Norman Lebrecht

Norman Lebrecht (born 11 July 1948 in London) is a British commentator on music and cultural affairs and a novelist. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph from 1994 until 2002 and assistant editor of the Evening Standard from 2002 until 2009. On BBC Radio 3, he has presented lebrecht.live from 2000 and The Lebrecht Interview from 2006. He also writes a monthly column for the magazine Standpoint.

The Maestro Myth (1991) charts the history of conducting from its rise as an independent profession in the 1870s to its subsequent preoccupations with power, wealth and celebrity. When the Music Stops (US title: Who Killed Classical Music, 1997) is a history of the classical music business, presenting an exposé of its backstage workings and predicting the collapse of the record industry. Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry (US title: The Life and Death of Classical Music, 2007) is billed as an inside account of the rise and fall of recording, combined with a critical selection and analysis of 100 discs and 20 recording disasters.

Lebrecht has written about the composer Gustav Mahler, including in books Mahler Remembered (1987) and Why Mahler? (2010). His interest in contemporary music is reflected in The Complete Companion to 20th Century Music (2000) and in the Phaidon Press series of 20th-century composer biographies, of which he was founder and editor.

Other books on music he has written include The Book of Musical Anecdotes (1985), Music in London (1992), and Covent Garden: The Untold Story (2000).

His career as a novelist began with The Song of Names, a tale of two boys growing up in wartime London, which was published in 2001 and went on to win the 2002 Whitbread Award for First Novel. His second novel, The Game of Opposites, was published in 2009 in the USA

Lebrecht lectures at major cultural institutions and universities. He has delivered addresses and courses at the Universities of London, Yale, Syracuse, SUNY Buffalo, UMKC Kansas City, USC Los Angeles, Claremont McKenna, Carnegie Mellon, Tel Aviv and the University of Granada, Spain. He has also worked with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Southbank Centre, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Intelligence Squared, the Shanghai International Literary Festival; and with the festivals of Verbier, Toblach, Cheltenham, Edinburgh and Melbourne.

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