Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra: EMS 18 September

[doversoul1]

Hannah French is in Toronto to meet members of the Canadian ensemble Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra about their projects and recordings since the early 1980s, including contributions from their long-serving artistic director, Jeanne Lamon. Music includes pieces by Bach, Purcell, Geminiani, Telemann, Beethoven, Zelenka and Leonardo Leo.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwg55

Beethoven?

[doversoul1]

Sorry to be a grumpy old so and so but this really is nothing more than STANDARD promotional stuff with bits of music thrown in in-between the guests prattling on about themselves. I have been putting up with all this to hear Zelenka. When it came, it was adagio ma non troppo from a sonata. That was it. Honestly, this is worse (I guess) than Breakfast. I’ve turned it off.

[Quarky]

Sorry to be a grumpy old so and so but this really is nothing more than STANDARD promotional stuff with bits of music thrown in in-between the guests prattling on about themselves. I have been putting up with all this to hear Zelenka. When it came, it was adagio ma non troppo from a sonata. That was it. Honestly, this is worse (I guess) than Breakfast. I’ve turned it off.

I'm glad you said it Doversoul, I will join you in the grumpy category. The ratio of chat:music must have been about 10:1. To whom was this programme aimed?

Early music fared much better with the preceding lunchtime concert with Mark Padmore and lute. But that seemed to be a Hear and Now version of an early music programme. The order of the day at Radio 3 seems to be mix'n'match, or mix'n'mis-match, as the case may be.

[Richard Tarleton]

Early music fared much better with the preceding lunchtime concert with Mark Padmore and lute.

Do you mean the concert with Morgan Szymanski - that was a guitar, not a lute - MS an excellent guitarist, but I hated, with a passion, Mark Padmore's renditions of Dowland - there's a layer of contrived preciousness (I don't know how else to describe it) laid over his voice in this repertoire which I just can't stand. Ian Bostridge does the same thing. And my favourite Dowland song at that (Now o now)

[MickyD]

Was this programme a repeat from last year? In which case, DS's remarks about being a promotional programme may well be spot-on, as Sony released a complete 47 disc box of Tafelmusik's recordings last year.