My life was changed by a Henry Wood Promenade Concert on 4th August, 1975. In the second half Sir Adrian Boult gave us Vaughan William's Fifth Symphony , and the blazing intensity of that performance remains unmatched, in my experience, in the concert hall or on record. Sir Adrian's 86 years had no relevance to his music making. Music, not age, was what mattered then. In the summer of 1975 punk was at its peak and the Vietnam War had ended after Communist forces took Saigon in the spring. Back with classical music, Pierre Boulez was in his last season as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which was at the top of its game , while William Glock's golden period as BBC controller of music and Proms administrator still informed music making in London. Your life could be changed for £1.30, which was the price of a balcony seat in the Albert Hall. All of which set me thinking, what price today's BBC Proms? In 2009 Promenade Concerts are one of few remaining...
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It doesn't seem to have occured to anyone that the reason I embed links to other OAOP posts is to add value, and that I couldn't give a stuff where my blog appears in primacy tables.
Hyperlinks are the point of the internet guys.
"the refreshingly unselflinking Alex Ross"
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Hahahahaha.
Yikes, my fellow Yanks. I've noticed that Americans in general have an amazing ability to leech every last bit of fun and interest out of things by turning them in to surrogate sporting contests, marketing opportunities or, more commonly, putting a dreary Puritanical gloss on them.
That's surely a joke, because if you took away Mr. Ross' links to his New Yorker articles, TRIN would be pretty thin gruel at times.
The Sounds & Fury ranking is a useful, but debatable, guide to the ranking of classical music blogs for those that need one.
But it may be worth considering that the apparent popularity of OAOP is due to the fact that readers actually like both the content and the embedded links, rather than being achieved by some cunning and arcane mathematical manipulation.