Music Richard Osborne

‘Hey, Nigel – I’ve just heard a rumour that the company is going to replace us with AI’

ghastly or sympathetic, depending on whose side you are on, George Russell is winningly ruthless. Conversation between the Russells is nothing if not solipsistic. When Bertha tells her husband to remove his feet from the table that once belonged to King Ludwig of Bavaria, George replies, ‘He had it once. I have it now.’ When George tells Bertha, ‘They’ve shot Jesse James,’ she replies, ‘He had his troubles. I have mine.’

The future of America is determined not only by money, of course. Race is also a part of the story, and Marian Brooks arrives at her aunt’s with a ‘coloured’ girl she met on the train from Pennsylvania. Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) is an aspiring writer and Agnes, with her nose for talent, employs her as a secretary. ‘They’re coming here to take our jobs,’ complains the housemaid.

It is a witty piece of casting to have Cynthia Nixon – currently also playing Miranda Hobbs in the Sex in the City reboot, And Just Like That – as the spinster aunt. Similarly, Christine Baranski, the democratic Diane Lockhart in the legal dramas The Good Wife and The Good Fight, is a canny choice. The performances are all terrific, the settings lush and the bustles ridiculous. The Gilded Age will be as talked about as one of Mrs Astor’s dinner dances.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE 1992 AND ALL THAT

Elgar, Rossini and Thomas Tallis are subjects for any season. Others who featured in the earliest editions of this column, when it appeared in the first issue in 1992, were more of the moment.

And what a year it was. The times they were a-changing, much as they had been back in 1963, when Bob Dylan wrote that celebrated lyric and Philip Larkin raised two cheers for the brave new world of sexual liberation.

Larkin called his poem Annus Mirabilis. After the Windsor fire and numerous other well-publicised royal événements, the Queen dubbed 1992 her annus horribilis. Where the arts were concerned, the year was a bit of both.

An early plus was John Major’s return to power, and the decision to give the newly created Department of National Heritage, begetter of the National Lottery, a seat in cabinet. The aim was to undo some of the damage of the Thatcher years, during which wrecking balls had been taken to the BBC, the Arts Council and much else whose benefits we’d taken for granted since the mid-1960s. That was when Harold Wilson’s arts minister Jennie Lee and Lord ‘two dinners’ Goodman had created an arts environment that made Britain, briefly, the envy of the world.

Glyndebourne’s closure of its old theatre in 1992 in order to open a new one in 1994 was another vote of confidence in the future. This at a moment when our state-funded opera companies, for the first time in their 46-year history, were in serious disarray.

Warmly encouraged by Glyndebourne’s George Christie, the fledgling summer opera festival, which music-obsessed merchant banker Leonard Ingrams (brother of Richard) had started on the terrace of his Oxfordshire manor house, moved up several gears to help bridge the gap. I reviewed that 1992 Garsington season, carefully omitting all mention of the Ingrams name, lest mean-minded readers suspected nepotism on the part of The Oldie’s founding editor.

By 1992, things were looking none too rosy for the classical-record industry. In a newly published book, Evenings with Horowitz, the great pianist railed at the brevity of the New York Times’s review of his latest CD amid a sea of reviews of albums of rock music.

The launch of Classic FM in the autumn of 1992 was another long-term plus; the arrival of John Birt as the BBC’s new Director-General an evident minus. ‘So how many people listen to your little lunchtime chamber-music concerts?’ Birt is said to have asked the BBC’s outgoing Controller of Music, John Drummond. ‘As many as need to’ was the great man’s withering riposte.

Drummond was the last Controller brought up in the old quality-driven, ratings-free dispensation that had begun with the founding of the BBC Third Programme in 1946 and continued