Some Ferney-Crit!

[Prommer]

Please see piece from Damian Thompson in the latest edition of The Spectator:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/music/9559552/is-this-the-greatest-piano-work-of-the-21st-century/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20150618_Weekly_Highlights_25

I would be very interested in your views on HIS views: Ferney, Macmillan, and so on!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Nothing seriously objectionable - I don't have a Maths degree, and The History of Photography in Sound was mostly written in the 20th Century (but it is a bloody good piece). I think I agree with most of his opinions voiced here.

[ahinton]

Please see piece from Damian Thompson in the latest edition of The Spectator:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/music/9559552/is-this-the-greatest-piano-work-of-the-21st-century/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20150618_Weekly_Highlights_25

I would be very interested in your views on HIS views: Ferney, Macmillan, and so on!

I've published as much as can face doing on that, although concentrating more on the writer's "style" - or rather what I take to be his attention-seeking journalistic mannerisms - than on most of the content (although, like fhg, it wasn't as though I necessarily disagreed with some of the writer's positiver and negative comments per se); it was about as unenjoyable an experience as was reading his piece, the latter almost reminding me of a written equivalent of the outpourings of CBH lashed with the "oriental spice" (to borrow from the piece itself) of "who's-a-clever-boy-then?" phraseology. Michael Finnissy certainly deserved more than that, however flattering to his epic piano work a handful of phrases in the piece undoubtedly are; James MacMillan likewise deserved less and I still fail to perceive why he - let alone whatever his political/religious stance/s might be - even gets a look in to this.

Oh and, by the way, I don't have a maths degree either - but then nor does Brian Ferneyhough...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... a written equivalent of the outpourings of CBH lashed with the "oriental spice"

- steady on! You'll be getting Radio64 all hot and bothered!

I suppose I was just so grateful to see Finnissy and Ferneyhough spoken of favourably in a non-specialist, mainstream publication that I didn't think to deplore the prose - the equivalent of "gee-whiz!" science writing. Nor did I notice the reference to "perfumed ramblings", an epithet I cannot imagine descriptive of Sorabji's sinewy composition.

But the "joie de vivre" that "bursts from Flurries is exactly what I've heard; and HoPiS is a superb work; and my own heart sinks when I behold a piece by Muhly on a programme; and I prefer MacMillan's stuff from his early thirties to anything written after The World's Ransoming.

But how quaintly old-fashioned to expect to find a (let alone "the") "way forward" ... bless!

[ahinton]

- steady on! You'll be getting Radio64 all hot and bothered!

I suppose I was just so grateful to see Finnissy and Ferneyhough spoken of favourably in a non-specialist, mainstream publication that I didn't think to deplore the prose - the equivalent of "gee-whiz!" science writing. Nor did I notice the reference to "perfumed ramblings", an epithet I cannot imagine descriptive of Sorabji's sinewy composition.

But the "joie de vivre" that "bursts from Flurries is exactly what I've heard; and HoPiS is a superb work; and my own heart sinks when I behold a piece by Muhly on a programme; and I prefer MacMillan's stuff from his early thirties to anything written after The World's Ransoming.

But how quaintly old-fashioned to expect to find a (let alone "the") "way forward" ... bless!

At least he spared us a "Great Leap Forward"!...

[verismissimo]

I thought it was an enjoyable piece of journalism...