Paying for Mr Pappano

In the wake of Arts Council cuts, it was no surprise to read press reports the other day that the BBC is willing to talk to other beleaguered arts bodies about orchestral funding. Whilst inherently sympathetic to their plight, I was reminded of another story last week about the salary earned by Antonio Pappano, MD at Covent Garden. I forget the exact figure commanded by Mr Pappano, but the sum which has stuck in my mind is £690,000. Now Pappano is no doubt a fine musician, but is he really worth the best part of £700k? To put it another way, could another musician, perhaps equally fine, have been found to do the job for, oh I don't know, £500k? £300k? Might not Pappano himself have been prepared to do the job for a lower sum?

For my work on the day of a concert an amateur orchestra generally pays me about £250 (yes, that's £250, not£250k). I am not suggesting that I could do as good a job as Mr Pappano (although I'd be willing to give it a shot), but one thing I have learned since I started conducting is that there are, even in amateur music circles, an awful lot of very fine conductors out there. And that's just in NW England. The idea that there is only a small group of people in the world who are capable of leading a top opera company (or a professional symphony orchestra, whose conductors are paid comparable sums), and that salaries like Mr Pappano's have to be awarded to secure their services, is pure tosh. The reality is that in every country there are dozens and dozens of terrific musicians who would do the job for less. Some of them would do it for next to nothing. If I did not have to eat, I would organise, rehearse and conduct great music free of charge. In fact if I had to, I would crawl over broken glass to do it. The experience is its own reward.

Why does any of this matter? Surely it's up to the ROH to decide how much it pays its Music Director? Well no. Firstly, Pappano's salary is obscene when compared with the wages of the players, which will be less than a tenth of the amount (extras at one of Manchester's professional orchestras are paid about £100 per day, and I believe it's among the most generous). Secondly, there's something rather horrible about anyone earning this kind of money when many ordinary people, who couldn't afford to go to the Royal Opera even during the good times, are losing their jobs.

And thirdly, the ROH receives public money. Yes, you and I are paying taxes in order to help the Royal Opera pay Mr Pappano £690k p.a. That makes me feel quite bad.

Should any organisation which has so little idea how to run a tight financial ship that it pays its chief the best part of a million quid a year really be getting a penny from the public purse?

in the shadow of the wizard

During the interval of a concert on Saturday, my mother came across a crusty old battleaxe she knows from her weekly French class. This lady, starchy, faintly condescending, played the fiddle professionally in various London orchestras thirty or forty years ago. They agreed that it was a fine concert - they'd just heard a performance of Mozart's magisterial Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K364 by the Athenean Ensemble - and after praising the soloists, Jonathan Martindale and Lucy Nolan, my mother's friend singled out the conductor, who had apparently done a fine job too. For Mum, fifty odd years of disappointment fell away in a moment, all the effort and sacrifice of parenthood made worthwhile by the open goal now facing her. "Actually, he's my son", she said.

I have conducted the Sinfonia Concertante once before, in a half-empty Victoria Theatre in Halifax. But here in Didsbury every seat in the church was taken, and there were people standing at the back; at the end, a kind of roar went up from the audience, the sort of response you very rarely get at a classical concert, and one I don't think I've ever heard whilst conducting (and I've done some rabble rousing stuff, from Bruckner to John Williams and back via the Dambusters March). What an exceptional piece K.364 is, and what a privilege for me, Lucy, Jonathan and the players, to walk, for the half an hour it took to play it, in the long shadow of the Salzburg wizard.

Caliban's Day

The biggest belly laugh in the production of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art comes when Humphrey Carpenter, arriving to interview W.H. Auden, is mistaken by the elderly poet for a rent boy. "But I'm from the BBC", expostulates Carpenter, to general hilarity. That this sub-Terry and June bit of knockabout should be the funniest line says a good deal about the standard of the rest of Bennett's play.

Of course, technically it isn't his play, but a play which one of Bennett's characters has written entitled Caliban's Day, which we see being rehearsed backstage at the National Theatre. The dried-up Auden, a randy, unwashed intellectual bully, is visited by Benjamin Britten, an old friend from the 1930s, and in the core of the inner play the pair of them muse on art and sex (to no great effect, I thought, but that's not the point of this post). The Caliban referred to is the rent boy, who (once we gratefully realise is not going to be fellated by Auden onstage) acts as an antidote to the clipped vowels and middlebrow intellectualising of Bennett's protagonists.

Bennett wants us to like Auden - funny, rumbustious, unrepentant - and so he has to make us tolerate his use of male prostitutes. So the rent boy is not a damaged individual, a victim of childhood sexual abuse or a drug addict. He isn't even a boy. No, he's a jolly outgoing charmer in his twenties who just loves to service eminent washed-up poets whose trousers smell of urine.

I found this male version of the old tart-with-a-heart lie both creepy and repellent.

What did the critics make of it? The man from the Times wrote that Bennett's depiction of the rent boy was " an unconvincing shovelling of A Sympathetic Member of the Working Classes into these cosy proceedings, to make some point about inequality, social injustice and so forth. It’s all as woolly as a Marks & Spencer cardie." But he still gave it four stars.

My wife's theory, that Bennett is a national treasure and therefore immune to criticism, was borne out by the Telegraph - "Alan Bennett, that most cherished of national treasures, is now 75", began its five star review. The Guardian didn't mention the rent boy at all: Michael Billington gave it four stars.

I was at school with someone who ended up as a rent boy. More typical than Bennett's evasion, he was a sad individual who died of Aids before he was 30.

myth-busting # 3

Although posting twice in two days risks giving the impression that I don't have enough work to do, I can't resist debunking an argument heard a few times recently, and that I suspect we're going to hear a lot more of as the cuts bite.

Here's a correspondent in the paper, one Lynne Alderson, pointing to research from France showing that that the 2009 Picasso exhibition in Aix-en-Provence "earned 62m euros of additional income for the town" against a measly investment of only 6m. So the government "should look to the long-term financial benefits of spending in the arts".

I'm as well-disposed to arts funding as the next person, but this just won't do. For starters, what would have happened to that 62m if it hadn't been spent in Aix? Would it have been kept under the mattresses of hundreds of middle-class culture-loving households the length and breadth of France? Would the bien-pensant have said to themselves, "We were going to spend this money, but because that Picasso exhibition didn't go ahead, we're now going to keep it stashed away"? Of course not. They'd have stuck it in the bank, invested it, or spent it somewhere else. So the money might not have gone to Aix, but it would have gone somewhere and someone would have made use of it.

But there's more. What if instead of spending the money on a Picasso exhibition the French government had spent it instead on, oh I don't know, something like tax breaks for Research and Development in industry? Now that wouldn't just have sucked in money from French consumers, it would ultimately have brought in money from overseas via exports.

So whilst Paris not spending 6m Euros at all would probably still have brought a 62m Euro benefit to the economy, spending 6m on something not related to the arts might have brought in a still greater benefit.

Those of us with an artistic interest to declare are not famously good with numbers: "bean-counters", we sneer at the accountants, satisfied that if they know the price of everything, we alone know its true value. Yet all the above is flippin' obvious to anyone bright enough to tie their own shoelaces, and its truly depressing to see that there are still people reliant on slip-ons and velcro amongst both the Guardian's readership and the people that edit the paper.

Not ..... not .... NOT ACACIA AVENUE!

"Osborne's benefit reforms will force thousands into ....", began a Guardian headline wail yesterday. Into what, I wondered - poverty? Prostitution? Voting Tory?

Well no. It appears that changes to housing benefit rules might make some people move out of inner cities and into - cue sharp intake of breath - the suburbs.

I know. I know. The poor dears. Flood, famine, pestilence are bad; but the suburbs? Is there no limit to the beastliness of these ravening deficit-cutters?

Truly there is one destination the metropolitan media elite fears more than Gin Lane, Death Row and the good-intention-paved Road to Hell combined.

For the love of God please spare them from Acacia Avenue.

myth-busting # 2

Continuing my credit-crunch guide.

2. The best way to shrink a deficit is to have people in work paying taxes.

I found this gem in an article by Jonathan Freedland in this morning's Grauniad.

It sounds plausible until you think about it. If Freedland is right and HMG spends a million on wages, the taxes it recovers and the benefits it saves will come to more than a million. So the Government should be increasing public spending rather than cutting it.

According to Freedland's logic, the more people the Government employs, the less money it will need to spend.

If only Governments the world over could grasp this simple principle, no economy need fall into recession ever again, and no Government would ever have to run a deficit.

A poster on CiF destroyed Freedland's position more pithily than I could. He wrote, "Not if their salaries are being paid from money the government has borrowed".

brassed orf

Retaining an endearing capacity to surprise after nearly 20 years in the post, my wife - born Hampshire, educated Portsmouth, Oxford and Bar School, London - has recently exhibited a passionate enthusiasm for brass bands. On Saturday I volunteered to go with her to the Bridgewater for a Brass Band Gala Concert featuring Brighouse and Rastrick, Black Dyke and Fodens (Q - What is the difference between between a Concert and a Gala Concert? No, I don't know either).

Some miscellaneous impressions from a neophyte:

1. The audience was even older than the average Halle audience.

2. Judging by the repertoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that modernism had never happened. On the downside this meant that some of the repertoire was woefully unambitious and footling. On the upside, the amount of new repertoire, enthusiastically played and greeted, showed that Brass Band culture is alive and well, unashamedly directed at the enjoyment of both players and audience, and entirely free from the stifling intellectual navel-gazing that acts as a thick layer of cobweb around modern classical music. In particular, Peter Graham, Professor at Salford, has evidently written some very skilful and breathtakingly exciting band music.

3. The actual sound of the ensemble is surprisingly mellow, at least to those of us used to wincing as orchestral brass comes crashing boisterously into the room. I'd attribute this to the preponderance of tubas, both large and small: a rounded and almost woolly timbre, comforting as hot cocoa.

4. The only bandsman/woman not wearing a lurid military tunic was a percussionist with Brighouse & Rastrick, who turns out to be one Minesh Patel, a percussion teacher resident in Leicester. What a player Mr Patel was, but could the chaps (all chaps in B&R) not club together to buy him the proper outfit? But perhaps Patel needed his arms unencumbered for his unrestrained and witheringly accurate assaults on the xylophone.

5. My tastes must be getting lower and lower - a favourite moment was an arrangement of a Mario Lanza tune. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is", wrote Noel Coward.

6. Judging by the hairdo of Aussie conductor David King, the mullet has not yet become taboo down-under. And please don't tell me he was wearing it ironically. Or, worse still, that it's making a come-back.