If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.
"...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
Whenever I've turned to CFM I've found the adverts so irritating that even Rob Cowan would be better.
That was my only point really - La Klein is currently so irritating to me that CFM on this occasion was better (and I struck lucky and got no adverts)
Rob Cowan was having a shocker this morning, though - in the few seconds I heard, he referred to the Goldmurk violin concerto. He did correct himself, to be fair...
"...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
So did I, and I too thought it read like a script for WIA (Pabs - a TV satire about the inner workings of the BBC starring Hugh Bonneville and co which some say would be funny if it wasn't so close to the real thing).
The contemptuous Proms/R3/Klein PR gambit is straight out of the Siobhan Sharpe School of 'Raccoon in the Trashcan' PR...
"...the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."
It's very interesting that I remember writing about the James Naughtie interview with Alan Davey that Jim came over as very defensive of criticism. I compared his piece with Bryan Appleyard's which appeared at about the same time:
"Naughtie's piece is, understandably, more BBC-slanted (perhaps that explains an 'overdefensiveness', the concern to protect, to give likely critics a surreptitious poke in the eye?)."
One might say the same about the ex-BBC Mark Damazer when interviewing Roger Wright, giving Friends of Radio 3 a whack over the head - and getting all his criticisms wrong. Every single one.
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.
I find that I can mentally blank the adverts, or at least cope with them much better than I can the R3 inanities, especially when driving.
Yes - I'm moving towards that attitude about adverts. After all, it might turn out to be useful to hear about SAGA insurance, whereas I cannot imagine that Mrs Trellis's budgie's enjoyment of the Rondo a la Turka will ever feature as a significant aspect of my life.
[FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]
whereas I cannot imagine that Mrs Trellis's budgie's enjoyment of the Rondo a la Turka will ever feature as a significant aspect of my life.
!!! I'm not at all sorry I haven't a clue why it would do so! Given the particular work that she apparently enjoys, would that be Mrs Trellis from North Syria, by chance? If you were a progamme presenter, longstanding ISIHAC tradition would probably result in her writing you a "Geliebte Stephen Ferneyhough" letter...
Useful though 'tis that "Suze" doth rhyme with "booze"
And that "Ibiza" also rhymes with "ether",
The time has come to send Klein on a cruise
Before we reach the ending of our teether.
(the last word of which presumes the need to pronounce this in best BBC Scawttish, à la manière de Susan Rae or Jim Naughtie)...
Having the intention of commenting further on the article in question, I felt bound to go out and buy a Radio Times first. £2 However, interesting: what the article really needs is a detailed critical analysis (what used to be called 'literary commentary' when I were a s-chewdent). One telling point: consider the opening:
"When the Proms season was announced, some headlines screamed "It's all gone Pete Tong". I wasn't terribly surprised. What had got the critics worked up was ... "
Hmm, well, it's true that the Telegraph and the D. Express used the phrase, but neither story seemed to be critical - merely reporting the newly announced programme and, press-like, focusing on the popular rather than the classical (as Ms Klein does). In fact, far from being critical, the headline writers had been a bit witty.
On investigation (I did not know this), "It's all gone Pete Tong" was a comedy film from 10 years ago, including references to, er, Pete Tong - and Ibiza. Now, it could be that the headlines were read as the Cockney rhyming slang, which is said to mean, 'It's all gone a bit wrong' and that that was the criticism - except that the stories beneath it weren't critical.
So it looks as if these may have been the critics wringing their hands and 'screaming 'It's all gone Pete Tong' (and Bill Cash is thus exonerated).
DJ Pete Tong has been signed up to present a night of club classics by the organisers of the Proms.
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.
Rob Cowan was having a shocker this morning, though - in the few seconds I heard, he referred to the Goldmurk violin concerto. He did correct himself, to be fair...
It could have been worse - the techies could have played the Goldbergs instead.
Yesterday his guest referred to John Cage's 4 minutes 22. He didn't correct himself - and neither did RC. What's 11 seconds between friends? Part of the cut backs perhaps or simply his tempo is a little faster than the score requires? Failing that perhaps it was edited by Einstein?
Returning to the original topic here's another false argument:
"As for the argument that a couple of late-night Proms out of 92 sensational classical concerts, are the tip of the iceberg for Proms armageddon, I'd say that in 2004 when the English National Opera played a live set at Glastonbury there were no cries of dismay that Glasto's essential core of rock and pop acts had been diluted by classical interlopers."
<ahem> Is she actually on the same side as the critics, but pretending not to be? That has to be one of the most fatuous arguments ever.
1. 2004 was over 10 years ago - how many 'classical sets' have there been since?
2. ENO were on the Pyramid stage, and as far as I can make out the vast majority of festival-goers simply sloped off to one of the other stages to watch other acts - as one can do at 'Glasto'.
3. The 'couple' of late-night Proms this year are, to be a little more precise, the Radio 1 Prom, the Radio 1Xtra Prom, the 6 Music Prom, the Asian Network Prom, Jarvis Cocker's Wireless Nights, the (Radio 2) Frank Sinatra Prom, the Bernstein Stage and Screen Prom, Fiddler on the Roof (?), the Story of Swing Prom, the Sondheim cabaret, plus a 'couple' of others of indeterminate content (Sherlock Holmes, Life Prom ...). And concerts like these turn up each year now (Pet Shop Boys, Paloma Faith, Rufus Wainwright, Laura Mvula ...), not, possibly, one concert every 10 years, perhaps. And yet, and yet, we have not yet discovered anyone (else) mentioning Proms armageddon. Have we? But one might say the reason for including them is very precariously based on taking quotations selectively, out of context.
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.
Returning to the original topic here's another false argument:
"As for the argument that a couple of late-night Proms out of 92 sensational classical concerts, are the tip of the iceberg for Proms armageddon, I'd say that in 2004 when the English National Opera played a live set at Glastonbury there were no cries of dismay that Glasto's essential core of rock and pop acts had been diluted by classical interlopers."
<ahem> Is she actually on the same side as the critics, but pretending not to be? That has to be one of the most fatuous arguments ever.
1. 2004 was over 10 years ago - how many 'classical sets' have there been since?
I'm not aware that they'eve even programmed any Rutland Boughton!
2. ENO were on the Pyramid stage, and as far as I can make out the vast majority of festival-goers simply sloped off to one of the other stages to watch other acts - as one can do at 'Glasto'.
3. The 'couple' of late-night Proms this year are, to be a little more precise, the Radio 1 Prom, the Radio 1Xtra Prom, the 6 Music Prom, the Asian Network Prom, Jarvis Cocker's Wireless Nights, the (Radio 2) Frank Sinatra Prom, the Bernstein Stage and Screen Prom, Fiddler on the Roof (?), the Story of Swing Prom, the Sondheim cabaret, plus a 'couple' of others of indeterminate content (Sherlock Holmes, Life Prom ...). And concerts like these turn up each year now (Pet Shop Boys, Paloma Faith, Rufus Wainwright, Laura Mvula ...), not, possibly, one concert every 10 years, perhaps. And yet, and yet, we have not yet discovered anyone (else) mentioning Proms armageddon. Have we? But one might say the reason for including them is very precariously based on taking quotations selectively, out of context.
No more Proms "armageddon" than BBC "armageddon", perhaps, but any assertion that either is not and indeed cannot risk being undermined in any way by such programming and frequency thereof would still seem to me to have emanated from those living in cloud-cuckoo-in-enter-spring-land; OK, Prom programming decisions and scheduling are mercifully not decided by the likes of Clemensuzy Derham but, if they risk inviting and encouraging certain of the kinds of Kleinesque pseudo-defensive commentary that have lately been published and widely derided, they arguably do no one, or the Proms themselves, any favours.
Comment