Kurt Masur and earnest Cuban festivals

Many wonder how Conservative leader David Cameron can support such a candidate, but award-winning Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee explains all - "Johnson's best asset is the devoted support of London's only proper newspaper. The Evening Standard - same stable as the Daily Mail - detests Livingstone: no surprise they gave Johnson front-page and leader-column coverage, with an article by himself (all about himself, not much policy) and lavish praise from the rightwing columnist Andrew Gilligan: 'Boris has come to save our great city from Ken's ghastly empire of bureaucrats, bendy buses and earnest Cuban festivals.'"
Norman Lebrecht is assistant editor and columnist of the Evening Standard. Last night BBC Radio 3 started a new series called The Lebrecht Interview. It was good to see that Norman's first subject was Kurt Masur, who not coincidentally is conducting a BBC Prom tomorrow. In his position as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra Masur was a central figure in Wende, the peaceful revolution that started in Leipzig, toppled the Communist dictatorship, and opened the door to German re-unification in 1990 . That revolution was started by the bottom 20% of East German society, many of who were lost in prison.
Read more on that 1989 revolution in Leipzig here.
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