One retired oil company manager agreed, saying the price had been kept artificially high by market players with a vested interest in a high price. “It is all to do with young turks on bonuses playing games with the price,” he said. “It is nothing to do with Opec.”The issue is whether the oil price will lead to a recession. According to Mr Verleger the impact would be much less than in the past. Inflation means that 1973’s peak of $40 a barrel oil is the equivalent of as much as $160 now “Oil prices matter to the world economy. However, the degree of importance has been moderated by the growth in the economy,” he said.There are also signs the West’s oil industry is reacting to the crisis.

Shell is spending $1.2bn next year to exploit small oilfields in the North Sea while BP says technology is now available to exploit a 4 billion barrel oilfield discovered 23 years ago.. Tomorrow evening, the Last Night of the Proms pays a closing tribute to one of this season’s themes, youth, with a performance of Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto – in the first half, of course – by one of the younger players on the international concert circuit, the 20-year-old American violinist, Hilary Hahn. Tomorrow evening, the Last Night of the Proms pays a closing tribute to one of this season’s themes, youth, with a performance of Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto – in the first half, of course – by one of the younger players on the international concert circuit, the 20-year-old American violinist, Hilary Hahn.
Hahn has an exclusive contract with Sony Classical, and is one of the youngest musicians to be give such a vote of confidence in the history of the label. And it’s her youth that Sony’s marketing people seem to want to underline: a waif-like figure stares out from the CD covers, all unruly hair and wide, innocent, pixie eyes. That image is not sustained by the astonishingly assured playing to be heard on the recordings themselves. Nor is it simply a question of slick technique: her three discs to date, including the Beethoven Concerto and three of Bach’s solo pieces, reveal that she has thought deeply about the music.

The critics regularly fall back on such ageist compliments as “mature beyond her years”, but in this case it’s true: the poise and emotional sophistication of her playing do not betoken an ordinary 20-year-old.In fact, for all that she has been followed by the “youngest ever” label for much of her career, Hahn has had a fiddle in her hands (currently an 1864 JB Vuillaume “del Gesu”, by the way) for years. She had her first lessons, in her native Baltimore, before she was four, and attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia between the ages of 10 and 19.Curtis takes an extraordinarily leisurely approach to the development of its students: all 150 of them get a scholarship for full tuition, and can stay on after graduation as long as their teachers think they still have something to learn – this is no prodigy factory. Since Curtis has no preparatory department, the 10-year-old Hahn became a full-time student, driven up from Baltimore by her dad twice a week for violin lessons and chamber-music classes.Her bachelor’s studies – academic as well as musical – began when she was only in her third year, so that her university career occupied her between the ages of 12 and 16. During that time, she kept concerts and recordings at bay, taking advantage of the calm Curtis approach to stay on and gain experience in orchestral playing and chamber music as well as in non-musical subjects: writing fiction and poetry, acting, literature courses.A fundamental influence on her musicianship was her principal teacher, the legendary Jascha Brodsky, himself a student of the great Eugene Ysaye: when Brodsky died in March 1997, at the age of 89, Hahn had been studying with him for seven years. Brodsky, she says, “was the best kind of teacher anyone could have. He didn’t try to mould everyone into the same way of playing – he took each person’s strengths and tried to make them individual players and develop them into the best they could be.”He also thought it was very important to develop all sides of a person’s playing.

He always had me working on a lot of different pieces – I had to work on solo Bach every week, for example, and I’d be working on a concerto and a sonata and a show piece He was careful to balance technique and musicality. He thought that one shouldn’t exist without the other: you have to have it technically clean in order to get the music across, and you have it musical in order for the technique to make any sense.”The measured evolution of Hahn’s career suggests that she is taking it at her own pace. “I’ve always made all the decisions myself, but I’ve been lucky to have really good advice from a lot of people, from teachers and people at Curtis to members of the Baltimore Symphony and administrators in orchestra, performers, conductors, soloists – everyone! I’m lucky in that the people I work with, my managers and Sony, are willing to see things eye to eye with me. They don’t pressure me into doing things that I don’t feel like doing.”One of the things she does like doing can be found at www.hilaryhahn where she uses the internet to “send postcards to her fans”, as Sony puts it, from wherever in the world she happens to be playing. It’s a novel touch for a classical musician; so how did the idea arise?”I’d been carrying on a postcard correspondence with a group of third-graders [eight- to nine-year-olds, in UK parlance].

I went into the classroom one day when I was visiting their teacher. I played for the kids and found out that for their social studies class they were doing an assignment where they asked everyone they knew to send postcards from every city they went to, and they would learn about each city as they got a postcard from it. I thought, well, I go to a lot of cities, so maybe I can help. So I sent in a postcard that year from every city I went to.”The next year, that teacher retired, so I had no more connection to that class any more, and I started thinking about how I could do it on a bigger scale. I had seen a couple of websites where artists had done some kind of diary on tour. But they weren’t always written by the musicians themselves.”That, indeed, was my first thought when I visited her site: is she doing this herself, or is she perhaps being ghosted by some marketing chap? “No, it’s quite mine.