Not coming to a TV near you


Elsewhere there are imaginative conspiracy theories as to why the film Peace and Conflict about Benjamin Britten's time at Gresham's School - production still above - is not being aired on British television. Follow this link for another possible reason conspicuously missing from that coverage.

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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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What price the BBC Proms?

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Our politicians face the music

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Norman Lebrecht blusters as blogs bloom

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As the annual administrative behemoth known as the BBC Proms lumbers into motion, filling the national ether with its familiar blend of civic piety and corporate branding, one is forced to confront a recurring fatigue.To listen to BBC Radio 3’s broadcasts of these mammoth London concerts is to witness a curious ritual of cultural containment. Before a note of Vaughan Williams or a forgotten rarity by Jonathan Harvey can safely enter the acoustic space, it must first be sanitized. The listener is subjected to presenters topping and tailing each masterwork with breathless, patronizing trivia, as if lifting entries straight from an illustrated children’s encyclopedia of classical music. One hears the familiar, smug cadence—that unmistakable institutional voice which assumes that the public cannot possibly encounter sound unmediated by narrative hand-holding.  The star system versus the art  The modern Proms season operates less as a sanctuary for deep listening and more as an e...
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