Essential Classics - The Continuing Debate

[vinteuil]

Perhaps all jokes and emoticons should be be banned here since one never knows who one is irritating?

... I find jokes and emoticons less irritating than an over-use of abbreviations. And I think that that might have been what LMcD was gently signalling.


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[Bryn]

Oliver Knussen, actually. Did you bother to scroll back even two messages to check the context? (Classic FM attention span?) Or is this just classic FoR3 forum distraction technique? Despite your emoticon, coming up with other people with the initials OK really isn't funny (though it is perhaps laughable).

But every schoolboys knows that the more apposite initials for that composer/conductor are GH.

[french frank]

Seek and ye shall find:

The new commission seems to run for one year only (Sept 17-18), with an option to renew for one or two years. The commissioning brief was the same as for the original Essential Classics in being intended to stop Breakfast listeners from leaving the station at 9am, and to keep them listening, hopefully (ha!), for the whole programme. It's one of the programmes designed for new listeners and younger audiences. The average age of the listeners is 62, higher than the station average. (As to that, I'd predict that older listeners are likely to switch off, so the job will be getting new listeners, always harder than losing existing ones.)

Again, it's the old BBC mantra: audiences before content. Which is why it's how it is (short, Breakfast-length pieces, plenty of light, familiar works). And, correct me if I'm mistaken, but last week and yesterday there was no meaty full-length work at all.* It seems even more determined to tread the old path of Classic FMism.

* I have a friend who shuns Breakfast (no full-length works) and switched on Essential Classics for the full-length work towards the end of the programme. That could be one listener lost but as he's 89 it might reduce the programme's average, so a success for the BBC's audience manipulation.

[Rex Bartlett]

And I've just come across a post from 3 years ago in the "The Classic FM-isation of R3 is almost complete" thread.

"Suzy Klein is mostly dreadful, every bit as much part of the presenter led, dumbed down, "treat the audience like half wits and you will surely get a massive audience of half wits" problems as the others."

Couldn't have put it better myself. Nothing personal of course. She's only doing the job she's paid to do.

[french frank]

And once FoR3 has left the scene, the House Rules can be rewritten, I suppose. But we tried (not always successfully) to steer posts away from negative personal comments about presenters, or anything too nasty . But personality is personality, and broadcasters can communicate agreeable or less agreeable personas. They're all just acting, projecting an image, after all

[LMcD]

... I find jokes and emoticons less irritating than an over-use of abbreviations. And I think that that might have been what LMcD was gently signalling.


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[Rex Bartlett]

... I find jokes and emoticons less irritating than an over-use of abbreviations. And I think that that might have been what LMcD was gently signalling.


.

Whatever LMcD's full name actually is.

[LMcD]

Seek and ye shall find:

The new commission seems to run for one year only (Sept 17-18), with an option to renew for one or two years. The commissioning brief was the same as for the original Essential Classics in being intended to stop Breakfast listeners from leaving the station at 9am, and to keep them listening, hopefully (ha!), for the whole programme. It's one of the programmes designed for new listeners and younger audiences. The average age of the listeners is 62, higher than the station average. (As to that, I'd predict that older listeners are likely to switch off, so the job will be getting new listeners, always harder than losing existing ones.)

Again, it's the old BBC mantra: audiences before content. Which is why it's how it is (short, Breakfast-length pieces, plenty of light, familiar works). And, correct me if I'm mistaken, but last week and yesterday there was no meaty full-length work at all.* It seems even more determined to tread the old path of Classic FMism.

* I have a friend who shuns Breakfast (no full-length works) and switched on Essential Classics for the full-length work towards the end of the programme. That could be one listener lost but as he's 89 it might reduce the programme's average, so a success for the BBC's audience manipulation.

I am an older listener, and I have switched off. As time passes, I listen less and less to Radio 3 and more and more to Radio 4. Furthermore (and I suppose this is a good thing) I now have more time in the morning to continue reading my latest book. (Perhaps the changes have been masterminded by W H Smith and Waterstones

[Serial_Apologist]

Oliver Knussen, actually. Did you bother to scroll back even two messages to check the context? (Classic FM attention span?) Or is this just classic FoR3 forum distraction technique? Despite your emoticon, coming up with other people with the initials OK really isn't funny (though it is perhaps laughable).

It's OK by me.

[Quarky]

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Another point about BBC figures is that they keep moving the goal posts so issues that you want to compare one with the other are never quite comparable. I do know that CD Masters got a weekly average audience of comfortably over 600,000. Essential Classics has over 800,00 but the figures aren't comparable because:

a) CD Masters was only two hours long and EC is three hours, longer for people to dip in and out: dippers in don't have to listen for very long to be counted as One Full Listener.

b) CD Masters didn't begin until 10am and EC begins at 9am which is reckoned a 'peak' junction, catching listeners before they begin to switch stations or switch off. Hence it was part of EC's brief to keep hold of the Breakfast listeners - another example of the audience driving the content, rather than Radio 3 just deciding what it would do.

A typical for3 thread as far as I am concerned. Excellent arguments put forward, so much so that I am left with nothing to add, then tailing off into flippancies.

Anyhow, although I gave up on Essential Classics, I have been attracted by Suzy Klein's version, so count me in as a "dipper" - that makes the audience 800,001.

As regards the name of the programme "Essential Classics", I was uncomfortable with that; it smacked of force feeding, well you know it's good for you. Suzy played some pretty inessential Classics; may be a change of name would be appropriate in due course.

[french frank]

Oh, dear. The problem with a programme like this is that any criticisms are about as relevant as picking fault with Classic FM, and just risk sounding like 'elitism' and nitpicking - even snobbery, dare one say - unless they come from the audience for whom it's intended. The catch [22] is that they just might not pick up on those same points and are capable of passing them over without having an opinion.

In my case I'm just downright pernickety anyway: if the commissioning brief lays down the importance of 'choice of recordings', would I choose Mikhail Pletnev to perform the morning's central work - K 331? Or was the choice based on the fact that omitted repeats cut the length from around 22-23 minutes down to 14'30", much more appropriate for the target audience?

I have to own up to being the founder of the Cats' Prevention League and the tediously hilarious buffo Cats Duet was never even faintly amusing to me. But if it has to be played, is composition still credited to Rossini, as 'the' composer, or just a magpie compilation where a bit of Rossini can be detected? Minor irritations which are enough to make one doubt the credentials of my 'trusted guide'.

Again today, 23 pieces - significantly more than previously, 4 of which were over 10 minutes long and none approaching 20. Jeremy Irons as 'Enry 'Iggins and Tavener's Song for Athene would be at the bottom of the pile, along with those wretched cats. Piazzolla, as we're always reminded, studied with Nadia Boulanger which makes his Tangos classical music … though personally, I can do without being Tangoed. Walton's Façade (Popular Song) once heard.

Hard to know what to gather from the playlist, of 23 items of which (ignoring some century overlaps):

8 were 20th c
8 were 19th c incl Rossini and 'Rossini'
4 were 18th c (Mozart x 3 and Hasse)
3 were Baroque (Strozzi x 2 and Vivaldi)

Three hours of programme with some fine miniatures but little that could be put in the indisputably, er, top rank (if I may) of classical works, aka Essential Classics (Jeremy Irons singing I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face, perhaps?).

[oddoneout]

but little that could be put in the indisputably, er, top rank (if I may) of classical works, aka Essential Classics

Please, don't go too far down that line of thinking...
I agree the title is stupid, except insofar as it signals to those who don't favour such an approach to broadcast 'classical' music that they had best steer clear. But getting into the realms of what constitutes music of worth and therefore can be 'permitted' is dangerous territory as far as I'm concerned, so better to push for a more suitable title - failing the possibility of removing the programme itself?

[french frank]

But getting into the realms of what constitutes music of worth and therefore can be 'permitted' is dangerous territory as far as I'm concerned, so better to push for a more suitable title - failing the possibility of removing the programme itself?

That is not the point at all. It isn't a question of 'what is permitted': it's a question of Radio 3, held up as the leading broadcaster of classical music, fiddle-faddling around every morning from 6.30-midday with a lot of quite attractive and appealing works but not finding room for one single full-length work of the core repertory.

No, I don't want the title changed to Inessential Classics and have it playing the same playlists as now.

[ahinton]

No, I don't want the title changed to Inessential Classics and have it playing the same playlists as now.

That could be seen to signify Sarah Walker as having morphed into Sarah Donearunner, n'est-ce pas? Not having a go at her; just saying...

[french frank]

So far continuing in the same way: first hour 7 pieces. Looking much too quickly at the headline at the beginning I saw 'Jupiter'. Good, that's … oh, no, my mistake … Still, we are going to explore some suitable companions pieces, so may I suggest The Full Mozart? It would also be a good companion piece for yesterday's K. 331 to illustrate Mozza's variations.

I rooted out some emails from 2004 when Ludwig fan Beethoven was compiling his Repertoire Repetition lists each month for the FoR3 website. Nice to see Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse turning up this morning. Not played so often now, probably, as it had 8 outings in May 2004.

It's ironic that as Breakfast is credited with playing somewhat longer works, Essential Classics ('the best in classical music') is playing shorter works so that the two programmes have now virtually coalesced.