ARTS AND MINDS – JOURNALS OF AN ARTS ADDICT 2007-13

EPISODE 18

JUNE JULY 2010

JOHN TUSA

Why Globalisation is an American ramp. What you need to be an arts leader – authority without authoritarianism. Shakespeare’s witches in Scottish kilts in Glyndebourne’s “Macbeth”. George Christie hates it. I make peace with an old enemy – Christopher Bland. Ian Bostridge is a great artist: should he be marketed as a brand? One estimate of the value of the British Museum’s entire collections: £500 billion. Shouldn’t the Treasury tax it? Dame Vivien Duffield is a great donor to the arts: she denies she is a leader, just a giver. First weekend of BBC Proms: absolute excellence. Can it last? How the Treasury forced the V&A Museum to make the right changes in quite the wrong way. When Brian Stewart told the truth about the Vietnam War but only the CIA listened.

Thursday June 3 Zagreb. The International Society for Performing Arts (ISPA) is a twice yearly gathering of arts leaders and managers. “Globalisation and Identity” is this session’s theme. By its nature, doesn’t “globalisation” lead to “loss of identity” I wonder? The session starts with a Croat, Gordana Vluk, who is actually dynamite but probably too challenging. Are there too many festivals? ( Zagreb has 50!) Festivals operate in a global context with virtually no local connection. Everything “ is the same especially international dance, you can’t see where it comes from”. Then she launches into “multiculturalism”. Is it any more than a “fashionable tag?” Later someone sums it up as being a “multi-cultural fog”. I query its role, warn of its misuse, explaining that the latest British election turned on popular anxiety about a “multiculturalism” that was forced on people without consultation. The rights of the “host culture” or the “historic culture” as I prefer to call it. I also spoke up for festivals – why do people like them? Their cost base is low, they are fast, flexible and fun; they attract different audiences, have a different atmosphere and different age groups. With luck festivals can be the shock troops of performing culture. But it was the attack, or rather warning, on multi-culturalism that got some representatives going; it has become a new article of faith, to be against it is virtually to self-define yourself as racist!!

Friday, June 4. I weigh in: “Beware of globalisation taken uncritically; remember that ‘globalisation’ is an economic , a managerial and an American concept; national identity has been devalued by being merged, damagingly, with the notion of nationalism; globalisation has little to say, less to offer about tradition or history; so take globalisation with real care”.

Tuesday, June 8. The annual Royal Academy dinner for the opening of the RA Summer Show. Stephen Fry speaks seriously, mainly, and is all the better for it. Nick Grimshaw, the President, manages a strong plea for support for the arts by the government, with a litany of “And none of this would cost money!”. Jeremy Hunt goes on about being “more American and raising funds for endowments”, ignoring that money for endowments is still money, is hard to get and solves no current funding problems. With interest rates at rock bottom, how large an endowment must you raise to make any significant contribution to your running costs? Why should they think that money ”for endowments” is somehow easier to raise? It is a vast displacement activity.

Wednesday June 9. To Scotland, invited by their Creative and Cultural Skills unit to talk about arts leadership. Why do organisations need leadership at all? Because without leadership, the result is: “Stasis not movement; passivity not activity; caution not dynamism; consolidation not purpose; assumption not reflection; rules not thought”. Summed up as, “the status quo not the way ahead”. Going further: what is cultural leadership? My answer: “A sense of Vision - which explains what an organisation is for; a sense of Direction – how we realise that vision; a sense of Purpose – how we define the direction; a sense of Cohesion – which shows the direction to be followed; a sense of Identity – which informs the direction; a sense of Feeling – which allows the organisation to feel as well as to think”. And for good measure just to be absolutely clear, what cultural leadership is not? “Authority without being authoritarian; readiness to listen but knowing when to decide.” I said I could do antitheses all day.

Friday, June 11. Evening to hear the glorious Russian baritone, Dimitry Hvorostovsky at the Wigmore singing Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Who better? He is devastatingly handsome, has a winning, though not a smarmy smile, and a sense of humour. When he held a fabulous, light, high note for just two seconds longer than necessary and the audience let out a quiet gasp, he broke into a broad grin recognising he had been rather naughty. Above all, he does not manufacture part of the range with a head tone – it is all pure voice, a glorious stream of natural sound. His jacket - black striped - pulls slightly across the middle button – a touch of embonpoint? – but this is a singer at the height of his career. A privilege and a joy.

Sunday, June 13. We treat ourselves to another Glyndebourne – this time the revival of Richard Jones’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth”. It is supposed to be weird, not in the sense of the “weird Sisters”, much weirder than that; but men in knobbly knee skirts (kilts?) and battle dress blouses. Odd, I grant you. The witches are of three generations, young dolly birds, middle aged housewives in slacks and gilets, and old crones. They emerge in drilled groups from three caravans and perform slightly mad dance routines as they sing. You know something? It works. Evil and witchcraft is everyday and banal – do we think a spell cannot be brewed on a gas ring? And the two scenes often hardest to set - Banquo’s murder and the sleep walking scene - are played in the palace boiler room, a ruthless cold and realistically evil setting for the darkest moments. Seeing Lady Macbeth obsessively throwing her bloodstained hankie into the washing machine is terrifying. Never underestimate Richard Jones. His sense of placing action unerringly in response to and sympathy with the music is quite extraordinary. Afterwards, Gus Christie says, with a grin, “my father loathes the production almost as much as any we have ever done.“ Are we surprised? No. Good for Gus, dear old George!

Wednesday June 16. Dinner party at our house for mainly musical friends, including Ian Bostridge and his wife, the biographer, Lucasta Miller. Ian is very funny about a marketing meeting he had with his record company, EMI. “There were six of them, and they had divided up my sales into groups and sub groups all of which they gave a name to!” (actually standard “Mosaic” marketing analysis). “They say my core audience is around 60,000 but that my potential reach is up to 1.3 million! I don’t believe that!” (Nor do I.) “Do you know what my last CD with Tony Pappano of “Schwanengesang” sold? Just 6,000”. JT : “ Since a best selling hard back novel is 3,000, that seems to me pretty good. I do hope they are not talking about developing ‘Brand Bostridge’?” Happily not.

Friday, June 18. Lunch with Henry and Polly Wrong at Much Hadham. Henry built, yes built the Barbican. They are planning to sell their lovely thatched house, with orchards, garden, outhouses. The reason - age and cost. Henry “Do you know what my heating bill was for last winter alone? £10,000!!” Then they will move to a riverside flat in Cambridge. Annie: “This is typical – the old move to get closer to a hospital!” Perfect summer lunch – chicken and avocado salad, new potatoes, salad; strawberries and cream; Chablis/Burgundy.

At lunch, the other guests are connected with David Chipperfield’s realisation of the “Neues Museum” in Berlin. Rick Nijs, who works for Chipperfield, says they are looking for a similar project - ie one where the architecture tells the story of the building by incorporating and revealing its layers of ancient texture while also creating a great museum space. I ask if a British client would have allowed such a subtle revelation of a building? He thinks not but it wasn’t plain sailing in Berlin either. After lunch, as we walk round the Henry Moore Sculpture Park nearby, Richard Calvocoressi, the director, says he has had to struggle to get the Trustees to recognise what a gold mine of resources they are sitting on! They just gave away rights to images, reproductions etc, they charged nothing for loans. Trustees thought the Foundation’s basic endowment was generous and that it was not proper to charge. Now, earnings from these sources mean the Foundation can make grants and pay for a staff of 44 people! The old world of gentlemen aesthetes had a lot to learn.

Tuesday June 22. The British Museum’s annual Director’s Dinner. Who should greet me in the friendliest manner but Sir Christopher Bland!! “What did you think of that strange BBC lunch?” he says breezily. I say that I remember that he was very rude to me. “ I wasn’t rude” says he, “ and in any case you can be as rude as anyone I know!” We decide that that is a score draw and decide to be polite. We did after all agree that the BBC policy of not disclosing artistes’ salaries was a great mistake. Later: the BBC Trust tells the BBC to say who are the highest paid artistes in the BBC!! Victory! Why don’t they listen to me? It was an odd coming together. Could he be a friend and ally?

Niall Fitzgerald, the Chair of Trustees, says the BM asked the economist Nick Stern and one other to estimate the all-up value of the British Museum’s entire collections. How much did I think they were worth? Pass. Niall: “The estimate, a conservative estimate, is that they are worth £500 billion!” I warn him that the Treasury will want to tax this ”notional” value as they want – and periodically try - to tax the notional value of the inalienable property of the great cultural institutions.

Saturday, June 26. Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell summer party at “Untitled” their house. Deepest Kent, intense, radiant. The house is finished, the meadow sown with meadow flowers, the hedgerow with spaced out wild roses looking like a perfect wild hedgerow – which it isn’t! - the garden merging effortlessly into the corn fields adjacent; the house a flow of windows, mirrors reflecting the windows, the whole almost part of the open space surrounding them. But it is totally them - as a friend said: “Ben is the fascist controller; Nikki the surrealist! That is their secret!” I’m not sure about that though Ben is clearly the controlling minimalist. The whole process has been recorded, videoed, filmed, a future art work in itself. Do you know how much it cost, I ask. Someone else says, “Yes, but Ben has kept all the receipts!”

Tuesday, June 29. Dame Vivien Duffield, only begetter of the Clore Leadership Programme comes for a session with the Fellows at Bore Place in the deep Kent countryside. DVD is a trooper who plays the laughs, which she gets and deserves. She is of course deadly serious and highly intelligent. On leaders: “There is no single model; one great arts leader is a little grey man, who looks just like John Major, who seldom appears over the parapet but runs a tremendous organisation!” On Chairmen: “Most of them are very bad , hopeless, the businessmen who leave their brains and skills at the door of the Boardroom!” Is she a leader?: “No, I don’t chair anything except my foundation, I sit on boards. I’m not a leader!” Later, the fellows and I decide that this is a big evasion dodging the fact that she has power but does not want to be held accountable for the way she exercises it. Denying she is a leader saves her trouble.

Friday July 17. The First Night of the BBC Proms, a landmark of the summer arts. The opening weekend stars the BBC Symphony, Royal Opera and Welsh National Opera on successive nights. Walking over to the Prom itself from the launch party, the BBC Director General, Mark Thompson, enthuses about the fact that several million people will see/hear the concert as a result of the various BBC ‘platforms’. He asks: “Who says there is no desire for this in the public?” I say it is a sad irony that just when we have won greater acceptance for the importance of the arts in the political world, the finances come tumbling down. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at the opening night. I can’t stand all that “Pater Ecstaticus hovering” stuff from Part two of Goethe’s “Faust”. But the music grows on me and then I realise that it is because of the way Jiri Belohlavek conducts it, very Czech, rather matter of fact, not Viennese and angst-ridden. It works, nothing is lost. To me, it seems much more accessible, more comfortable, more moving. I lack the capacity for Viennese neurotic self examination!

Sunday, July 18. To the BBC Prom box for the Royal Opera production of Verdi’s ”Simone Boccanegra”. An epic evening, the Maltese tenor, Joseph Calleja, drawing a collective gasp of exhilaration from 5,000 throats as he ended his Act Two aria, sung with an elegance of line and beauty of tone. Marina Poplavskaya soared with perfect beauty of tone and in one particular phrase moved the whole box to tears. And what of the big boy, Placido Domingo? A great Doge of course, a massive presence, a heroic tone, thrilling beyond words. But a baritone? No never, just a great tenor whose voice ( like Obelix’s chest?) has slipped a bit lower. Does it matter? In one sense, yes. Verdi wrote the high notes for a baritone to have to reach for. Domingo makes the high notes easy - of course – but the low notes do not have the resonance Verdi wants. Nothing takes away from the grandeur of Domingo’s assumption of the part.

When Roger Wright, the Proms Director, visited him in Berlin to get him to perform in the Prom, Domingo said: “Yes, but on one condition; I must do it in costume.” To which Roger instantly agreed. At the end of the opera, Boccanegra has collapsed, dead on the stage. The music ends, the applause swells, the other principals step forward, Domingo lies motionless!! Seconds pass; no movement! What is going on? Surely the unthinkable cannot have happened? Only when a concerned Poplavskaya bends down to see if he is alright does Domingo sit up and get up grinning broadly. His idea of a practical joke!

In the interval Nick Kenyon, a former BBC Proms Director, produces a corker: “Do you remember in my first year as Proms’ Controller we had a concert version of the Royal Opera’s Verdi “Don Carlos” and you and Annie came to our box? The next day, John Birt (then Director General) rang me up: ‘Why did you have John Tusa in your box last night? What did you talk about? ‘”

Look back at the Proms’ Opening Weekend. It a kind of pinnacle of British arts – three great national institutions, the BBC, the Royal Opera, Welsh National Opera, delivering real outstanding quality, a culmination of a decade and a half of striving to do the arts better than ever and to international standards. Glorious but sad because now, as the cuts fall, this quality will be threatened, weakened, undermined. Will we ever see the likes of this weekend again? Possibly not and we will look back at what was achieved in the glory days with sadness, regret, perhaps even anger.

Monday, July 19. At the University of the Arts London Degree Day lunch, I have Elisabeth Esteve-Coll, once Director of the V&A, as my guest. What happened there in her unhappy time?. I started on neutral ground, reminding Elisabeth of the Anglo-Israeli seminar on Lake Tiberias that we both took part in. “Oh yes, I resigned immediately afterwards!” On to the V&A! Elisabeth: “We had many distinguished keepers and curators who had once written pathfinding works. But they had stopped writing and had no interest in making their collections available to the public and comprehensible to them. I had no Finance Director, the civil service occasionally seconded a non-skilled accounts assistant to the museum to ‘do the money’. There was no HR support or marketing.“ Elisabeth went to the Office of Arts and Libraries and the Treasury and said she needed money to make the cuts and redundancies and get the right staff replacements. To her amazement they came back at once, March 10 of the year in question, and said: ”You can have all the money you need but it must be spent by the end of March!” Three weeks for a revolution. “That was why it was so brutal!” And she never recovered her reputation. A woman before her time, very possibly.

Monday, July 19. A “return match” dinner with Julia and Antony Neuberger at the “York and Albany” just of Regent’s Park! As we have an early glass of wine at the bar, up bounces Philippe Sands, the international lawyer. We congratulate him on his persistent pursuit of the “Blair Gang” over the illegality of the Iraq War. We enthuse over the FCO legal adviser, Elisabeth Wilmshurst, whose Chilcot Inquiry appearance we all attended. Philippe: “ I coached her before her appearance. She came up to lunch in Hampstead and we walked over to the ‘Wells Pub’ only to find the David Cornwells there (John le Carre). She was thrilled, David said how much he admired her and would she come up, have lunch and talk to him about the FCO for his next book!”

Thursday July 29, 2010. To Scotland for the Annual General Meeting of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, the Scottish-based charity started by Rory Stewart. We have known his father, the diplomat, Brian Stewart, for 40 years. So what of Rory MP? He has been badly burned by recent tabloid exploitation of his offhand remark that some of his constituents are so poor that they hold their trousers up with string! This was turned into alleged quotes that he said his constituents were primitive. It has had two good results: first, rather stand-offish Tory back bench MPs have started to come up, sympathise and welcome him. No more “Rory Stewart, great explorer destined for high office”. He is human, vulnerable, like them! Secondly, his constituents have rallied round, sensing, I think, a media stitch up, and feeling they were patronised by the tabloids; text messages of support, suggestions that they will all start to wear string belts as a gesture of solidarity, some from people saying “I wish my MP were like you!” As learning experiences about the tabloids go, I think he has got off lightly.

We spend time with Rory’s father, Brian Stewart. The stories pour out, some familiar but worth recording from a civil service life lived mainly in the discreet shadows. How the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, asked Brian – at Ted Heath’s request – to draw up a list of things we might do to make the IRA’s life more difficult. Brian drew up a list starting with poison pen letters right down to assassination! He didn’t recommend it but if Heath wanted a list of options, those were the options! Burke Trend loved it: “Just what we are looking for!” Dick White, Brian’s superior, had not seen the paper and was furious. But, says Brian: “He lacked the moral courage to say any of the options were wrong! He just said ‘don’t do that to me again!’”

While Brian was posted to Hanoi in 1968 as Minister - “normal FO chaps couldn’t have stuck the isolation! I loved it!” – Murray MacLehose, the Hong Kong Governor, decided he should hold a big Vietnam conference. Brian agreed but once it was set up he had cold feet. Everyone else there, US and UK “dips”, soldiers, intelligence, would be briefed up to the hilt on the situation. Based in Hanoi, he had only his words and eyes to go on. So he presented a short paper entitled “Notional Assessment by the Politburo of the North Vietnamese Communist Party”. As the assembled US/UK bigwigs were celebrating a big defeat of the Viet Cong/ NVA in the 1968 Tet offensive, Brian put another perspective. “The Vietnamese do not care about casualties. In their eyes, they got into Hue and fought it into rubble. They spent two days in the centre of Saigon. These are achievements. ‘Tet’ was a Vietnamese victory!” Of course everyone hated it and disagreed with it except for the CIA who saw the point! That was the kind of situation Brian loved – him against the world, him usually right.

3,504 words 23 March 2025