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

Pliable said…
The error on Slipped Disc has now been corrected without any note or explanation. The website self-identifies as "the world’s most-read cultural website". As Norman admitted in the Evening Standard rant cited above, "Classical blogs are spreading but their nutritional value is lower than a bag of crisps".
3:19 pm
Antoine Leboyer said…
Well, this is not the first time that N Lebrecht would do such things. A long time ago, he made a long article on the Swiss Romande Orchestra. It was full of spite and mistakes, including comments like FIFA being in Geneva instead of Zurich. As you did, I did a counter article and pointed out the many inconsistencies which I put on the comments of the article on his blog. He corrected and of course never admitted anything.

Maybe we should put on our credentials NL fact-checkers.

All the best, Antoine
5:06 pm
Pliable said…
Yes Antoine, and Lebrecht takes another pop at the Swiss Romande Orchestra today - https://slippedisc.com/2020/11/daniel-harding-joins-worst-run-symphony-orchestra/

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.
5:24 pm
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