Now BBC presents Beethoven's greatest hits

Some time ago the BBC Radio 3 dropped its policy of only playing complete works, and started broadcasting single movements from symphonies and concertos. Yesterday, in their Morning on 3 programme, they took their drive for 'accessibility' still further by playing the Molto Adagio slow movement of Beethoven's sublime Op 132 quartet on its own. Shorn of the framing, and contrasting, Allegro ma non tanto and Alla marcia, assai vivaci Beethoven's great hymn of thanksgiving sounded horribly like film music - which is presumably what the BBC producer intended.

But I'm sure the market driven BBC will say the audience ratings justified it, and that they gave their nemesis Classic FM a bloody nose. So to help them understand what they actually did, I offer the noses of two other great works of art shorn of all those boring bits around them.

Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Classic misunderstandings - Beethoven's movements

Comments

Pliable said…
BBC Radio 3's Morning on 3 continues its exploration of 'left-field' views of the late Beethoven Quartets tomorrow with Bernstein's transcription of Op 135 recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic.

There is a world of difference between transcriptions and truncations, and I listened a lot to Bernstein's LP of the Mitropoulos transcription of Op 131 when it was first released in 1979. (The Opp 131 and 135 are now coupled on one CD).

But have to confess I listened to Bernstein's transcription again a few months ago and didn't get beyond the first few minutes.

But it is a fascinating curiosity, and worth listening out for. (Morning on 3 is available on 'listen again')
1:40 pm
Anonymous said…
Well, I'll admit that my first reaction was just about identical to Pliable's.

And yet ...

"...sounded horribly like film music..."

Seems to me that this is where your "noses" metaphor falls flat - the noses are still easily recognizable as a part of the whole, and to my ears, the same thing is true of the Beethoven.

"...which is presumably what the BBC producer intended."

A fascinating comment, and I'm really curious why you presume this.

"...the market driven BBC will say the audience ratings justified it,"

Am I supposed to conclude that "market driven" is an unqualified negative?

"Some time ago the BBC Radio 3 dropped its policy of only playing complete works,..."

Being from the colonies, I can't really comment. However, you make an absolute statement. Does this policy really apply to all programming, or only to some?
3:52 pm
Pliable said…
Scott, Grove's Dictionary wrote that the BBC Third Programme was originally pitched at:

'the alert and receptive listener, who is willing to make an effort to select his programming in advance and then meet the performer half-way by giving his whole attention to what is being broadcast'.

Times change, but BBC Radio 3 now expects very little effort from the listener (such as listening to a whole Beethoven Quartet). Instead the schedules are dominated by compromises in the increasingly frenetic fight for listeners with 'populist' Classis FM.

In my recent postabout Arvo Pärt's Passio I wrote how Pärt determined the duration of the silences between the sections determined by the number of syllables in the final word of the preceeding sentence.

Pärt's Passio is a through-composed work, not a succession of movements separated by silences. In my view a Beethoven Quartet, such as the Op 131, is exactly the same.

I can see no reason for the BBC to have programmed a single movement. It was not a time constraint. As mentioned in my comment above, the same programme is tomorrow broadcasting the orchestrated Op 135 which lasts 32 minutes. The Op 132 lasts 38 minutes.
4:31 pm
Anonymous said…
Fair enough. It sounded to me as though this might be the same sort of "short pieces" constraint that I'm familiar with during morning and evening "commute times." If you want complete longer works, it's mid-day or evenings or weekends.

I'm not trying to defend any "dumbing down" initiatives, but I do recognize that trying to play to my own particular tastes would be a fast way to drive down any live or remote audience. Not all compromises are inherently evil, but I'm really not close enough to this particular example to judge ...
5:43 pm
Anonymous said…
OK, it sounds like nationalist crap ( it does). I'm flemish ( however not a natinalist, I dislike nationalism).

Van Beethoven?
Van? Not Von. Why?

Because his ancestors (parents, grandparents)were from Mechelen.They emigrated to Bonn.

Still .. great organ linked musicians over there.
5:54 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Classical music's march to the scaffold

Image
News that revamped BBC Radio 3  attracted a record audience in Q1 2025 and programme presenter Norman Lebrecht's euphoric support for the network's new regime should be seen in the context of the following extract. This comes from a paper entitled The guillotine: Shadow, spectacle and the terror in volume 20 of the academic publication Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal:   'Executions were the most frequent and popular of revolutionary festivals, and the guillotine was at the centre of entertainment celebrating the Republic. A sense of the fairground spectacle and amusing novelty is conveyed in the following passage:  "Around the scaffold people sold mementos and lists of the scheduled executions. There were restaurants and cabarets de la Guillotine, where the latest victims were lists as “catch of the day” and satirical songs and poems were performed. The crowds were especially dense near the Jardin des Tuileries where, it was commonly known, one had...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

Classical music should exploit its healing power

Image
Classical music cannot stand still; so that means it must find new audiences. Western classical music has evolved into a highly dualist art form with clearly demarcated boundaries around its core offering of the orchestral and operatic repertoire. There is little debate that this repertoire must - and will - remain central to the art form. But it can be argued that to open up new markets the current watertight boundaries around that core offering must become porous. An example of a blurring of these boundaries would be an entry into the mind, body and spirit market; a market which a post here in 2011 pointed out was then worth around $11 billion annually in the US, compared with $200 million for classical album sales. It is tempting to dismiss the mind, body and spirit market opportunity as no more than 'Mozart for meditation' and 'Gregorian Chant for the soul', but that would be a mistake. As my earlier post noted , the spiritual dimension is found in many of cl...
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol...
Read more

Alma - the loveliest girl in Vienna

Image
And of course no item about Lehrer in a music blog would be complete without mention of one of his least political but most delightful songs - Alma. I first heard it when I was starting university and had just bought my first Mahler recording (the Cleveland/Raskin/Szell 4th ). I remember being fascinated to discover that Alma only died the previous year. Thanks Scott for that email, which sends us down another fascinating path. My header photo shows Alma and Gustav Mahler in Basle at the time of the performance of the composer's Second Symphony there in 1903. The photo below shows the couple walking between Toblach and Altschluderbach in 1909. There are very few photos of Alma and Gustav together, which may not be surprising once you've heard Tom Lehrer's song. Below are the lyrics for Alma together with the top and tail Lehrer gave it on his 1965 album That Was The Year That Was . Finally there is a recording of the great Tom Lehrer himself singing Alma . Last Decembe...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

Early musician who could have become a great conductor

Image
Hopefully at least a little of the content from eleven years of On An Overgrown Path transcends the virtual noise that is the staple fare of online music journalism today . For me the most rewarding projects have been the Philippa Schuyler and Master Musician of Jajouka doubleheaders, the profile of Guyanese conductor Rudolph Dunbar , the exploration of contemporary modal music , and interviews with Jonathan Harvey , Jordi Savall , Ali Keeler , and with David Munrow's recording producer Christopher Bishop. Although the latter interview has been available as a sound file it has not to date been transcribed as text. So while tidying up loose ends I have transcribed the interview below. (The photo at the foot of the article was taken during the radio interview and shows me with Christopher Bishop). Although David Munrow is best known as an early music authority the interview ranges widely. Christopher Bishop mentored both Riccardo Muti and Andre Previn early in their careers...
Read more