Other US orchestras are wrestling with long legacies of stasis. In the 1970s American orchestras lost the thirty-somethings to rampant rock, an art that refused to grow old. Audiences who would once have gravitated in midlife from the Stones to the symphony stuck with the Jagger tours. The symphony lost its Middle America hinterland.

Heavily dependent on local donors, themselves of advancing age, orchestras carried on playing Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak, music of a distant past, accentuating their geriatric profile. Musicians, fearful for their jobs, adopted a hard-hat unionism that won them $100,000 starting pay for a 20-hour week in the Big Five, unaffordable when the market crashed. Attitudes have since hardened into confrontation. Only in American orchestras do I hear well-meaning executives referred to as "management", the natural enemy.

Remedies are rare and largely unproven. Gary Hanson of Cleveland, feeling the recession in a depressed, rustbelt city, switched his orchestra part-time to Miami. Zarin Mehta of New York installed a music director Alan Gilbert who, while light on prior achievement, is putting Messiaen into Manhattan ears and bringing a Finn, Magnus Lindberg, as composer in residence. Chicago SO president Deborah Rutter lured the glamorous Riccardo Muti back into American contention. Boston's Mark Volpe is reeling from the sudden loss of James Levine while Philadelphia has hired the bright French-Canadian Yannick Nézét-Séguin as its next music director, should it succeed in emerging from the bankruptcy courts.

Seeds of orchestral revival are found only in the Far East, where the Japanese audience has not wavered amid economic and natural disasters, China is creating six new orchestras a year and the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea has become the first non-European, non-US orchestra to win a major label record contract, with Deutsche Grammophon. Classical sales in Korea are the highest in the world, amounting to 18 per cent of the total record market, against less than 2 per cent in the US. These are encouraging signs, apparently a significant shift in the centre of orchestral activity. But at close hand, it becomes clear that the impetus in Asia is often attributable to local causes — inter-city rivalry in China's command economy, self-education drives in Korea. The question of who needs the symphony orchestra in the 21st century is not going to be resolved by isolated national phenomena.