Tonight...

...I am finally going to Die tote Stadt. It's not snowing, the trains are running (touch wood) and I hope to report back fully tomorrow morning! Watch this space.

Hungarian Dances goes live at Fiddles on Fire

Glad to report that the Fiddles on Fire Festival - this year, two bonanzas of the hottest global violin playing from Klezmer to Karnatic, first in Gateshead, then in London - is to be the scene of some special Hungarian Dances: Concert of the Novel events in April!

It was all their idea, too. When I went up to The Sage in September, I read from the book, then popped on a sneak preview of Hejre Kati from Philippe's CD. Collectively my audience shot towards the ceiling. The Sage being a wonderful, upbeat, go-ahead arts centre where managers actually speak to one another, someone then looked at my website, saw that there'd been a concert...and an invitation to go live followed soon afterwards.

This is going to be very different from the Kensington event last summer - I have repointed the script to concentrate the action on the story of Mimi Racz. For Fiddles on Fire, we're creating a special programme of 75 minutes, to perform on the two Saturday evenings of the two festival wings, each at 6pm. I've managed to reduce the 130,000-word novel to about 6 pages and with violin music including our beloved Dohnanyi and Bartok, plus Ravel, Debussy, Brahms and, of course, Monti and Hubay, we hope that you'll love the result.

The Sage, Gateshead, event is on Saturday 11 April and I'm hugely grateful to Bradley Creswick, the leader of the Northern Sinfonia, for joining me in this since Philippe has a prior engagement on the other side of the planet.

The London event will be at Kings Place on Saturday 18 April, starring Philippe Graffin and friends. Intriguingly, KP has developed a 'dynamic' ticket system (perhaps inspired by the nearby trains?) in which the earlier you book, the cheaper the tickets are, so...

'Purely classical' chart begins chez Gramophone

BBC news has a story that a new top record chart for 'purely' classical music (as opposed to Katherine Jenkins singing Leonard Cohen and calling it a 'sacred aria') is being launched in Gramophone's March edition and will be updated weekly on their website. (More from Tommy Pearson on the subject here.)

So how useful is this? Should they have done it years ago? Is this an industry that takes 40 years to cotton on to a good idea, in a magazine named after a machine that all but vanished 20 years ago? But now that it is on its way - with the late Richard Hickox doing well - is it actually of any positive value whatsoever? I am put in mind of the book trade, which is desperately skewed by several big, depressing factors that are usually nothing to do with quality but more about who is willing to spend money on what. (If I start telling you what these factors are, though - and how pernicious, how poisonous and how ought-to-be-illegal - someone will tell me to stop being a whingeing author. So you'll just have to take my word for it.)

In short: the discs that become 'bestsellers' are almost certainly going to be those on which the most money is spent in terms of promotion. Promotion means that the public will know something exists (nobody will buy anything if they don't know it's there). The CDs will then bowl on up the chart, and will sell more. Or are we classical aficionados more independent-minded than crossover and pop flock-followers? What do you think, folks?

Alfred takes the cake

Caught the very beginning last night of Brendel in Recital on BBC2 - Haydn, played with magic, detail and profound empathy - but it was getting on for midnight, way past my bedtime. The recital from Snape Maltings, according to the introduction filmed at the concert, showed Brendel at 70, about to embark on a world concert tour. Problem: today Brendel is 77 and retiring; the historical nature of the film should really have been pointed out beforehand. There must be a fair number of people googling Brendel's forthcoming world concert tour this morning...

You can't get any of this on BBC iPlayer, but the documentary, Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask, is snug on Youtube, so here is some of it.

Decca: the obituary?

As I feared...the imminent death of Decca, as reported by Norman Lebrecht. He says:

Still, no point waxing nostalgic. Lots of firms are going to the wall, taking their traditions to oblivion. Decca joins a long queue at the morgue. The regret is that what dies with Decca is more than just a label – it is the very concept of label as a mark of character, a name that united artists and listeners in the search for a particular quality. The idea of label defined the record industry. It is the strategic antithesis of sterile agglomerates like Universal.

Without labels, artists spin off to Starbucks, listeners lose interest and the remnants of the record business go rummaging in dumpbins. Even a number-one classical hit barely shifts 500 copies a week, not enough to support an executive’s pension fund. It’s the end of the line for Decca, the last waltz in a bare-walled studio of dreams."

Far be it from me to 'wax nostalgic' - but this was the label of the glory days, the home of Georg Solti, the label that - largely thanks to the magic ears and brilliant intuition of Christopher Raeburn - helped to build the recorded careers of Cecilia Bartoli and Andras Schiff, among others. This was the label of Benjamin Britten, Kathleen Ferrier, Pavarotti, not to mention his two friends. This was also the label that brought us the Entartete Musik series, spearheaded by producer Michael Haas, encompassing Schreker, Krenek, Braunfels, K/g and many more - a library of great historical value since most of those works are not available to hear elsewhere. This was the label of vision, of class, of...

So, where are the Raeburns and Haases of today? Christopher has retired; Michael divides his time between curating exhibitions in Vienna and producing Opera Rara's discs. If there are any brilliant people left in the recording industry, they are having trouble making their presence felt because the core values are vanishing from the big companies. For instance, in his article Norman complains about the "all-purpose" engineering of Julia Fischer's latest disc on Decca, which he feels does her no favours. Sound quality does matter to the record-downloading public, but what if a company boss does not know that, can't hear the difference and doesn't see the point of spending money on it?

Here in the hackworld, we knew something was going wrong about 20 years ago when a major label (not Decca) held a press conference that included a speech by their new marketing chap, who'd just joined them from a food company and started declaring to a roomful of the most knowledgeable critics in the British capital how amazed he was to learn that Tchaikovsky was gay, so now they were going to develop a 'Tchaikovsky concept' in which... well, if the 'concept' ever took wing, it was quickly buried; but generally speaking the vision began to leave the industry when it chose people whose presumably considerable expertise in accountacy, sales and marketing nevertheless did not extend to a profound empathy with classical music and its market. I am no marketing guru, but it looks like a no-brainer to me: how can you sell anything successfully if you haven't a clue what it's about?

Smaller labels such as Bis, harmonia mundi, Hyperion and some of the artist-led labels like LSO Live, Onyx and Avie, are still more than afloat today largely because they know what they're doing. As Sir Alan Sugar might say, they understand their product. If you don't understand your product, you end up like that Apprentice candidate who was trying to sell expensive day-rents of his red Ferrari in Portobello Road Market - fired. Decca, you're...