Recommend Stephen Johnson's Proms Interval talks on Antony Hopkins (the first was last Friday, the next one is this evening - Monday). It acts as a timely reminder of what we are really missing these days on R3 in the way of really instructive music talks and how superb Antony Hopkins' long-running series Talking about Music was. David Munrow was another excellent speaker on music, although his were more for younger listeners. How about a late evening re-run of some of these programmes?
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Timely reminder indeed, sf. They have been noted already, somewhere - not sure where.It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. -
Hopkins sounded briiliant on those clips didn't he. Learnt an awful lot from that guy - he really knew how to engage with both music and listener, and help listeners to do the same...Comment
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One hears the mannerisms and above all pacings of an altogether different era - one in which people seemed to give themselves time to communicate what they had to say.Originally posted by jayne lee wilson View PostComment
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We had two visits at school in 1958 from the Intimate Opera company, whose leading lights included Anthony Hopkins and Joseph Horovitz. The latter was the accompanist in the September performance, singers Julia Shelley, Stephen Manton and Gwyn Griffiths, programme: "Coffee Cantata" (Bach), "Bal Masqué" ( Stephen Storace, arr. AH & JH) and "The Lottery" (Offenbach). Finding the programme for this concert sent me on a Horovitz hunt and I have got as far as the Clarinet Sonatina and Jazz Suite on you-tube, pleasant enough. The programme notes that the next concert was to be James Blades and Joan Goossens (pno), I remember that one for the J. Arthur Rank story.
The earlier concert had Hopkins compèring and accompanying. Same tenor Stephen Manton with Elizabeth Boyd and Eric Shilling. "The Music Master" (Pergolesi), "The Grenadier" (Dibdin) and "The Telephone" (Menotti), the latter being the most enjoyable of the three.
Arriving a couple of years later at Imperial College, then pretty much limited to the block defined north and south by the Natural History Museum and the Royal Albert Hall, I found that Anthony Hopkins was in the habit of rehearsing his next broadcast once a week at lunchtime in the Main Hall of the Union, the building that the arena queue eventually runs alongside. Convenient for RCM students and those scientists with a taste for musical analysis. Well, I went once and never again! I don't blame him but what he did was to characterise the opening of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra in such vivid and specific geographical terms, a location known to me, that I have never been able to get his word-painting out of my head. The work isn't ruined, of course not, how could it be? but there's an unwelcome frisson as it begins.Comment
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Perhaps they could have an archive on the website?Comment
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I'm listening to tonight's Antony Hopkins/Stephen Johnson interval feature on Sibelius 2 and constantly wanting to here more of Antony Hopkins and wishing SJ would shut up.
Can't we band together and ask the BBC to either re-broadcast the Antony Hopkins programmes in full or make them available on the BBC website.
The AH snippets leave me hungry to hear more, in full.Comment
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One has to be grateful for what one gets - of course
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It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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I certainly support that and cannot understand why there's not been an unadulterated series of repeats.Originally posted by johnb View PostComment
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