Story with a familiar ring


Valery Gergiev's London Ring isn't exactly resounding. Don't say you weren't warned.

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Comments

Pliable said…
All of which doesn't stop the Guardian from, once again, publishing the press release as an editorial.
3:15 pm
Halldor said…
Indeed - well said. What really gets me about all this is the tone of surprise from national press commentators who write as if this was all, in some way, unpredictable. Who could have guessed?

It's not as if the whole farrago had already been seen and dismissed in the UK two or three years ago, in - oh, I don't know, some provincial backwater like, erm, Cardiff. Presumably none of our world-class London commentators managed to make the trip that time. Or maybe they just don't read reviews of events at no-mark hicksville venues like the Wales Millennium Centre.

We provincials have our uses. We could have saved them the expense of buying four expensive tickets, for starters...
2:22 pm
Pliable said…
Halldor, you make an important point about the London-centric attitude of the media.

I did a guest spot on a BBC Radio 5 Live chat show about the Proms the other night. I was sat alone in the BBC studios in Norwich, everyone else was in the London.

When I mentioned the excellent Les Orientales festival in France the BBC presenter sneered at me, saying not many people can afford to go to French music festivals.

Actually they can. If, like me, you live more than a hundred miles from London (or in Cardiff even), going to a Prom involves a night in a London hotel.

I can currently get my car and two people across the Channel and back for half the price of a London hotel room which comes without breakfast, but does come with black mould in the shower and burn marks in the carpet.

The media, and the BBC in particular, think that London is the beginning and end of the classical music world. They are missing a lot as a result.
3:25 pm
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