the executive arm of Chris Roberts, president of Universal Classics and Jazz, whose writ reduced the famous label from standard-bearer of classical performance to ambulance chaser of crossover trash. Roberts is leaving the job in October and his structure is being demolished daily beneath him.

Many expected Lang to depart with his master and commander, but the quiet former jazz producer has been given one big chance to put right all that has gone wrong over 15 years. It's a huge task, but the restoration of geographic primacy will be widely cheered - and not just by the surviving Mutters and Thielemanns on the roster.

One of the world's leading conductors told me the other day of the hostility he faced from Roberts & Co. 'I felt they hated conductors. Anything I suggested was greeted with a sigh and a frown. I was a time-waster for them. We were never going to achieve anything together.'

That deadly ambience has changed with the return of Costa Pilavachi in a presiding A&R role. Pilavachi was removed as head of Decca when Roberts decided to demolish the London-based label. he went on to become head of EMI Classics, fell out with its hedge-fund owners and has now returned in a peacemaking role to revivify the Roberts wasteland. 

Much will need to be done before Deutsche Grammophon can regain its rightful historic position as pacemaker in the classical music industry, and Pilavachi has a long way to go before he gains the confidence of its devoted German staff. Many of them are avid readers of Slipped Disc, anxious to know what's will hit them next.

Early appreciations of Ernest Fleischmann, who has died aged 85, have focussed rightly on the second half of his life when, as manager, he transformed the Los Angeles Philharmonic into a world-class orchestra and created a Frank Gehry Hall that will be a city landmark for the next 100 years. It was a phenomenal achievement. Safe to say that Ernest did more for orchestral life in America than any executive since Arthur Judson invented the Philadelphia brand with Leopold Stokowski during the First World War. 

But Ernest had another life, and it saddened him that it got downplayed. Before moving to the US in 1970, he had gone from being a conductor in South Africa - the last pupil of Albert Coates - to a talent spotter and career maker. Appointed manager of the player-owned London Symphony Orchestra, he retrieved Jascha Horenstein and Pierre Monteux from the discard pile and rocket-boosted their late careers.

Andre Previn and Claudio Abbado were two of his proteges, followed (much later) by Esa-Pekka Salonen. His eye and ear for conductors led to deep and lasting personal relationships with Zubin Mehta, Pierre Boulez, Carlo-Maria Giulini and Kurt Sanderling.

It was Ernest who established the London Symphony Orchestra's pre-eminence in its city, a rank it has held almost unbroken ever since, and Ernest who - on the whiff of a Friday-afternoon City rumour - wrote the proposal that won the LSO its valued residency in the new Barbican Centre. He was deposed by a players' putsch led by his closest friends and, though always quick to anger, he managed over the years to make his peace with most of them.

After the LSO he spent a year in the record business with CBS but Ernest was always a live wire. He lacked the Sitzfleisch for corporate meetings.

He was always open and forthcoming when I approached him for information and we often saw things from a similar angle. Passionate about new music, he introduced me to the extraordinary impresaria Betty Freeman, opening a three-way friendship. He was happy in LA, after his fashion, yet, in almost every conversation with me, Ernest would start chewing his lip and wondering why his London years had been written out of the record.

He had been a subtle catalyst of Swinging London in the 1960s, one of the backroom fixers who turned the town from deadening post-war austerity to a place where people came to have fun. For that, he deserved a knighthood - more than most conductors do.

It has been an open secret in political and musical circles that David Milliband and his wife Louise adopted two children because they were unable to conceive. Mrs Milliband plays, under her maiden name, in the second violins of the London Symphony Orchestra. In the chatty corners of orchestral life, everyone knew of her personal sorrow and everyone clammed up.

Musicians, media and public officials are pretty good at keeping secrets when lives are at stake. I can think of one major problem with a prime minister's child that never saw print and another with the wife of a well-known conductor. The decencies in these cases are almost unfailingly observed, at least in the UK.

So why did Milliband choose yesterday to go public with the tears he shed during the IVF treatment he underwent with his wife in the course of trying to have children? What public interest was served by this revelation? Why were the public decencies not preserved?

The obvious reason is that Milliband is front-running for leader of the Labour Party and wants to separate himself from the rest of the pack with a single humanising detail. That's what politicians do: they make capital out of ordinary lives, sometimes out of their own.

I don't like him the more for this 'revelation'. On the contrary, I think Milliband has given too much information for no good reason. It will do him no great good, and it can only harm the conventions of decency in public life. There are some things that just don't need to be broadcast.

Dear Mr Hill

I have greatly admired your doggedness in pursuing the paper trail that revealed Boris Johnson's unflinching, partisan support for Veronica Wadley as London chair of the Arts Council. We always knew it was so, but it was good to see the proof.

What else have we learned? Not much. Most public appointments are partisan. Blair-Brown inserted trusted cronies into every cranny of the arts, not least the present chair and chief executive (notionally a non-political post) of Arts Council England. The heads of the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence are, it was announced today, resigning before the year is out because they were 'too close' to the last government. Many of Ken Livingstone's senior appointments were old acquaintances not forgotten.

So why the fuss about Wadley? Because she's a Tory and you don't like them? I don't like cauliflower, but I try not to go on about it, even when one is planted in the England goal. Of all the candidates for Wadley's ill-paid post - £6,000 a year - she was in my view the best qualified.

I say this not as her former music critic (which I never was: fact-check, Mr Hill) but as her former Assistant Editor, who watched her closesly at work, clashed with her on many details of practice but few of principle, and cherished her unflagging dedication to the arts.

She will do a good job for London and the arts. If she doesn't, you and I will be watching. But allow me to suggest, with collegial respect, that this is now a non-story. No scandal. Nothing happened. The Mayor got the woman he wanted into the job. End of.

all best

Norman Lebrecht  

Veronica Wadley has been announced as the new Arts Council chair for London, a job which covers most of the country's largest arts institutions and comes with the backing of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

It's a case of if you don't succeed at first.

Last year, her candidacy was shot down by the national Arts Council chair, Liz Forgan, on the spurious grounds that she had no arts cred. Forgan's personal and political prejudice against Wadley was backed by the Labour Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, whose disappearance from office after the election was loudly cheered across the arts spectrum. Forgan is not likely to outlast him by long.

In point of fact, Wadley - with whom I worked closely when she was Editor of the former Evening Standard - has shown more passion for the arts than any newspaper person in my experience, with the possible exception of Alan Rusbridger at the Guardian. She hired me to revitalise the paper's arts coverage and allowed me to extend it to the limits of our budget and my own ingenuity. Often, she would call me early in the morning to clarify an esoteric point in an overnight ballet review. Her appetite for detail is ravenous. 

Since leaving the job a year ago, she has visited practically every arts organisation within radius and seen most of their shows. She certainly knows as much as anyone about the present state of the arts and is ideally well equipped to guide the sector through recession.

It's a very good appointment and one she will carry off with her customary application.

Gianandrea Noseda is stepping down after a decade as chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Manchester.

It has been a fairly glorious time in which the Italian, a protege of Valery Gergiev's, gave the first Beethoven cycle to be made available as a free download, pursued a strong strand of 20th century Russian music and made more than 20 commercial records for Chandos.

The orchestra showed itself to be in fine form in the Mahler cycle it shared recently with the Halle and Noseda, 46, will be wanting to devote more of his time to opera. He has been principal conductor in Turin for the past three years.

When more than a million people downloaded his interpretation of the Beethoven symphonies, I speculated in print that they might be as influential as Toscanini's. Not for musicians, perhaps, but an awful lot of listeners around the world, from Vietnam to Mexico, have received more enlightenment from this conductor than from any other.

BBC Press release follows:

Hot out of the sacred music cauldron in Fez, I came home to the heart of the opera debate. Last night, I contemplated the future of opera on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves with ENO artistic director John  Berry and ex-Arts Council chair Christopher Frayling. Tonight, I'm on BBC4 in a repeat of David Thompson's excellent film Pavarotti: A Life in Seven Arias.

What hope is there for an art whose creative ferment ran out in the 1920s when Puccini and Janacek died? Since then, fewer than a dozen new operas have become popular fixtures. As a result, the art tries to reinvent itself in ever more bizarre deconstructions.

In Germany, the trend of staging arias among the trash cans has become so extreme that booing is frequent, especially at Bayreuth, and the conductor of the Komische Oper Berlin, Carl St Clair, has quit in protest.

Few other cultures go to such extremes, though Calixto Bieito managed to outrage Spain and subseqeuently half of Europe by opening Verdi's Ballo in Maschera with the king and his court sitting on toilets, pants around their ankles. Die Fledermaus, in his Cardiff production, was - he said - 'all about prostitution'.

At ENO, John Berry has eschewed the wilder shores of radicalism and placed many of his shows in the hands of tested theatre and film directors. Critics mostly hate these prespective-shift rereadings of classic situations but the audience, which has rejuvenated dramatically over the past 2-3 years, is generally enthusiastic. The Directors Cut is working for ENO.

What's more, Berry is extending the repertory with works like Ligeti's Le grand macabre, Saariaho's L'amour de loin and Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers. Adventure is payng off for a house that receives £10 million less than stolid Covent Garden. 

Yet I argued with John that this is not enough to bring opera back to life as a cultural compulsion. Commissioning new works and backing them to the hilt - as ENO and the Met did with John Adams and Doctor Atomic - is the essential first step. But opera also needs to engage with 21st century technology, with screens and multimedia, with interactive flexibility. What was the last technical development in the opera house? Surtitles - and they are 25 years old.

How long, in recessional bite, can we afford such extravagance? Frayling was keen to know. You can hear the discussion here.

As for Pavarotti, what we have learned since his death three years ago is not just that the big man himself is irreplaceable but that the role of Great Tenor may no longer be tenable. With Domingo on his last legs and Rolando Villazon a sad burnout, there is no king pirate on the high Cs. That era could be over. How does opera replace the black magic? You tell me.... 

I've just got back from the Festival of World Sacred Music in Fez, Morocco, positively pullulating with multiple forms of musical spirituality that ranged from Burundi war drummers to stately Cambodian ballet. I won't fill in much detail at this point other than to lay down a personal marker for the blind Mali singers Amadou and Mariam - late stand-ins for the injured US performer Ben Harper - whose act was both ecstatic and hypnotic. I have rarely sat so breathless through a musical performance.

If you want to check what I was up to last night, visit the unofficial festival blog whose correspondent Mary Finnegan caught up with us at the start of a four-concert night. I ought to be exhausted. Instead, I'm exhilarated by the razzle of the music. See Mary's blog for pics.

No connection to the Paris trial of its former bosses, Universal Music Group has finally moved today to get rid of its weapons of mass classical destruction.

Universal Classics and Jazz, a hybrid construction, is to be shaken down from the top. Its president, Chris Roberts, is expected to leave today 'to pursue other interests' (the official line goes) and the dumbing-down policies of the last 15 years are to be reversed.

They didn't exactly cheer at Deutsche Grammophon HQ when the news of Roberts' departure was announced at lunchtime, but the wave of satisfaction could be felt three countries away.

Roberts, imposing his lowbrow tastes on a high-class business, demolished Decca and meddled constantly in DG, appointing sucessive label chiefs and obsessively spying on them (as I recounted in The Life and Death of Classical Music). His crossover disasters cost the label a fortune and much of its hard-won credibility.

Market share soared as a result of his dumbing down but core customers deserted and the labels lost their allure. Lang Lang quit in disgust and other prestigious names are said to be on the brink of rupture.

Once Roberts departs - I write these words with trepidation since he's a corporate animal who has repeatedly dodged the chop - reconstruction can begin. New appointments will follow in the next few days.

For Deutsche Grammophon, this is a Berlin Wall moment - a historic chance to reinvent itself as an entity of acknowledged integrity. It's drinks all round at the yellow label tonight. 

The former head of Vivendi, Jean-Marie Messier, went on trial in Paris this morning charged with criminal fraud, false accounting and other counts arising from his takeover of the international music group Universal in the freewheeling 1990s.

Among five others charged with him is Edgar Bronfman Jr, a former Universal chief, now head of Warner Music Group. Messier, 53, was forced to quit in 2002 and has been back-pedalling ever since. Bronfman, heir to a liquor fortune, has bounced back.

Neither is expected to go to jail, but the trial will last all month and ought to reveal how the men at the top of the music business bat its fortunes around like so many beachballs.

Messier and Bronfman represent, between them, more than half of the world's music industry. The indictment is not so much against half a dozen individuals as against the way the global business is run. The impact on classical music was detailed in my last book.

First report appears here. I shall read the verdicts with interest.

I have just been told that the composer Benjamin Lees has died, aged 86. A delightful man, I last heard from him a few weeks back to say he was writing a second violin concerto, his vigour undimmed by the recent unfashionability of his hard-worked, ever-expressive music.

Ben belonged to no cult, style or school of composers. A student of the iconoclastic George Antheil, he wrote what was on his heart and his mind, and he wrote well. There is a not a misplaced note or stress in the two-dozen works I have heard - invariably on record, since performances were scarce.

Although championed by important conductors from Leopold Stokowski to Lorin Maazel and acknowledged as an American eminence, he fell out of the Manhattan loop and did not merit so much as an index mention in Alex Ross's panoptic survey of musical modernism. His entry is my own Complete Companion to 20th Century Music is, sadly, short. The fact that most people remembered is that he was born in Harbin, China.

Ben bore rejection with mildness and courtesy, sustained by a strong marriage and a loving family. We dined together once with great gusto and corresponded often. I heard his recent premieres by direct mail and was greatly taken by the third piano concerto and the fifth and sixth string quartets. This is music built to last: it will not fade to dust.

You can hear snippets on his website, or rush out to buy the first violin concerto, recently recorded by Elmar Oliveiro, with John McLaughlin Williams and the Ukraine orchestra. Behind the melodic ease and infallible musical logic lay a passion that burned fierce and had something vital to say. 

A full worklist can be found on www.benjaminlees.com. His publisher was Boosey&Hawkes.