Yet more Hazlewood.

[MickyD]

Hold on to your hats - he's tackling Mozart 40 tonight on BBC4 at 1930.

[Tony Halstead]

Excellent news! He is certainly a very gifted communicator in both words and music.

[salymap]

I look forward to that. Congrats on getting his name right too

[Chris Newman]

Great. I look forward to it. The previous programmes have been very interesting with lively music making whilst not aimed over the heads of people who are in the early stages of discovering "classical music". I always call it "Shakepeare's Litmus Test" where his plays were successful if they appealed to both the aristos and the groundlings. Charles H succeeds in doing this with music.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Please pinch me. I must have slipped into a parallel universe, or something.

However, I'm pleased that there appears to be a truce in the feeble game of CH bashing.

[maestro267]

Once the Proms comes round, though, our 'forum sport' of presenter/announcer-bashing comes into its prime. Shame it's not on the Olympic programme in 2012.

[Bryn]

Hold on to your hats - he's tackling Mozart 40 tonight on BBC4 at 1930.

No he's not. BBC4 is repeating the 2003 programme of him on Mozart 40, the third in a series of three such repeats.

[Uncle Monty]

Please pinch me. I must have slipped into a parallel universe, or something.

However, I'm pleased that there appears to be a truce in the feeble game of CH bashing.

I suspect you're having your cake and eating it there, Alpen

Excellent news! He is certainly a very gifted communicator in both words and music.

This is most reassuring. I was reading an article the other day bemoaning the decline in traditional English irony in daily speech, but it's good to see it alive and well. :cool2:

[Bryn]

Perhaps, UM, you would like to offer your critique of his analytical introduction to K543? Do bear in mind the general audience it is aimed at.

Be quick though. It will only be available on the iPlayer for another 9 hours.

[Uncle Monty]

Perhaps, UM, you would like to offer your critique of his analytical introduction to K543? Do bear in mind the general audience it is aimed at.

Be quick though. It will only be available on the iPlayer for another 9 hours.

I already recorded it (as I did first time round)! It wasn't bad by his standards. (Does that constitute "critique"? ) However, it was, as you say, a few years ago, and history is full of examples of figures, the full blossoming of whose awfulness took some time to become apparent -- Caligula, Hitler, Thatcher, etc. Not that I'm getting this out of proportion

I shall shut up about this. Alpensinfonie is right, the easy target of Hazlewood-bashing may become tedious. It's just. . . I don't like being embarrassed, and the spectacle of someone routinely making a prat of themselves and either not caring (bad) or not knowing (worse) I find terribly squirmy. For similar reasons I could never watch "The Office".

But the BBC are obviously determined to keep employing him, so I shall say no more.

[MickyD]

No he's not. BBC4 is repeating the 2003 programme of him on Mozart 40, the third in a series of three such repeats.

This I didn't know, Bryn - all these three programmes were made in 2003?

[Bryn]

Indeed, all three date from that year. In 2005 he did a similar set of three programmes on Beethoven, again with Ronald Brautigan as fortepianist in a concerto (this time the G major, Op. 58) which I tend to give a spin (the performance rather than the preceding analysis) a couple of times a year.

[Michael C]

Is it just me, or is the sound balance somewhat awry in these programmes? There seems to be a predominance of woodwind and brass compared with the strings - I find it difficult to hear all the detail when the strings have such an important part in the whole affair.

[french frank]

Is it just me, or is the sound balance somewhat awry in these programmes? There seems to be a predominance of woodwind and brass compared with the strings - I find it difficult to hear all the detail when the strings have such an important part in the whole affair.

Wouldn't be the first time the BBC sound engineers have been accused of getting the balance wrong.

[Chris Newman]

Is it just me, or is the sound balance somewhat awry in these programmes? There seems to be a predominance of woodwind and brass compared with the strings - I find it difficult to hear all the detail when the strings have such an important part in the whole affair.

I do not mind this now and again as far too often the winds are drowned out by massive Mantovaniesque string sections.

On the other hand, looking at this thread and more on the other place, I just wish people would give CH a rest. It is the constant sniping at personalities that makes me wonder whether I should bother with musical message boards. It really is the wonderful friends that I have made that keeps me here.

Back to Charles Hazlewood. I can only think that he suffers the fate of those people who try to promote the arts in a popular way. As I remember Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn and Michael Tilson Thomas came in for a lot of stick. I thought it was a sort of snobbery particularly if the artist in question was youngish: you get it with tenor Rolando Villazon. Yet somehow, George Solti, an old man was allowed to appear with Dudley Moore and introduce music in the ITV series Concerto, but when MTT took over from Solti there was a backlash against because he was younger. There is a small coterie of people who refuse to accept real musicians as presenters and who almost imply that it is prostitution for musicians to talk about their work; Chi-chi Nwanoku is a fabulous double bass player but look at the bitchy remarks she gets on the websites when she introduces programmes. When I was a kid I heard adults poohpoohing Eric Robinson: OK he was no great shakes as a conductor (unlike his rather starchy brother, Stanford, who was successful abroad with the likes of the Leningrad Phil) but with his cheeky radio and TV manner he helped introduce the likes of me to the lighter classical repertoire and I progressed from there to Tchaikovsky symphonies and Brian Ferneyhough.

Musicians on this board who work with CH think the world of him. As far as I am concerned CH makes good music and tries to promote it in a lively manner. Good for him. I believe also that quite a few of this same small group of armchair critics do not much like HIP/authentic music-making: that may be part of CH's problem. He is tarred with the "weirdo" paintbrush applied by them to Nicholas Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner, Gustav Leonhardt, Simon Rattle, Vladimir Jurovsky and others. Some of these musicians may have eccentricities (don't we all?) but they are passionate musicmakers who in this penny-pinching society are determined to keep music's flag flying.