And Decca is being...

RESTRUCTURED. Oh yes, it's not dead, it's just being restructured.

Effectively, there's not much of it left, though it will have a good London figurehead in the form of none other than our friend Paul Moseley, proud owner of Onyx (which he will continue to own). Gramophone has the full story, explaining that Decca is essentially ceasing to be a British-based entity since the backroom stuff is all being merged with DG's operations in Hamburg. The Decca staff as such are being reduced from 20 to 6.

It also points out a certain gentle irony in Paul's appointment: "Moseley is a former Decca executive, though in 2005 founded Onyx Classics, which offers greater flexibility to artists in their relationship with the label – including the artist being able to retain the rights to the recording. Since its launch, it has provided something of a welcome refuge for artists who have found themselves without contracts with the majors (including a few from Decca itself!)."

Furthermore: "The Universal Classics and Jazz label, which focuses on cross-over repertoire, will now also be called Decca, but with different styling – employing the old black logo, as opposed to Decca's newer blue and red. Crossover activities are described as being “organisationally separate” from Decca’s core classical output."

Last but not least, Matthew Cosgrove is going to run Onyx for Paul. Matthew used to be top dog at Warner Classics, then went to Hamburg to run, er, DG.

I'm fond of these guys - they are bright, clever, musical and knowledgeable and they've all done excellent work. Yet, staring out into the spring sunshine, I can see Solti (the cat) in the garden chasing his own tail, and I wonder why it feels like an appropriate comment on the state of the record industry at large...?

#operaplot rides again!

If you missed it last time, here's your chance: the estimable Omniscient Mussel is running another #operaplot competition via Twitter, this time with prizes in the form of tickets donated by some 20 of the world's best opera houses, and with Danielle de Niese as star judge.

All you need to do is tweet an opera plot in 140 characters with the tag #operaplot between 9am on 27 April and midnight on 3 May. Rules & regs here.

"Opera is drama, so it seemed only right that the contest be re-imagined on a more epic scale," Miss Mussel comments. "Tickets felt like the right prize because while DVDs and CDs are great, opera is all about the live theatre experience."

Oh for some teeth

A few strips of an article I wrote about corruption in music competitions have made it into the Indy today. Most of the piece didn't.

The original would have made your hair stand on end, then curl laughing. The lawyers weren't having it, though. It was all true, nonetheless - I mean, you just couldn't make this stuff up.

Let me tell it like it is: most music competitions *suck*. The outrage they cause among the hapless people they manipulate is phenomenal. The barefaced cheek of certain individuals' behaviour leaves me gasping for adequate words. The psychological damage to gifted young competitors is immeasurable. The public is being cheated - they think that the finest young musicians in the world are being found for them - oh, if only. Yes, a lot of the stories are very funny (the funniest having, of course, been excised from print). And I would laugh harder if they didn't also make me cry.

Nobody has been able to do anything serious to remedy corruption in competitions, for fear of lawsuits. Even if the accusations are true. We have all been rendered toothless.

The various stylistic infelicities in the piece, by the way, are the result of the lawyers' red pen and do not appear in my original. Besides, I never put in the line saying that competitions are one of the best arenas for star-spotting available to whoeveritis. Indeed, I think my actual words were 'please excuse me while I slip out the back way'. As for "Further, there is a juror who adjudicates at contests all over the world and some successful candidates among his students apparently go home wondering what has become of their prize money" - no, they don't. They know exactly where it is, they just pretend, when people ask them, that they don't. My words were that they go home 'slightly cagey about' what has happened to it...

Here's the Facebook group that is mentioned in the piece. And here is a cool petition to sign.

Hungarian Dances at Fiddles on Fire, Kings Place

As the line goes in Shakespeare in Love: "It'll be all right." "How?" "I don't know, it's a mystery." After a day of fully expecting that I would a) lose my voice completely, b) faint, c) both, the concert went wonderfully and a voice came along from somewhere, though I'm not sure it was actually mine. ?! An actress friend informs me that 'adrenalin kills all known germs'. She's right. How? It's a mystery.

But over to Philippe Graffin and Claire Desert: the music was what mattered, and they were *amazing*. If you haven't heard them before, I'd like to invite you over to the 'Listen' page of the Hungarian Dances website where you can hear them play Tzigane and the first of the Bartok Romanian Dances.

Left, the London team after the show - Tom, me, Philippe & Claire in the foyer at Kings Place.

Huge, huge thanks to everybody involved in this delicious treat of a project, to the Folkworks team for making it happen at all, to The Sage Gateshead and Kings Place London, to everyone who turned out and cheered us on, and to both my beloved teams of musicians!

Now I am going straight back to bed.

Richard Nixon: the piano concerto

Thanks to Daniel Finkelstein in The Times for discovering this little gem on Youtube. He asks 'Is this the most ridiculous political video ever?'

Of course, other American politicians have played the joanna too. A few years back, Tom's orchestra was booked for a recording that was marked Top Secret. OMG. Nobody was allowed to know what it was, so very special was it to be... Some opportunists in the band decided to have some fun and put it about that this recording was to be none other than Condoleeza Rice in Mozart piano concertos. Blood pressure levels instantly soared, there were whispers and growls in the ranks and it was only when protest delegations to the directorate and the Musicians' Union were being planned that the perpetrators said: 'Only kidding!'

The recording was actually a nice opera singer singing nice operatic arias very beautifully, so goodness knows what all the fuss was about.

Kings Place concert is tonight, and I'm still coughing. Please excuse me while I go back to my steam bowl.