Are segues the next big thing?


When I was being trained as a BBC studio manager I was taught how to segue seamlessly from one 78 grams deck to another, mainly to provide sound effects for drama productions. A few years ago Classic FM started segueing between CD tracks and, predictably, BBC Radio 3 copied them. Now it has spread to the concert hall; at the penultimate BBC Prom concert the BBC Philharmonic segued from Penderecki Threnody 'For the Victims of Hiroshima' to Beethoven's Elegischer Gesang, Op.118; which at least stopped the audience applauding in the wrong place.

Are seques the next big thing? Or rather are they the next old thing? After all the Beatles did it on Sgt. Pepper (see above) and Mahler used it in the form of attacca in his symphonies.

Now read about some Magnificent Mahler-lite from Manchester.
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Comments

Garth Trinkl said…
Pliable,

I recall that David Drew’s widely-read program notes to the Elektra-Nonesuch best-selling recording, of 1992, of Gorecki’s Symphony #3, referred to the September 1, 1989 performance of the work in a darkened cathedral in Braunschweig, West Germany, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

I recall that Mr Drew noted the Symphony's opening that evening segued immediately from the ending of another work – a Haydn symphony or Mass? I cannot recall the opening work.

Do you happen to have that David Drew liner note accessible – as I do not?
Pliable said…
'Do you happen to have that David Drew liner note accessible – as I do not?'

Garth, I should have, but I don't. A quick search on OAOP will show that Gorecki’s Symphony No 3 is not among my most frequently played pieces of music.

I do have the Nonesch recording, but it is my "reserve collection" which is spread across a number of closets around the house. I've just spent a fun-filled 30 minutes trying to locate it but so far no luck, although I did find a lot of other forgotten CDs.

Knowing our readers someone else will turn the sleeve note up soon.

By a strange piece of synchronicity tomorrow's OAOP features the record company executive responsible for bringing that Gorecki symphony to a mass audience. That is unless the article gets bumped, which it did today.
Pliable said…
I told you a reader would crack it. This was just received-

Here's the answer to Garth's question about the segue spot:

"The programme began with an early Kyrie by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; and in witness to the crimes of those who scorned all that Lessing and the Enlightenment had stood for, it continued with Schoenberg's A survivor From Warsaw. The leap from Mendelssohn's time to Schoenberg's thus symbolized the history and the story from which the subsequent performance of Goreki's Third Symphony set out."

programme notes by David Drew for the Nonesuch recording of Goreki's Third Symphony

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