Once in royal download city


The Path's resident download sleuth Walt Santner has come up with a real Christmas cracker. The Radio Prague Choir has recorded thirteen Czech carols and made them available as free and legal downloads, complete with texts and scores. Start the musical celebration here, lots more Walt discoveries here.

Christmas canine captured in Avignon's Le marché de Noël and (c) On An Overgrown Path. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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BBC Proms and the tyranny of the children’s encyclopedia

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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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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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