It was a rather delicious moment yesterday morning, just before Tony Blair's first and last speech on the arts as Prime Minister, to eavesdrop on Norman Rosenthal - the highly entertaining, prodigiously talented, sometimes irascible exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy - asking Roger Wright - controller of Radio 3 - how he might possibly go about getting the job running the Proms. (The post is shortly to be vacant thanks to Nicholas Kenyon's departure to run the Barbican this autumn.)
Rosenthal is known for saying outrageous things, and there are times that one cannot tell whether he is being serious or not. Personally I suspect he is one of those people who is always at least a little bit serious, he's just less guarded than most. Anyway, Roger egged him on and told him to talk to Jenny Abramsky director of BBC radio and music, for tips on how to fill out his application form. Amazingly, this he duly seemed to do, she also being one of the crowd of the great and the good who was standing outside Tate Modern waiting for the commencement of Blair's performance.
And why not? Rosenthal is a deeply cultured man, not just a visual art monomaniac. He is an extremely frequent theatregoer, and he has a deep knowledge of and love for classical music. Within the visual arts, his tastes are bracingly catholic, bringing historical shows to the RA as well as having famously curated the groundbreaking Sensation! exhibition that popularised Britart in 1997. If he brought that kind of sensibility to the classical music scene (and indeed that kind of instinct for identifying the zeitgeist) then one could do a hell of a lot worse. Classical music could do with a bit of the pizzazz that Rosenthal has helped bring to British contemporary art over the past 20 years.
