Tomorrow is non-stop Liszt

[Anna]

The BBC Singers leave me cold, but that sort of choral isn't my thing. However I am, to my amazement, enjoying the concert now, possibly because I don't know the works. Mercia - good point - surely there should be more piano?

[Nick Armstrong]

The BBC Singers leave me cold, but that sort of choral isn't my thing.

Same here. Wasn't listening today though!

[Jonathan]

The other thing is that yesterday was Liszt's birthday, not today!
Anyway, I've been busy all day so haven't heard a note - choral music isn't really my thing either but I will have a listen on iPlayer so I can pick and choose what to listen to. I've been listening to the Faust and Dante symponies in the 2 piano versions this week, as well as assorted other solo works. And I'm still lobbying certain record companies to record the remaining unrecorded orchestral and piano duet / 2 piano works. I think the work at 5pm is actually the Kunstlerfestzug zu Schillerfeier, S114 but need to listen to find out (edit, it wasn't!!).

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Enjoyable choir-concert to start with, a pity that the BBC-singers use a vibrato that wide that you can drive a car through it.

Off all the BBC classical music ensembles, the BBC Singers are my least favourite. They sound like a random collection of very wobbly soloists. A choir should blend so that no-one stands out. In the BBC Singers, they ALL stand out.

[Bryn]

O.K., for those too indolent to keep up, Radio 3 DAB uses the old, inefficient but robust MPEG-1 audio layer II codec (mp2) to carry its audio information in digital form. Most of the time the data rate for that mode of transmission is 192k bits per second (approximately equivalent in audio quality to a a28kpps mp3 (MPEG-1 audio layer III). The on demand version of the iPlayer offering for Radio 3 variously uses the much more efficient Advanced Audio Coding, Low Complexity (AAC-LC) codec (COder/DECoder) at 192kbps or 320kbps (HD Sound), or High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) at the horribly low data rate of 56kbps. In the past week or so more use has been made of the excellent 320kbps AAC-LC option, but a few programmes have been slipping through with only the low audio quality 56kbps HE-AAC encoding. Last night's Hear and Now programme was one thus poorly treated. Rupert Brun, who heads up the relevant team of iPlayer technos is to be thanked and congratulated on making so many Radio 3 programmes available on demand in HD Sound audio quality. However, more attention needs to be paid to ensuring that the listeners are not lumbered with 56kpbs HE-AAC as the only option via the on demand iPlayer facility.

Now that it's over I note that most of the event was coded only at 160kbps 'joint stereo' mp2 on DAB (due to 5LSX taking some data bandwidth). However, it looks like the iPlayer has come up trumps with an HD Sound rate AAC-LC offering on demand for 7 days.

[Dame Fanny Moody]

What?