It's good news week for contemporary music

To start the week two excellent reasons why this new release of Peter Maxwell Davies' chamber music is good news. First, it's great music passionately played by the chamber ensemble Gemini and vividly recorded in the slightly dry acoustics of Studio 1 at the Department of Sound & Recording at the University of Surrey. (The department is very highly rated and has offered a tonmeister course for many years). The main work on the CD is Ave Maris Stella from 1975 which lasts for almost 30 minutes. This is classic early Max, writing before he was seduced by the plush sounds of the symphony orchestra and string quartet. Strange isn't it how composers like Maxwell Davies and Ralph Vaughan Williams produce some of their best works on religous themes yet are non-believers? Worth the purchase price alone is Dove, Star Folded from 2001 which, unusually for Max, is based on a Greek Byzantine hymn; John Tavener had better look out.

The second reason why this CD is good news is that it comes from the Metier label which has been aquired by the enterprising small Divine Art Record Company (who have nothing at all to do with Falun Gong ). Metier have a back catalogue well worth exploring, Michael Finnisy Music for String Quartet, Roberto Gerhard String Quartets and Morton Feldman and Christopher Fox's Clarinet and String Quartet are just some of the riches while Divine Art has a future release of piano sonatas from Elliott Carter, Miklos Rosza, Charles Ives and Edward MacDowell.

And talking of Peter Maxwell Davies I'm playing his Missa Parvula on Future Radio on April 20 in a coupling with Edmund Rubbra's Symphony No. 6, which let's me give a heads-up to Dutton's excellent new recordings of Rubbra's chamber music. And it also means I can share some more good news. Future Radio's station manager told me today that the Overgrown Path programme page gets more hits than any other page on their website except for the schedule and webcam pages. That's more hits than the rock, hip-hop, electro and other programme pages. It must be all that Vaughan Williams I'm playing ... And more good news for the small guys/girls, leading independent record store Prelude Records in Norwich was packed on Saturday , the busiest I've ever seen. Is the tide turning away from the internet?

It's good news week, which is why music is good for you..
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BBC Proms - dumbing down is contagious

Today's Observer seems determined to follow the BBC down the slippery slope to editorial oblivion. No less than two pages are devoted to a vacuous article whose title, 'From Iggy to Gigli: my journey to the Proms', says it all. Observer journalist Sean O'Hagan is given some free tickets to help puff the BBC Proms to the crossover audience, and reports: - At other times, though, I was totally baffled by what I was hearing. And some of it was simply was too much to take in, particularly, though it pains me to say it, the more modern stuff: Adams's Symphony No 4, and especially Sam Hayden's cacophonous Substratem.

If we ignore the misspelling of Sam Hayden's Substratum and a later incorrect reference to the "Soweto String Quartet", I am sure John Adams' would be surprised to learn that he has written four symphonies, and even more surprised to find one of them confused with Charles Ives Symphony No. 4, which was in fact performed in the July 17 Prom.

But as another journalist and BBC presenter, the inimitable Norman Lebrecht, recently wrote: - Esoteric as it may seem, the supposed fraud shows up the flaws of a classical blogosphere that trades in unchecked trivia. Classical blogs are spreading but their nutritional value is lower than a bag of crisps. Unlike financial blogs, which yield powerful and profitable secrets, classical web-chat is opinion-rich and info-poor. Until bloggers deliver hard facts and estate agents turn into credible critics, paid-for newspapers will continue to set the standard as only show in town.

Now read about a great journalist who wouldn't have made those kind of mistakes
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