Final notes from the masters

Classical composers may lead less exciting lives than rock stars, but they compensate by dying in the most extraordinary ways.

Alexander Borodin dropped dead during a fancy-dress party while dressed as a cow, while George Gershwin fell into a terminal stupor and was found with a Hershey bar smeared all over his face (having tried to eat it via his ear).

Charles-Valentin Alkan's unstable bookcase caused him to be crushed to death by his own cookery books.

Jean-Baptiste Lully fatally injured his own foot with his baton while (ironically) conducting a concert to celebrate Louis XIV's return to health, while Robert Cooke (organist at Westminster Abbey) died after eating dodgy kippers, vomiting, then jumping to his death in the Thames. Oh, and Vincenzo Di Firenze was speared by a sharp organ pipe (an F sharp, actually).

Most of the Second Viennese School also died in strange ways, what with Alban Berg succumbing to a single bee sting and Anton Webern being shot by a triggerhappy American soldier while lighting a cigar (at least they didn't put a dog lead round his neck or sodomise his tradesman's entrance with a neon light first).

They are gone, but their influence lives on, as Pierre Boulez freely acknowledged while In Rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonic, shown last night as part of Artsworld's month-long celebration of the art of conducting.

Although his own dissonant, Webern-influenced compositions will never be featured on Classic FM's Most Wanted, Boulez has become the world's most highly-respected conductor of the 20th century repertoire, due to his acute ear, his preoccupation with clarity and his rock-solid sense of rhythm.

Unlike some conductors I could mention, who are fonder of the bottle than the baton and notorious among musicians for their irregular movements from bar to bar.

Recorded in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal in 1998, the programme centred on a rehearsal of Berg's Three Pieces of 1914. Echoes of Mahler and Schoenberg were clearly audible in this early expressionist work, but the continual dissonances would doubtless still provoke horrified cries of "fire in a pet shop" in traditional circles.

Switching freely between English (for the interview) and German (for the orchestral session), the Frenchman displayed his unerring ability to detect a single wrong note in the most complex and raucous of passages, told us that "virtuosity is very important for me" and touchingly revealed that he'd never quite achieved the manual dexterity he'd aspired to during his own pianoplaying days.