What are your favourite editions of Discovering Music...

[Guest]

and why?

Did that episode contain the most indepth and knowledgable commentary?
Did you learn many new things about a favorite piece?
Did you come to know and love a completely new work?


Also, can you recommend shows for a beginner looking to form a basic familiarıty with great composers?

hopefully they can still be found on the bbc website, although they do seem to cut the full performances off at the end.......

[johnb]

Slightly off topic but - there used to be an archive of past Discovering Music programmes which stretched back many years but it didn't include the more recent years. The archive was tucked away somewhere and the programmes were in the old Real Audio format and could only be listened to if you had Real Player installed.

I was trying to find Stephen Johnson's* excellent two part DM on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring but either the BBC has removed the archive or my searching wasn't very good. Can anyone help (I know the archive was still available last year)?

* [Edit: It was Gerard McBurney, not Stephen Johnson]

[traveller]

Can only see that really short clıp they have up at the moment.....will check other places......

[johnb]

I've just found some links to that archive I had posted elsewhere, early last year. Sadly they are no longer valid - it looks as though the BBC has removed the archive.

[traveller]

Probably part of the move to Iplayer....maybe ıt ıs possıble to emaıl them and see ıf ıts goıng to be put back up on the new system?

[3rd Viennese School]

I've always wanted to hear the Shoshtakovich symphony no.10 from November 2001- only caught the end. Presented by Gerard McBurney.

3VS

[johnb]

If any of us have any off air recordings on Discovering Music perhaps we could create a consolidated list and make it (and the recordings) available to each other.

This would have to be done through PMs of course, but I'm sure we can set something up (either here or elsewhere if necessary).

Any thoughts?

[french frank]

Some public-spirited soul might like to check through what's available already and provide a list too ...

My guess is that if these recordings were available there are no rights problems and they will be made available again at some point. Perhaps I could find out from Graham Dixon ...

[johnb]

It would be quite simple to strip out the actual analysis from the following performance, in order to avoid any possible infringements.

[johnb]

Some public-spirited soul might like to check through what's available already and provide a list too ...

I'll have a go at that over the next couple of days.

(I have an ulterior motive, of course - I'm hoping that someone has a recording of the two part Rite of Spring DiscM done by Gerard McBurney.)

[3rd Viennese School]

Ive got Sibelious symphony 4 (2002) and Prokofiev symphony no.1.

But only on cassette!

3VS

[3rd Viennese School]

and Shostakovich symphony 15-Sarah Walker.

But only on cassette!

3VS

[johnb]

Following a hint from FF I've compiled a list of the Discovering Music programmes from 2003 to July, 2011. The list is in Word format and, as far as I can tell, people should be able to listen to the analysis part of these programmes (by clicking on the 'Clip' on the webpage) but the performances of the works are not included.

The list is sorted in composer order, then by the work title (alphabetical). It includes the year and month of the programme so it should be fairly simple to navigate to the programme via the Discovering Music archive:

Discovering Music archive

The list

It is a pity that Programmes 2002 and earlier don't seem to have any clips. Perhaps because they were originally in Real Audio format?

If anyone would like the list in a different format or if anyone finds any errors (and I'm sure there will be some) - please PM.

(This is a duplicate post in case people who might be interested miss my original post in another thread.)

[teamsaint]

Just to flag up, in case like me you didn't realise, quite a number of old episodes are still available.

And to labour a point, quite how this series doesn't fit into the current R3 zeitgeist is a mystery .

[Quarky]

Just to flag up, in case like me you didn't realise, quite a number of old episodes are still available.

And to labour a point, quite how this series doesn't fit into the current R3 zeitgeist is a mystery .

Discovering Music didn't always work for me. To take a recent example, there was an episode on Gesualdo with James Weeks of Exaudi. Very technical, the choir felt they were riding over a humped backed bridge, which was the last thing it felt like to me, as a listener.

Peter Phillips in the series Glory of Polyphony took an overview approach, contrasting his work with Palestrina, and this gave me a much better insight into the work and mind set of Gesualdo.