Yet more slipped facts
Slipped Disc reports "Sitar Maestro Ustad Shahadat Hossain Khan" has died of Covid. As, of course, any cultural commentator whose musical horizons extend further than Mahler and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla knows, Ustad Shahadat Hossain Khan played the sarod, not sitar. In fact, you don't even need to be familiar with Indian music to know he played the sarod. Because the usual YouTube clip lazily pasted into the Slipped Disc post actually identifies the maestro's instrument - see graphic above. As a certain Norman Lebrecht proclaimed in the Evening Standard in 2006, "...online blogs won't become required reading until they start focussing on the facts".
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Comments
Maybe we should put on our credentials NL fact-checkers.
All the best, Antoine
If, as per his post, the Swiss Romande Orchestra deserves to be labelled the "worst-run symphony orchestra", Slipped Disc certainly deserves to be labelled the "worst-run classical music blog".
What pains me is not that Lebrecht keeps making these sloppy mistakes, but that the classical music industry continues to take him seriously.