It’s hard to know where to start – or finish – when explaining the formidable Lilian Hochhauser, due her centenary birthday card from the King next month.

Over more than 75 years, she and her husband Victor, who died in 2019, were Britain’s most respected musical impresarios. Their net ranged wide – from Gracie Fields and Mario Lanza in the 1950s to Chinese acrobats in the Noughties – but they will undoubtedly be best remembered for a unique ability to negotiate with stonewalling Russian bureaucracy and winkle out some of the Soviet Union’s greatest talents.

‘I worked hard, I loved music and I loved what I was doing. It’s as simple as that’

‘I worked hard, I loved music and I loved what I was doing. It’s as simple as that’

 From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, their diplomacy charmed the regime to permit the likes of Dmitri Shostakovich, David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter and Msistlav Rostropovich, the Bolshoi and Kirov (now the Maryinsky) ballets, as well as the Red Army Choir and the Moiseyev folk dancers, to perform in Britain. Communism may have indelibly blighted Russia’s post-war reputation, but the Hochhausers’ enterprise reminded us that there was more to the country’s soul than its political apparatus and its granite-faced masters.

After 1974, when the couple were abruptly blacklisted by the Kremlin for sheltering the recently defected Rostropovich (as well as their support for Israel), they changed horses to promote 12 seasons of ballet at the London Coliseum starring another celebrated defector Rudolf Nureyev. When perestroika brought fresher faces and open doors, they resumed their relationships with the Bolshoi and Maryinsky, promoting biennial visits to Covent Garden in alternating years until the confluence of Victor Hochhauser’s death, Covid and the war with Ukraine forced their activities to a tragic halt. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was the Hochhausers’ ability to make such business pay without a penny of subsidy from the taxpayer or private investment. Everything the couple presented came at their personal financial risk, and there were times when they ran close to the wire.

Still comfortably ensconced in the large home-cum-office in........

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