As the first event of its kind ever held in this country it generated enormous excitement and was almost immediately

As the first event of its kind ever held in this country, it generated enormous excitement and was almost immediately recognised abroad.In 1949, I myself succeeded Bing as artistic director. One of my first priorities was to introduce art exhibitions into the festival mix, and within five years we had shown Rembrandt, El Greco, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne and a magnificent homage to Diaghilev curated by Richard Buckle. But the highlight of my time was probably the 1951 visit of the New York Philharmonic. They gave 14 concerts, half with Bruno Walter, half with Dimitri Mitropoulos – their first visit to Europe since 1936, I believe. We were able to bring them over with a special grant as part of the Festival of Britain that year.

They’re here again at this year’s festival, with two programmes under Kurt Masur, but it’s impossible to conceive of a visiting orchestra ever again giving 14 such concerts in this day and age.”Sir Ian Hunter was talking to Gina Cowenn Thomas Sutcliffe and his column return in September. Chris Wright is living every lad’s fantasy, a life revolving around football and music. The 51-year-old founder of Chrysalis records, first home of Sixties stalwarts Jethro Tull and Procol Harum, is the proud, new owner of QPR, having sunk more than pounds 10m into his life-long passion. With an estimated worth of pounds 60m, Wright is the third member of the Seventies record boss trinity that also includes Richard Branson and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island records, and the latest to diversify into new-business opportunities.

These men, the first and perhaps the last generation of backroom pop moguls, may have started out in love with music, but they were certainly smart enough to make it pay. In the Sixties, so the myth goes, everyone was far too stoned to think about making money; in the Eighties, however, “Greed was good” (allegedly). Yet these three Sixties survivors are wealthy enough to buy their dreams; while their yuppie successors have all too often ended up the casualties of capitalism.
Wright wasn’t just an idealistic music-lover – he steered clear of drink, and read politics and history at Manchester. When he left the university in 1966, he began working for a talent agency while he wondered what to do next, then formed his own company with Terry Ellis (hence Chrysalis) “My first job didn’t seem glamorous at the time. We always wore jeans and T-shirts and sported long hair and beards,” he says. “The beauty of the job was that it didn’t feel like work and I would have done it for free. I worked hard.”Unusually for a pop person, an old friend and fellow QPR supporter is Sir Terence Burns, Chief Secretary to the Treasury (another is Branson, who visits the Wright family at their home in Gloucestershire) “He is very able,” says Sir Terence.