Radio 3 Schedule changes

[Roger Webb]

. He [Dylan] is , of course , a modern day Troubadour who thankfully hasn’t suffered Manrico’s fate.

No, he's never run out of voice during 'Di quella pira'....but then he never had much to start with - someone once asked why he sings through his nose......his mouth is worn out!

[LMcD]

Well, most music is forgotten in 50 years, and some a lot sooner than that. But I would say that the best of the jazz from the 20s and 30s is no more niche than a great deal of classical music, and some of it will last indefinitely. The earliest recordings by (say) Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald aren't going to be forgotten. More lightweight stuff tends to be less durable, of course. Some artists just don't speak to a later age. But I don't think the Beatles and Stones are going anywhere. I have no opinion about Coldplay or Taylor Swift!

I still listen regularly to those Beatles love songs from the early 1960s, and also lots of music from the Dance Band Days. I wouldn't claim that they're great music, but to me at least they're timeless. and I'm happy to find room for them in my life alongside the equally timeless Mozart, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Brahms and Sibelius, to name just a few of my 'classical' favourites. To take a couple of examples: for me, the final movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 is magical, but so is Jess Stacy's final contribution to Benny Goodman's famous Carnegie Hall concert.

[Master Jacques]

Interesting how high culture is bound up with class in this country whereas it isn’t in France, Germany, or Italy.

Being from Manchester, where you didn't know - and cared less - whether you were sitting next to a Duke or a Dustman at the Hallé's Free Trade Hall concerts, I was certainly shocked when I first came to London, by the cultural class-based divisions I found down here.

[Master Jacques]

Thing is FF it will , bar a tiny fraction , be forgotten in fifty years or so. How much popular music of the Edwardian era survives ? A few music hall songs remembered by people who dress up in costume and singalong .

More survives than we might think, globally. I was asked at a conference in the States which forgotten work of music theatre I'd most love to see staged. On answering The Arcadians, three audience members immediately put up their hands and said, "You should have come to our production in [Minnesota/Ohio/Philly] last year". Monckton and co. - popular musicians par excellence - are still very much alive and kicking in the USA, although despised and stupidly neglected here.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I still listen regularly to those Beatles love songs from the early 1960s, and also lots of music from the Dance Band Days. I wouldn't claim that they're great music, but to me at least they're timeless. and I'm happy to find room for them in my life alongside the equally timeless Mozart, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Brahms and Sibelius, to name just a few of my 'classical' favourites. To take a couple of examples: for me, the final movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 is magical, but so is Jess Stacy's final contribution to Benny Goodman's famous Carnegie Hall concert.

The difference is that the Mozart is a living work of great art eternally recreatable either at home in practice or live in the hands of great pianist. The Jess Stacy Sing Sing Sing piano solo is one that can never be recreated - yes you can play it - there are transcriptions - but devoid of the context it is just not the same. It’s a beautiful moment frozen in time like a butterfly on a pin.
Mozart’s piano concerto will be played in 100 years - that Stacy solo will never be played again. I do think some Beatles songs are great music by any definition and one or two ,perhaps, more will survive. I see the band are 18th in the Spotify most streamed tracks. The Stones are fading away at 156 - though that’s still 20 mill plus streams and I gave up looking for Bob D.

[Master Jacques]

I think there's a reason why the original play is forgotten (at least internationally) and the opera will endure. Verdi's alchemy has turned a rather peculiar piece of base metal into gold.

I can tell you that El trovador is still performed - and honoured - in the Spanish-speaking world. As the three most widely spoken languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese. English and Spanish, that accounts for a lot of people who can still enjoy Guttiérez's fiery poetry and exciting drama. To call his archetypal tragedy "base metal" makes no sense at all to me. Verdi certainly did not see it that way, of course. As Ein Heldenleben has stated eloquently, Cammarano's Italian adaptation makes it a superb libretto, one of the best around unless we're wedded to ideas of TV realism.

While we're on the subject, the Rivas play which was to be turned into The Force of Destiny is an equally magnificent original. If we can't appreciate Spanish poetry, bad luck for us.

[Master Jacques]

The difference is that the Mozart is a living work of great art eternally recreatable either at home in practice or live in the hands of great pianist. The Jess Stacy Sing Sing Sing piano solo is one that can never be recreated - yes you can play it - there are transcriptions - but devoid of the context it is just not the same. It’s a beautiful moment frozen in time like a butterfly on a pin.

I merely wanted to say 'bravo!' for the elegant way you've put this eternal truth.

We listen to old popular music to transport us back, to touch an unrepeatable moment in time. I think of the way I listen to Binnie Hale singing 'Spread a Little Happiness', to reach back to a melancholy, post-Great War world in which I didn't exist, and to try and understand how single women felt at the time their potential mates were nearly all dead. Whereas art music moves us forward, absorbs us in itself in a completely different - I do not say "superior"! - way.

[LMcD]

The difference is that the Mozart is a living work of great art eternally recreatable either at home in practice or live in the hands of great pianist. The Jess Stacy Sing Sing Sing piano solo is one that can never be recreated - yes you can play it - there are transcriptions - but devoid of the context it is just not the same. It’s a beautiful moment frozen in time like a butterfly on a pin.
Mozart’s piano concerto will be played in 100 years - that Stacy solo will never be played again. I do think some Beatles songs are great music by any definition and one or two ,perhaps, more will survive. I see the band are 18th in the Spotify most streamed tracks. The Stones are fading away at 156 - though that’s still 20 mill plus streams and I gave up looking for Bob D.

The Stacy will, as you say, never be played again, but people will, I believe, continue to listen to, and wonder at, it.

[Retune]

I can tell you that El trovador is still performed - and honoured - in the Spanish-speaking world. As the three most widely spoken languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese. English and Spanish, that accounts for a lot of people who can still enjoy Guttiérez's fiery poetry and exciting drama. To call his archetypal tragedy "base metal" makes no sense at all to me. Verdi certainly did not see it that way, of course. As Ein Heldenleben has stated eloquently, Cammarano's Italian adaptation makes it a superb libretto, one of the best around unless we're wedded to ideas of TV realism.

While we're on the subject, the Rivas play which was to be turned into The Force of Destiny is an equally magnificent original. If we can't appreciate Spanish poetry, bad luck for us.

I'm struggling to find any recent performance of the play, and I'm afraid I can't get past the fundamental silliness of the plot. I don't expect TV realism, but this would be rejected by a bad telenovela. James Conlon makes a heroic attempt to frame the story as 'not as ridiculous as has been commonly claimed' here, though ('Yes, it is unusual, to say the least, for a woman to mix up her own baby with another and throw him into the flames. But given the trauma Azucena had just endured—seeing her mother burned at the stake as a witch— it’s within the realm of the possible.').

[Retune]

The difference is that the Mozart is a living work of great art eternally recreatable either at home in practice or live in the hands of great pianist. The Jess Stacy Sing Sing Sing piano solo is one that can never be recreated - yes you can play it - there are transcriptions - but devoid of the context it is just not the same. It’s a beautiful moment frozen in time like a butterfly on a pin.

For me, a living work of art is one that continues to speak to us and influence other artists. But the way in which it does this depends on the nature of the medium. A musical score or the text of a play offers scope for endless re-interpretation. But artworks like paintings or sculptures or novels or photographs or films, which are not performed and have a fixed form, can remain living, vital artworks as long as we are still interested in them. Musical recordings fall into this second category. Sometimes our interest might just be nostalgia (even for a time or place we never experienced personally), but for the greater works it is more that they say something timeless, or at least still relevant. When it was released, audiences might have relished Citizen Kane for its thinly disguised take on William Randolph Hearst, but it is watched today for the artistry of its direction and cinematography (which remain influential, and are rediscovered by each new generation of film makers) and because of what it says about power and what it can do to those who attain it. Nobody, hopefully, is going to watch this film and remake it, but there will be better films in the future because film makers have seen it and learnt from it.

[Ein Heldenleben]

The Stacy will, as you say, never be played again, but people will, I believe, continue to listen to, and wonder at, it.

It’s interesting isn’t it ? Does its eternal unrepeatability make it in some ways more precious than a work that can be recreated ? Or is the new art in producing your own solo ? All I know is in the few times I’ve heard a decent band perform Sing Sing Sing I’ve never envied the pianist.

Ps has any one (other than possibly John Bonham or Buddy Rich ) hit the drums more explosively and accurately then Gene Krupa in the last few bars? ..it’s like a small scale nuclear explosion,

[Ein Heldenleben]

For me, a living work of art is one that continues to speak to us and influence other artists. But the way in which it does this depends on the nature of the medium. A musical score or the text of a play offers scope for endless re-interpretation. But artworks like paintings or sculptures or novels or photographs or films, which are not performed and have a fixed form, can remain living, vital artworks as long as we are still interested in them. Musical recordings fall into this second category. Sometimes our interest might just be nostalgia (even for a time or place we never experienced personally), but for the greater works it is more that they say something timeless, or at least still relevant. When it was released, audiences might have relished Citizen Kane for its thinly disguised take on William Randolph Hearst, but it is watched today for the artistry of its direction and cinematography (which remain influential, and are rediscovered by each new generation of film makers) and because of what it says about power and what it can do to those who attain it. Nobody, hopefully, is going to watch this film and remake it, but there will be better films in the future because film makers have seen it and learnt from it.

Well there’s living art and living art . I much prefer live music to recording partly because having worked in a business where you do both I know how much recording fakery goes on. The live impact is so much greater for me . I don’t even like amplified rock music much any more as there’s so much pre Rec / auto tune / backing track cheating going on.
But then I’m a bit of a radical . I don’t much care for art galleries and museums - places where art goes to die. Worse if my smartphone ruined experience at the Musée D’Orsay and L’Orangerie last year is anything to go by - art as an instragram background. I’d let anyone who can write a decent essay on an artwork have one to hang on their wall. Might be few security issues but at least it would be genuinely appreciated.
Our experience of “art” is now so synthetic (in the popular sense ) as to denude much of it of meaning, And visual art is the most corrupt of the lot - it’s all about money . At least no one could level that accusation at modern classical composers.

[Master Jacques]

I'm struggling to find any recent performance of the play, and I'm afraid I can't get past the fundamental silliness of the plot. I don't expect TV realism, but this would be rejected by a bad telenovela. James Conlon makes a heroic attempt to frame the story as 'not as ridiculous as has been commonly claimed' here, though ('Yes, it is unusual, to say the least, for a woman to mix up her own baby with another and throw him into the flames. But given the trauma Azucena had just endured—seeing her mother burned at the stake as a witch— it’s within the realm of the possible.').

Like other contributors here, as well as James Conlon, I think you're missing out by dismissing the plot of El trovador so airily, which is a pity. Plausibility is irrelevant to archetypal drama such as this: we might just as well find the plot of Oedipus "silly", because he takes so long for the penny to drop, as to the identity of the richly-dressed personage he's killed at the crossroads.

Archetypal drama doesn't play by televisual rules. I don't know any reputable opera critic who has dismissed Cammarano's libretto as poor: Julian Budden certainly does no such thing in his classic, three-volume study of the composer, praising its brevity, directness and lack of padding. As with Greek drama, most of the significant action takes place off stage, even the final execution of the hero.

Rest assured that Gutiérrez remains a figure of Byronic, or Shelleyan stature in Spanish poetic drama. Quite right too. Verdi appreciated him, returning to his Simón Bocanegra for a later masterwork, in a very different style.

https://www.zarzuela.net/writ/gutierrez.htm

To learn a little more about his musico-theatrical work.

[oddoneout]

Looking at the newform Saturday schedule for tomorrow I note that

Tom Service is joined in the studio by clarinettist Anthony McGill with exclusive plays

(my bold)
So - no music, but bite size drama?

[Master Jacques]

Our experience of “art” is now so synthetic (in the popular sense ) as to denude much of it of meaning, And visual art is the most corrupt of the lot - it’s all about money . At least no one could level that accusation at modern classical composers.

... and there you hit the most damning criticism of Radio 3's increasing inanity - the almost total disregard of modern art composers*, except when it comes to an hour or two of commissions broadcast once from the Proms. The station simply is not doing its job, in any department worth mentioning.
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* And no, that doesn't include Max Richter, Karl Jenkins and the usual suspects touting shamelessly derivative film and tv scores