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In Dubai.

My interest was piqued, even more so when I learned that the week would be quietly bankrolled by the competition’s composer-in-residence, a wealthy Russian-Ukrainian former hedge fund trader who, in his early retirement, had turned to composing naive classical works and paying world-class musicians to perform them. Its capital city is home to four million people, and is arranged in a continuous strip between desert and sea, a 4,000 km² promenade of property development along which adverts for condos, Gucci and crypto are punctuated with billboards displaying the face of the ‘CEO Sheikh’, Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. I flicked it on and moved through the channels, past Karl Largerfeld TV, dispatches on the Pope’s death, the in-house video stream advertising spa treatments, a Chinese state television service broadcasting in Arabic, and fell asleep to a frontline report on Russia Today.

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