Impossible not to celebrate the fact the Glenn Dicterow has spent 34 years as the leader of the New York Philharmonic; he's retiring this month after working through the eras of Music Directors Mehta, Masur, and Maazel, and now with Alan Gilbert. Dicterow talks guardedly to the New York Times here about encounters with Bernstein, being shot by Danny Kaye, and mediating the relationship between maestros and the orchestra over the decades.

But the most astonishing fact, by far for a British reader, is how much Dicterow was paid. In the most recent New York Phil accounts we have access to - 2011, his annual salary was $523,647 (£304,000) - more than half a million bucks. Nobody's going to begrudge Dicterow his dues, but that's a sum that's exponentially more than any leader of a British orchestra could ever dream of making. And while Dicterow is an exception, the average pay of a sample of US orchestras in 2013 and 2014 makes jaw-dropping reading for anyone in a British orchestra: $148,720 (£86,000) for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; even for less famous orchestras in the States, the pay is astonishing: $81,892 (£47,500) for the St Louis Symphony, Detroit Symphony Orchestra's players take home an average salary of $82,880 (£48,000).

US orchestras have a remarkable system in operation in which they are funded almost completely by private money but are represented by some extraordinarily resilient unions, meaning that if rehearsals run over the clock, the orchestra will simply stop playing (members of the New York Phil did precisely that to Bernstein, as Dicterow remembers; Claudio Abbado complained about the same phenomenon). When the Detroit Symphony were on strike a few years ago because their salary and conditions were going to be cut to under the $100,000 (£58,000) mark, it was hard to feel totally sympathetic for these players still on secure contracts and salaries that would make most British orchestral musicians weep with jealousy. In the salaried orchestras in the UK - the BBC orchestras, the Hallé, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the orchestras of most of our opera companies - precise figures aren't available, but based on recent-ish figures, average orchestral wages hover around the £30,000 ($50,900) mark. For the other orchestras, who are often paid freelance rates according to the Association of British Orchestras and Musicians' Union's guidelines, these rates work out currently at less than £20 an hour for the vast majority of musicians for a concert day including as that does three hours of rehearsal and up to three hours of concert time. That's not enough, either in terms of a meaningful reward for a lifetime's dedication to their instrument and their art-form, or for a larger sense of being valued by the society in which they live and work.

The point is not necessarily that US musicians are overpaid - if endowments and private donations can support those salaries, it's difficult to criticise them in principle. But simply, it's that our orchestral musicians are not fairly remunerated. Dicterow and many of his American colleagues face a secure retirement and a stable financial present; it's not too much to think that the players in British orchestras, which take their place on the world stage alongside much better-paid ensembles - and who you'll hear in all their glory at this year's Proms, from the London Symphony Orchestra to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - ought to have the same chance.