hypocrisy central

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap.  In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this?  The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own.  Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands.  The aim?  According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag. 

Looking like Brad Pitt

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson.  Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director.  However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.  

This time I was "attentive".  I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.  

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough.  Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame".  In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan.  And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts?  Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.  

From the back, of course.  In a dark theatre.

Yes, I was in favour of the war!

Although my experience of having been - reluctantly - in favour of the Iraq war, amidst a class of people who were overwhelmingly against it, is a subject for another time, I was reminded of it this morning by a letter in the Graun about civilian casualty figures.  One Geoff Simons, author of Iraq Endgame: Surge, Suffering and the Politics of Denial, claimed that estimates of the dead topped one million.

Of course, no-one knows how many casualties there were, but it just so happens that the only organisation that has tried to count the actual individuals killed, Iraqbodycount.org, puts the total at slightly less than one tenth of that figure, ie at about 95,000.  Now that is a lot of people, but it is a lot fewer than one million (presumably that's why it was ignored by Mr Simons), and in any event as a marker of whether the war was a bad idea or not is meaningless unless you consider "but for" test.  Ie, but for the war, what would have happened?

Well, it's reasonable to assume that Saddam would have remained in power; that he would have continued to butcher and starve the civilian population as previously; that on his death he would have been succeeded by one or both of his sons; and that on the eventual collapse of the Ba'ath party regime, perhaps a generation into the future, a bloody sectarian power struggle would have ensued, only this time without the Americans to hold the ring and pay for the reconstruction.  In other words, more of Saddam would probably have been deadly too, and to come to a fair assessment you need to set the war casualties against those who would have died if Saddam had been left in place.  Unfortunately, you can't count those people, because no-one knows who they are; neither can you show emotive interviews with their grieving relatives on TV.

It seems to me, contra Mr Simons, that it's those opposed to the invasion who are in denial, because, however dreadful, it was probably no worse than the alternative.  It must be hard for people like him to accept that it's because Bush and Blair ignored their protests that Iraq now has a democratic government.  

A small satisfaction then of the post-invasion period has been the way in which the case against it has unravelled in the slowest of slow motion.

Symphonie Fantastique!

You can think you know a piece pretty well, but some new things struck me after conducting Berlioz's masterpiece on Saturday night for the first time.  

Extraordinarily, the Symphonie Fantastique was written in the same period (late 1820s) as Schubert's Great C Major symphony.  But where Schubert does his wonderful best to follow in Beethoven's footsteps - Schubert lacks more than a small part of Beethoven's great gift for construction based on motivic development, but nevertheless the Great C Major is recognisably designed on the same principles - Berlioz's method is something altogether new and different.  True, there are tunes, one of which recurs throughout the work, but Berlioz is less interested in contrasting and developing these than he is in the bravura opposition of brilliantly vivid and idiomatic orchestral textures; you might even say that this is the principal constructive device.

It shouldn't work.  It should be rambling and incoherent.  But it isn't.  Why?  Partly because the above-mentioned idee fixe ties it all together; partly because the ideas themselves are so wonderful; and partly because in the second half of the piece Berlioz cranks up the rhythmic excitement so successfully after the long silences of the central slow movement that you seem to be caught up in some crazy dance, a party that's got out of hand but that no one wants to end.

Conducting long symphonies like this one, I am sometimes just relieved to have got to the final bars without mishap.  But on Saturday, admiration for Berlioz's achievement came welling up at the finish, and now I can't wait for the chance to do it again.