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The most worrying aspect of the coming Ice Age is the way it has split the arts into rival camps, performing and visual, and sundered London from the rest of the country. The first closures are expected within a month, but where some art forms have been assured by the Chancellor that their future is secure, museums and galleries expect to be penalised and the regions will be starved of major attractions. That is where we stand on the eve of Gordon’s big freeze. Last summer, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) asked arts directors to submit contingency plans for cuts of seven and five percent, in the hope that the Treasury would flinch at the prospect of closures. It did not. Performing arts chiefs, led by Covent Garden’s Tony Hall, found a way into Gordon Brown’s parlour and were amiably assured they would not suffer. The heads of museums and galleries were denied comparable access. They now face nemesis. Charles Saumarez-Smith, director of the National Gallery, has appealed to the government not to damage museums ‘disproportionately’. The British Library is threatening to shut early and charge users for reading books, a proposal that is so contrary to the Library’s constituted purpose that it has to be seen as a desperate ploy. Strikes and disruptions start today at the BL. The national museums have put forward three options if cuts are imposed on the scale intended. They can reintroduce admission charges; they can stop lending items and exhibits to the rest of the country; or they can shut departments, buildings and entire institutions. The removal of entry charges five years ago resulted in 85 million extra museum visitors and is being trumpeted as one of New Labour’s triumphs. There is no way the government will allow that egalitarian policy to be reversed. Regional distribution is inviolate in much the same way. Although it costs London a fortune in wages and insurance to send cultural treasures around the nation, politicians are committed to equal distribution and will enforce continued touring. That makes closures unavoidable. In the next few weeks, the Treasury will announce its local government settlement. Councils up and down the land are poised to shut arts facilities. In the London area, Wandsworth will close its local museum and end subsidy for the Battersea Arts Centre; Waltham Forest will mothball Vestry House and the William Morris Gallery, shrine to the Victorian arts and crafts movement and home to some pretty lush pre-Raphaelites. ‘It’s the tip of a much bigger wave,’ warns Graham Fisher, head of the Museum Libraries and Archives Council’s London section, covering 230 museums. ‘There are more alarms to come.’ The spate of closures began late last year with the Type Museum in Stockwell and the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The type collection, jointly owned by the Science Museum and the V&A, is now in cold storage, unseen by public and scholars. The V&A’s theatre pack has gone into the Kensington vaults. Glasgow has recently withdrawn its museum of religion and there are fears for important art collections in Leeds. This, however, is nothing to what will follow in June. The DCMS put its budget at the bottom of the Treasury pile in the hope that officials would run out of cutting zeal before they reached it. That plan has been confounded and museum chiefs are now engaged in a last round of talks with Treasury officials to retrieve stability from the jaws of disaster. ‘Over 20 years,’ says Neil McGregor, director of the British Museum, ‘the museums of London have become the leaders of Europe in terms of energy and agenda setting. We don’t need extra money. We’re just asking for the same. I’m remaining very positive that we can convince this government to sustain investment.’ ‘I feel very determined about the case we have to put,’ asserts Sandy Nairne, head of the National Portrait Gallery. ‘This is an incredibly small amount of money in governmental terms. Why disrupt something that is so valuable to the nation?’ McGregor and Nairne refuse to divulge worst-case scenarios but even a tiny cut would put vital building plans on hold and require shorter opening hours and reduced staffing. At a time when London’s museums are being asked to play a pivotal role in presenting Britain to the world at the 2012 Olympics, the damage to morale is unhelpful. Worse, the Treasury’s divide and rule between performing and visual arts, London and country, contravenes the image of national unity that New Labour will want to project at the Games. It is both unreal and unfair. We have been here before. In the 1990s, the Tories froze the arts to pay for the Millennium Dome. Now New Labour aims to rob the arts to pay for the Olympics. It is a petty act – the BM’s £46.8 million grant barely matches one ward in an NHS teaching hospital – and it is unnecessary by any rational accounting. The Games are ephemeral entertainments, museums bear witness forever. And that point is starting to get through. If museums are shut or cut, the vandalism will have a name on it. The name is Gordon Brown. And that is not the way the next Prime Minister wants to enter history. NL ------------- CD of the week Chopin: 2nd piano sonata, 4 Scherzos (EMI) Simon Trpceski **
Norman Lebrecht To be notified of the next Lebrecht article, please email mikevincent at scena dot org Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. [Index] 
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Visit every week to read Norman Lebrecht's latest column. 
Here’s a tricky one: how
do you review a formidable young pianist whose sound leaves you
ice-cold? Simon Trpceski, 28, is a rising comet from Macedonia, busy on
the international circuit, recently with the LSO. He has all the
technique it takes to play Chopin while answering his emails and he can
catch the breath in your throat with the speed and accuracy of his
keyboard sweeps. But that, for me, is it. Lots of flash and not much
feeling, let alone the respect a work of art requires. The funeral
march of the second sonata sounds almost facile, too easy by half; the
scherzos substitute bombast for passion. Some may find this approach
clinically objective; to my ears, it’s the wrong music for this
prodigious but very raw artist. I want to hear him tackle Prokofiev,
Busoni, De Falla, John Cage.