The greatest rivalries are frequently between people who were once close colleagues and may even have grown up together. Think of Cain and Abel, Lenin and Trotsky, Blair and Brown, Lennon and McCartney. Now the classical music business is enthralled by something similar in the murky world of agents.

Even before Gustavo Dudamel was named music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in April 2007, an image of the young, charismatic conductor had begun to appear before the public, heralded by buzz about the flamboyant new maestro.

Smarting from his rejection by British orchestras, the conductor Alex Prior went off to conduct the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in January, having beaten 180 applicants for the post. Nothing too remarkable about that until you realise he is 17 and travelled there with his mother.

It’s a very assured – not to say very brave – young conductor who chooses to make his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’ notoriously challenging Seventh Symphony. Mighty talents have fallen at this particular fence, defeated by the work’s circuitous evolution and elusive logic.

Simon Rattle is coming home to Birmingham for a rare working visit — but he holds few hopes for his native land
So you think the mood in Britain is gloomy? The view from Berlin looks even more apocalyptic, it seems. “If I were not British,” says Britain’s most celebrated conductor, “I would say that this old country of ours is going through a kind of endgame.”

Imagine this: you drop onto the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, switch on the TV and see a dapper young man with a baton standing before an orchestra and demonstrating the patterns conductors use to lead music in different meters — two, three, four and five beats to the bar.

It is not quite as baroque as the passionate music for which the conductor William Christie is famous. But the sword created by Chanel Fine Jewelry to mark the American-born musician’s entry into the Académie des Beaux-Arts — the highest French cultural honor — includes another of his passions: flowers.

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.

The hardwood baton used by San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is 12 inches long and made by a retired stage hand in Amsterdam. The stick used by Nicola Luisotti, the San Francisco Opera’s music director, is 13 inches long and crafted by his 82-year-old father using wood from trees grown near the family’s home in Italy.

An orchestra conductor faces the ultimate leadership challenge: creating perfect harmony without saying a word.