BOOK AUTHORS: THE DEFENSIVE LINE

posted by James Reel

    A magazine asked me to write a Mstislav Rostropovich retrospective upon the cellist’s death, so I’ve been interviewing a number of cellists who knew him. I’d also hoped to talk to pianist Lambert Orkis, who performed with Rostropovich for 12 years (today, he’s most closely associated with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter). But yesterday I got word through a intermediary that Orkis doesn’t want to give any more interviews now because 1) he’s tired of being misquoted and, no doubt more importantly, 2) he’s thinking about writing a book about his work with Rostropovich, and is saving up anecdotes for that project. It should be an interesting volume if Orkis follows through. And I’m sure that once it’s published, he’ll be much more forthcoming with interviews in the interest of publicity.
    Meanwhile, Norman “Chicken Little” Lebrecht is in a snit because Don Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer does not buy Lebrecht’s theory that the classical CD industry is dead. Lebecht tolls the death knell because the major labels have pretty much imploded (due to 15 years of corporate stupidity, I might add, not because of the rise of downloading). Lebrecht ignores the abundant evidence that the death of the classical CD is greatly exaggerated, dismissing the hundreds of new releases by smaller labels as “non-commercial vanity products.” Well, that’s an interesting way to support a dubious assertion: Declare inconvenient facts to be irrelevant. But what really annoys Lebrecht about Rosenberg is this: “The facts of decline are laid out in my book, which has not yet been reviewed in Cleveland, and there can be no excuse for such wilful myopia.” What an arrogant ass.