Classical music station turns the clock back


Just three days after BBC Radio 3's hidden audience loss was exposed the station has announced a U-turn in its music programming policy. So what's new?

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Pliable said…
Email received:

Meanwhile, across the sea‏ our very own Dutch classical station, Radio 4 is broadcasting live, a performance with music by Xenakis, Cage and Kyriakides performed by Musikfabrik. It would seem not all hope is lost. -- MvdK

http://www.radio4.nl/
8:20 pm
Murai said…
Thank you for that Dutch radio link. One can never have too many sources of good music.
12:50 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 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

Different tempo but the music continues

Image
'The pause is as important as the note' ~ Truman Fisher We start a summer of travelling tomorrow with a flight to Morocco, so the tempo of posting will slow markedly. While I'm away do read other great music blogs here , but why not escape the tyranny of league tables and explore the long tail of music blogs over here ? But don't forget the music continues on my Future Radio programme at 5.00pm UK time every Sunday with a repeat at 12.50am on Monday morning. Here is the forward schedule which starts on April 20 with two modern composers who between them do not have a single note of their music in the 2008 BBC Proms season . April 20 Unique British voices - Peter Maxwell Davies Missa Parvula sung by Choir of Westminster Cathedral; Edmund Rubbra Symphony No 6 played by Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Norman del Mar. (Nice Max connection as I took the photo of the Japanese garden at Dartington Hall where he was a fixture at the Summer School for many years). A...
Read more

A contemporary composer's Passion

Image
James MacMillan (left) charts progress on his new Passion in today's Guardian . I am playing his percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel on Future Radio on May 11. Read about another contemporary Passion here . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Read more

Eat your heart out RIAA

Image
Everywhere else it is doom and gloom in the record industry. But here is one retailer giving the thumbs up. He runs a market stall in the Jemaa el Fna in Marrakech and official figures show that more than 90% of CDs and DVDs sold in Morocco are pirated, with an industry spokesman saying "every artistic endeavour is affected". Based on my recent visit I would put the piracy rate higher; during nine days in the country I did not see a single legitimate CD on sale. But then, even the BBC gives permission for file sharing for personal use. Now playing - music of the gnawa communities found in the southern areas of Morocco. The repetitive rhythms and looping riffs of gnawa that are the signature sound of evening in the Jemaa el Fna originated in black African religous rituals and trance and are provided by drums and the gimbri , the long-necked lute seen on the label above, supplemented by iron castanets called karakeb . Hypnotic stuff, but I'm afraid my CD (above) the fr...
Read more

The Innocent Ear 2.0

Image
Daniel Barenboim's recording of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Choral Fantasy with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Vienna Academy Chamber Choir conducted by László Somogyi was released in 1970 on Westminster Gold . But the innocence didn't last long. A few years later the recording appeared in Version 3.0 . Now intermediate your own way to Innocent Ear 1.0 Image credits Westminster Gold . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Read more

The sound of louder music

Image
'A recording of overwhelming emotional power: the power of Bach combined with the great themes of Coltrane. The resulting sonorities are literally unheard-of: classical sound plus the mix of a pop album' - Raphaël Imbert's excellent Bach-Coltrane album which featured here recently hardly needs marketing-speak to promote it. But the promotional copy quoted above from the record label's website may be the tip of an iceberg. My header image shows how the Grateful Dead's 1974 Wall of Sound redefined louder music. Even before that Stockhausen wrote Stimmung for six amplified voices . Then in the 1980s Xenakis decided that amplification was the only way to balance a harpsichord against percussion in Komboï . In the twenty-first century Jordi Savall uses subtle amplification for instruments such as the santur in his concerts of medieval music . And the new English National Opera production of Bernstein's Candide, transplanted from the Théâtre du Châtelet in ...
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

All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

Image
Depressing, but predictable, to see the mainstream media scrambling aboard the Bohuslav Martinů bandwagon as soon as BBC Radio 3 announces a cycle of his superb symphonies . Equally depressing, but a sign of the times, to see the Independent publishing an appreciation of the composer's symphonies by a writer who confesses elsewhere to never having heard a single note of them. As Norman Lebrecht famously wrote in the Evening Standard back in 2006: ‘... until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town’. Sadly the hard facts now show that Norman is no longer at the Evening Standard , and, as from next Monday, the Evening Standard will no longer be a paid for newspaper . But you can find pre-bandwagon appreciations of Martinů here and here . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of ...
Read more

How Olivier Messiaen became part of the Vichy myth

Image
A comprehensive review of the first week of the Aldeburgh Festival by Richard Fairman in the FT revolves around the new production of Owen Wingrave , which is described, quite correctly, as "one of Britten’s most outspoken anti-war works". Among the other works grouped with Owen Wingrave is Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen , which was given a stunning performance by the Festival's artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich. In his review Richard Fairman identifies the Messiaen work as being "written in the thick of another war in 1943". Which, again, is perfectly correct; but bracketing Owen Wingrave with Visions de l'Amen can also be interpreted as implying that the Messiaen work shares some of the anti-war context of Britten's opera. Because this implication is a recurring theme in contextualising Messiaen's music, it deserves closer examination. In a January 2012 post I asked the question Is Olivier Messiaen p...
Read more