We like to celebrate anniversaries and the BBC has been busy recently with Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn. Almost overlooked was the fourth great Czech, Martinu, who died in 1959. Then belatedly, Andrew Burton had 35 constructive minutes on Radio 3’s Record Review last December, for the sesquicentennial (lovely word) of Louis Spohr who died in October 1859.

I have admired the cool melodic music of this Brunswicker ever since I was given his four double-quartets by the great Ted Perry of Hyperion after an interview, 20 years ago. And he belongs in Tribune. A man of high and generous character, Louis Spohr was one of us, a leftie, getting more so as he grew older. You cannot call a man complacent who, at 64 and Kappelmeister to a German Prince, in 1848 helps students to build barricades. Even his name is a political statement. Christened “Ludwig”, he preferred “Louis” – associated with dangerous, radical France.  Joe Haines would have worried about him.

Yet the fall in his standing until recently was due to his musical conservatism. As this conservatism amounted to an undying love

of Mozart, I shouldn’t worry about it. Interestingly though, while the explorations of Beethoven troubled him, Spohr would champion the young Wagner, conducting the premiere of Tannhäuser. A bad critical habit today is the cult of innovation. “Yes, I enjoyed that, but isn’t it derivative?” So much frankly unenjoyable music is proclaimed “significant and relevant” by sterile dominies for whom impact is all, pleasure sinful.

It’s a puritan creed with a streak of masochism. Spohr, like JF Fasch, Franz Danzi and, in our own day, George Lloyd and Berthold Goldschmidt, has suffered for writing good music of a school, music which kicks no doors down. He was, ironically, the complete technical innovator. By way of a rolled-up sheet of music, the conductor’s baton was his idea. So are the numbered squares by which orchestral players keep track of the score.

Spohr, generally reckoned the equal of Paganini, was the ‘Other Great Violinist’, but less showy. Touring all over, (four times in Britain) he naturally wrote for his own instrument, 15 concerti in all, and there are recent versions of the 1st, 6th, 8th and 11th on two Naxos discs. He also produced what were called Quatuors brilliants, in which the first fiddle is a soloist. He was not however the prisoner of his own instrument.  Married to a virtuoso harpist, Dorette Scheidler, he wrote for the harp. Like Mozart, Weber, Brahms and Reger, he would write (beautifully) for the clarinet because he knew an outstanding soloist – in this case, Simon Hermstedt of Sondershausen – there are four concerti and a potpouri, all very fine. Anthony Burton spoke up for the symphonies, and versions of four are now available. There is a clutch of lieder, notably recorded by Ian Partridge, suggesting that the operas, headed by Jessonda, very successful in his lifetime, deserve at least recorded revival.

There is now a decent set of his music in any adequate record shop. One might start with the Nonet – which, at the lowest point in his standing, kept a slot in the repertoire, as did the Piano and Wind Quintet. Then there are those double quartets. Just look around: his music has the classical virtues, free of the bombast and grandstanding which, when he died 150 years ago, were busily vitiating late romanticism. Not just an innovator indeed, Louis Spohr was a late, very good vintage.

Edward Pearce

Will under-fire Barack Obama take heart from the revelation that Norman Tebbit – the archest of the arch-Thatcherites– might have voted for him as US President? Probably not.

Last week, the Daily Mirror labelled Peter Mandelson “the James Bond of British politics” on the grounds that he has “a licence to kill off the Tories in the general election”. But surely Lord Mandy is rather more reminiscent of another Ian Fleming character: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the sinister mastermind behind the buccaneering free enterprise organisation SPECTRE – the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – with tentacles reaching out in all directions . He’d look good with a white cat on his lap, too.

Brave and optimistic souls are battling to ensure Labour’s manifesto comes out looking, well Labour. Campaigners are still pressing for the East Coast Line, which was last year taken under the public wing after its private owners messed up, to be retained in public hands. Problem is, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis has already put the re-privatisation contract out to tender. Not much consultation on that one.

What was it Gordon Brown said about reining in the banks? It had to be done on an international basis. Well, the Government is now pursuing an international deal. But it doesn’t look much like a clampdown. More like a rescue operation. Britain is colluding with Spain to block tougher European Union rules on hedge funds and private equity firms. Not that tough in fact, just a little more transparency here and there. But that terrifies the City folk who started the whole financial collapse in the first place. Spain currently holds the presidency of the EU, which means it gets to determine priorities for new directives. Chancellor Alistair Darling and City minister Lord Myners are in cahoots with the country’s economic minister Elena Salgado to get the tougher rules – championed by France and Germany – watered down. While Spain is desperate to attract private equity, the Treasury fears disinvestment in the City. Like crime, the perception of the threat is greater than the incidence

David Cameron’s communications chief Andy Coulson looks like he will be needing a few explanations for his boss, if not the boys in blue. He was editor of the News of the World when it turns out, thanks to a Guardian investigation, more than 100 people in public life – prominent and not so prominent – had their mobile phones hacked into by the paper’s journalists, or private investigators working for them. Mr Coulson has repeatedly insisted that he cannot recall any of his journalists breaking the law in this way – for that is what it is.
Clive Goodman, the royal correspondent who went to jail, didn’t tell his boss, according to the official version of events. Now three phone companies are making details public of other customers whose conversations were hacked and the scale makes the exercise look routine. Everybody on the paper, and their rivals, had an inkling that this was so. Except the editor.

Former Tribune editor Bob Edwards was reminiscing with colleagues from the magazine and his Fleet Street days as editor of the Sunday Mirror at a gathering in London when the current editor recalled the time he had been arrested as a spy for attempting to take photographs of the main station in Belgrade, then the capital of Tito’s Soviet-satellite Yugoslavia. Under the semi-totalitarian regime of the “non-aligned” country, the station was deemed a site of strategic military importance. A similar thing had happened to the current editor. As they mulled over this coincidence, Bob said: “The irony is that you’d get done for that in this country now.” The difference is that, in this country, it would not have to be a designated military site, as Belgrade station genuinely was.

The Tory Party might not know it, but David Cameron is about to take Britain deeper into Europe than ever before. In fact, he plans to move his government to Brussels. Well, at least part of it. Oliver Letwin, who chairs the party’s policy review, confirmed at a think tank conference that if the Tories win the election they will despatch a Treasury minister on permanent EU monitor duties, to keep an eye on all those spendthrifty foreigners spending our cash. The problem is there is no mechanism for such a post. The poor exile, who has not yet been identified, is destined, apparently, to get his feet under a table at the offices of UKREP, the official British representation to the EU. But the staff are all diplomats and civil servants who won’t much like having a ministerial cuckoo in their cosy
nest.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was brought down to earth rather abruptly after delivering the prestigious Hugh Cudlipp lecture. At the end of his hour-long exposition on the future of the newspaper industry and journalism in the digital future to an audience of academics and journalists, he was thanked by the great Mirror man’s widow Lady Jodi Cudlipp. She was especially keen to express her gratitude to Mr Rusbridger for overseeing the introduction of the Berliner-sized Guardian that we see today. It is, she explained, the only newspaper that snugly fits the bottom of her parrot’s cage. The symbolism was much appreciated by the guffawing audience. Soon though, if Mr Rusbridger is right, there won’t be any convenient newspapers for poor Polly. An Apple tablet just wouldn’t be the same and you can’t wrap your fish and chips in a tweet

There have been many unflattering suggestions made about the pictures of David Cameron’s strangely flawless-looking face on his £500,000 posters, not least from Star Trek devotees. Trekkies will yawn at the internet joke that the Tory leader’s Botox-happy appearance resembles the android Lieutenant Commander Data, but Tribune has a better idea. On the right is Constable Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the naturally formless shape-shifter whose name means “nothing” and who never manages to look quite human. On the left…