The Choir 30.03.14

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I don't think there's another thread on today's programme - the last opportunity for the announcers to bombard us with the pop-up studio.

It started off with SM-P trying to be cool, talking over the music and introducing the choir with a fake American accent, but things improved as the programme continued, despite bleeding chunks of Janacek.

[jean]

They went downhill again fast when she told us Occitan was a kind of polyphony, rather than a language.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

They went downhill again fast when she told us Occitan was a kind of polyphony, rather than a language.

I missed that.

[DracoM]

On every Sunday, and in every way, this programme is systematically shooting itself in the foot.

It's aching for a Radio 2-esque formula, but without R2's confidence, efficiency and above all sure-footed sense of its demographic, and it clearly has not a clue where it's going or what it's trying to do. Thus it's lurching further into mere 'tracks, guff and gush plus tweets' - the EXACT formula that has turned Breakfast and Essential Classics into widespread objects of disillusioned scorn and weary rejection. A skimpy magazine the counterpart to In Tune, and off-hand, I can't think of a less flattering sheep pen to be lodged in.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The thing is, SM-P isn't a "musical idiot". But it seems she is being told to behave like one.

The programming is unimaginative too, placing The Choir immediately after Choral Evensong.

So now Radio 3 has naff programmes almost all the time - Breakfast, Essential Classics, In Tune, The Choir, Saturday Classics, Sunday morning, Sound of Cinema and even Afternoon on 3 is going the same way.

Where will it all end?

[DracoM]

Finding one or two of the other truly EXCELLENT online classical musical sites.

[Honoured Guest]

Where will it all end?

Ena, I think you may have put your clock one month and one hour forward last night.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I hope we don't let choral music go this way. I sang in a choral concert on Saturday evening - a very good choir, but the entire programme consisted of Mickey Mouse music. A dreadful experience for the choir and cheap entertainment for the audience.

[DracoM]

I detect a genuine and desperate fear in R3 planners that to do other than what they are currently doing will impinge on ratings, lose them cred with the new DG, and land them in trouble.

Programme content is paranoid / terrified about challenging, educating, proposing the new, the difficult, the serious, n or seriously investigating the vast concourse of choral music behind us. And The Choir is no different: it is merely another silly In Tune magazine, far more interested in the people who sing than the music they are singing, and IMO they have consciously driven off the Choirworks / serious analysis aka Discovering Music route because they are scared stiff rigid to do otherwise.

It's a Radio 2 programme exactly like the egregious Film Music disaster. They've got the demographic totally wrong, they are frittering away chance after chance of getting the real excitement of having singers and conductors in to TALK and not gush, and do a proper in-depth analysis of their 'Choral Classic', instead of merely playing bits.

SM-P maybe OK on her music, but she sure as hell is NOT getting the chance to show anything of whatever musical knowledge she may have. Hence the tyranny of the 'tracks', gush, email and tweets / playlist culture. Most choral works simply do not fit into that formula, but one gets the distinct impression that they are desperately seeking out those pieces that are five-ten minutes only so as to fit the straitjacket. And in such straitjackets, the medium cannot breathe, break out, reveal itself. It's like week after week of frozen ready meals in controlled portions, instead of the great feats that choral music is.

In short, as a dedicated flagship for the genre, they are selling choral music, its practitioners, composers, culture criminally short, and in fact damaging the genre and Radio 3 in the process. Given that MORE people sing than almost any other single activity in UK apart from sex and shopping, the sheer timidity and narrowness of vision in the programme is a serial betrayal of many, quite apart from mercilessly revealing the programme makers own creative poverty and fear.

[bach736]

Might it not be a good idea to 'follow' SM-P on Twitter and introduce a note of gentle criticism into the flood of fawning tweets?

[DracoM]

And you think that will make one iota of difference?
Since when has the BBC or its presenters ever thought 'listeners' were [a] intelligent [b] informed [c] had anything relevant or [d] perceptive to deliver?

[Honoured Guest]

1923.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Has somebody switched sides?