THE richest headhunt in classical music has ended with the world’s most coveted pianist switching teams at a critical moment for the industry. Lang Lang, 27, has signed with Sony Classical for $US 3 million ($3.4 million), says an executive at his old label, Deutsche Grammophon.

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A female conductor is still seen as such a novelty in the UK, yet one of our most internationally acclaimed maestros is a woman. Julia Jones rightly upbraided me when I interviewed her for tomorrow’s Music Matters on Radio 3. “It’s only in England that I get asked questions like this”, she said, whereas in Portugal, or Vienna, or Berlin, or even America, it’s not an issue.

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I have been watching, in amazement, the cartoon Wonder Pets on the Nickelodeon children’s television channel. Demonstrating the benefits of teamwork, Linny the guinea pig, Tuck the turtle, and Ming-Ming the duckling (Ming-Ming is everyone’s favorite, and mine, too) save an animal in trouble—sometimes a dolphin, sometimes a monkey, sometimes a bee—in every episode, and feats of great collaboration are always required.

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In 1890 a 13-year-old Spanish musical prodigy, Pablo Casals, was rummaging through a second-hand sheet-music store in Barcelona. He stumbled across a tattered copy of six cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach. These pieces, written in the 1720s, had long been obscure. But for the young Pablo, their melodic beauty was audible.

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It’s been observed here before, particularly by one commenter, that many of the classical music field’s attempts to be hip and draw in a younger audience are a little embarrassing, or stilted. (I’m putting words in ianw’s mouth here; he raised the point objecting to the term alt-classical. And I have to concur with him that if an orchestra were to use this term in its marketing, my instinct would be to run the other way.)

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In an interview last April, before his performance of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at London’s Covent Garden, the noted opera and orchestral conductor Semyon Bychkov stated: “You start trying to be faithful to a composer’s score but great masterpieces give you enormous possibilities for interpretation. You can serve the music without being subservient.” The statement of St. Augustine could apply: “Love God and do what you will.”

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Odd, the pianist Kirill Gerstein thought. A music critic from Houston was coming to interview him in Jacksonville, Fla. Mr. Gerstein’s manager had arranged the meeting, at the Omni Hotel’s J bar, to coincide with a run of concerts last November. Might as well meet the writer, the pianist thought.

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Pierre Boulez has traveled vast distances since those early years when the incendiary young modernist clawed and shouted his way to the top of the Parisian musical avant-garde. Having made the long journey from enfant terrible to grand old man, he no longer has to shout to be heard. And when he makes pronouncements, he no longer does so with lofty derision but with smiling authority.

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When the exquisite Soviet figure skating pair Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov took the ice for their free-skate program at the 1988 Winter Olympics, they bounded off to the rousing lilt of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”): music that matched their lyricism, drive and evident weightlessness as they flew across the ice.

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Ever wonder what kind of penmanship George Frederick Handel had? Was he the type to cross things out with a single, swift stroke, or did he cover up his mistakes in a scratchy flurry? Well, wonder no more.

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