Is pirate music ever justified?

Krystian Zimerman broke off a concert recently to berate a filming audience member

After Krystian Zimerman's recent outburst at an audience member for filming on their phone, Rupert Christiansen wonders if it will ever be possible to eliminate pirate recording.

Krystian Zimerman, one of today’s very greatest pianists and a man of exceptional intelligence and integrity, stormed off the platform in the middle of a recital in Germany earlier this week when he noticed someone recording him on an iPhone, presumably for distribution on YouTube.

Having berated the audience with a reminder that the classical music industry was being decimated by all such pirate recording, he resumed his recital but refused to give an encore. (The incident follows a similar strop by the actor James McAvoy, who recently broke off a performance of Macbeth in London to tear a strip off people in the audience who were taking photographs of him in flagrante.)

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