Where were you yesterday?

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Gone, gone, gone. Where were you when you heard the news? Ironically enough, I was in the reception area of Voice of Russia UK Radio, ready to take part in their culture show 'Curtain Up' with one of the first - possibly the very first - Russian pianist who sloped away from the USSR to study in London. The lovely Rustem Hayroudinoff is playing at St John's Smith Square on Saturday 13 April and is now a professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, this couldn't have happened without Thatcher. The persuasive diplomatic relationship she built with Gorbachev helped to lead to perestroika, the fall of the Iron Curtain and a new freedom of movement. Rustem came to London in 1992; a decade or two earlier, he'd have had to 'defect' instead. Some other Russian musician friends who moved to London around the same time got married in the late 1990s and celebrated by lunching with their parents at the Ritz. And there at the next table was Thatcher. That made their day: they adored her for what she'd done for their country. (Yesterday, Thatcher died at the Ritz, after suffering a stroke. Or, as one major news website succinctly misprinted, a 'strike'.)

Many of us Brits felt she did more for Russia than the UK. Newspaper reports this morning expose the lingering and indeed widening divisions she left behind. I was 13 when she came to power and the impact of watching the changes that took place under her rule ran deep. Everything my parents believed in and that had brought them to London rather than the US (escaping apartheid South Africa in the 1950s) was brought into question in her era. The value of collective rights and the dignity of human beings per se was under fire: from then on, all that mattered was the price of something, not its worth. The central bricks that held together the moral fibre of Britain were kicked out of its wall. The mess the UK is in now can be traced back to a fundamental change of philosophical attitude that took place here in the 1980s: it became morally legitimate to put the grubbing of money ahead of any vision of what to do with it to make a better, more beautiful world.I don't doubt that Thatcher sincerely believed in "the trickle-down" effect - but after 30 years, the limitations of the notion are all too clear.

The NHS, the Arts Council, school buildings, public transport, which crumbled to shreds through lack of investment during the Thatcher years and reached rockbottom under John Major - everything that required an input of public money was slashed to pieces. In the arts, many of our finest institutions, including all the London orchestras, were sliced to the breadline. Doesn't anyone remember the later sticking-plaster of "stabilisation funding"? Has everyone forgotten the Hoffmann Report? As for London itself, the GLC was abolished wholesale; the capital city became just a conglomeration of boroughs with a broken heart instead of a full-scale identity, greyness instead of pride, infrastructure crumbling and homelessness rife. Doesn't anyone remember the South Bank's Cardboard City in the middle of the roundabout where the IMAX is now? Has everyone forgotten the Poll Tax Riots? And the Miners' Strike?

What miserable, shattering, hideous, divisive years those were. How tenderly the British right-wing still clings to them today.

It's been left to the country's fine playwrights to preserve the subtleties of Thatcher: the essence of the character, the paradoxes, the personality and the shadings of good intention that illuminate the person behind the nation's favourite punchbag ("I blame Thatcher"), though she is probably so with good reason.

As Michael Billington writes in today's Guardian, part of her legacy is that "we are still having to argue that subsidy of the arts is a fruitful investment rather than a frivolous expenditure".

We're all human. That's the only lesson, in the end.  But we should be making the best of that, and helping others to make the best of it, too. That should mean expanding minds, not shrinking them; broadening lives, not narrowing them; bringing people together, not dividing them; opening us up, not closing us down; singing, not silencing.

Now I'm off to the BBC Music Magazine Awards and am happy to leave anyone who doesn't already know with the happy news that Natalia Osipova is joining the Royal Ballet right here in good old London. We must be doing something right.

(UPDATE, Thursday 11 April: listen to this speech about Thatcher by Glenda Jackson, MP and former great actress, in Parliament. She tells it exactly as I remember it.)

Friday Historical: Beethoven's Triple in Moscow, 1970

Heads up, first, to a feisty performance of this extraordinary piece at St George's Hanover Square yesterday. The Orpheus Foundation's mission is to help young musicians bridge the gap between finishing college and finding their way into the profession by providing orchestral performing experience with the Orpheus Sinfonia. Yesterday their cello soloist was one of their increasing number of success stories: born in Belorus, Aleksei Kiseliov played with the ensemble for several years and, besides winning a number of prizes, he has now been appointed principal cello of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beethoven's Triple Concerto features a virtually irrational workout for the cello, which has to undertake all manner of stratospherical pyrotechnics, but Aleksei stayed cool as can be, maintaining exquisitely beautiful tone throughout. Expert contributions, too, from his fellow soloists - the fine young violinist Benjamin Baker and our neighbour-in-SW-London Anthony Hewitt, who was in volcanically eloquent mode at the piano.

Since giving that talk a couple of weeks ago, I've been preoccupied with Beethoven. It's too easy to take him for granted. Rather than musing at length, though, let's hear some...

So here are the Triple's second and third movements, played live in Moscow in 1970 by David Oistrakh (violin), Sviatoslav Richter (piano) and Mstislav Rostropovich in "that" cello part. Kirill Kondrashin conducts the Moscow Philharmonic in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

Polunin update

Following yesterday's announcement that Polunin will not dance next week and hasn't been seen since Tuesday, a report in the Independent suggests that his disappearance is a matter of "artistic differences" rather than anything more serious. Nick Clark tells all: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/sergei-polunin-the-runaway-ballerino-strikes-again--coliseum-hit-by-new-disappearing-act-8560542.html

Polunin vanishes

The Ukrainian ballet star Sergei Polunin appears to have gone missing in London. He is here to dance in Peter Schaufuss's controversial contemporary ballet Midnight Express from next Tuesday, but did not show up to rehearsals yesterday. The company has said that he has not checked out of his hotel, but is not responding to their calls, and Schaufuss has said that he is concerned for Polunin's welfare. More from the Evening Standard, here.

He has just performed, with the Stanislavsky Ballet, the Russian premiere of Kenneth MacMillan's dramatic masterpiece, Mayerling, with reports of his interpretation of the anti-hero Crown Prince Rudolf suggesting history in the making. Fortunately someone filmed it.

Gove "could close Chetham's"

This report from Channel 4 News last night is about the latest developments at Chetham's in Manchester. It suggests that after ISI findings and a Manchester City Council report, the institution has until May to address alleged failings in its management structures and child protection systems and that if this is not done satisfactorily, the education secretary Michael Gove might have the powers to close it down.

This school is too vital and precious a presence in British musical life to allow such a thing to occur. We always hear bad news first, but the number of fine musicians and happy people who have also emerged from its portals over the years is high, and now many devoted, honest, hard-working and non-abusive teachers are there to guide musical youngsters through top-level training and see them into the profession. We hope profoundly that the necessary issues can be addressed rapidly and thoroughly and put right once and for all. We need specialist music schools, we need more of them, and we need them to function reliably.

Of course, the National Union of Teachers has just passed an unprecedented motion of no confidence in Gove.