Tom Roper's Weblog

Classical music blogs

The egregious Norman Lebrecht holds forth on classical music blogs in a piece in La Scena and the Evening Standard; unfortunately he aims some unwarranted accusations at the excellent On an Overgrown Path, who replies robustly.

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A pedant writes

There's an awful howler in Sunday's Observer, in which Phil Hogan writes, though not online, of the Proms that they were founded "for the russet-cheeked Victorian masses. A grand evening of music at the Albert Hall for the price of a lump of coal and a quart of gin". [Verb missing, I think-TR]
It's a pity that Hogan's whimsy is spoilt by the fact that the Proms only moved to the Albert Hall in 1942 after the Queen's Hall was bombed the year before.

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Anonomoose

Gosh, it's quite like Mr Murdoch's MySpace over here. If you've recovered from the Bearded Pigs, try this:

Bearded Pigs live

The Bearded Pigs, the world's first transformative band, the t-shirt says, may be heard in a series of AAC files, performing in the Sundance Room of the Regency Hyatt, Phoenix, Arizona on 21 May at MLA 2006.

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Wagner, Discovering Music and others

Through the typographically-odd column written by Norman Lebrecht in La Scena Musciale, I discover that, as well as the handful of tracks available for download with BBC Radio 3 Easter Monday's Ring in a Day complete broadcast of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the same station's Discovering Music has quietly launched a podcast linked to the A-level music syllabus, though they don't say which board, which will offer excerpts from the following, with commentary interspersed, over the next six weeks :

1 April Schubert's Unfinished Symphony
22 April Bruckner's Motets
13 May Haydn's Symphony No 60 'Il Distrato'
3 June Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique
17 June Haydn / Telemann Trumpet Concertos
1 July Schubert's 5th Symphony
The podcast is available form: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio3/discoveringmusic/rss.xml

Technorati Tags: wagner, podcasts

P D Q Bach

I heard a Radio 4 programme, All the Right Notes Not Necessarily in the Right Order, about humour in music, The first programme discussed the work of Peter Schickele. Schickele's stuff is very funny, but I remember Gabor Cossa, an antique dealer in Trumpington Street in Cambridge, who also organised performances of works by the mythical P D Q in the 60s. I think Schickele is not the first.
Postscript: no I was mistaken. I'm not sure where this came from but my memory is clearly wrong. It must have been Schickele.

BBC - Radio 3 - Bach Christmas / Bach Blog

The BBC's Bach Christmas seems to me wonderful. It reminds me of the sort of thing the old Third Programme used to do. When I was a boy it was possible to hear every cantata broadcast on the liturgically correct day; now the technology allows so much more. No downloads yet, that I can see. But there's a blog (sort of, no RSS feed):  BBC - Radio 3 - Bach Christmas / Bach Blog.

Mobile Music Workshop 2006

Over my head, I should think, but I was interested to see that the University of Sussex will be the venue for  Mobile Music Workshop 2006.

Coincidence in Manchester

How odd. I'm sitting in a cafe on the Oxford Road in Manchester and I've just gone to the BBC website to download the latest Beethoven symphonies, numbers 7 and 8. I glance out of the window and realise I'm opposite the BBC. On top of the building is a hoarding which advertises the live performances in the Bridgewater Hall by the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda.

MLA and Bearded Pigs

By now the Bearded Pigs will be sleeping the sleep of the just after their triumphant MLA gig. I do hope there'll be a podcast.
More generally, I wonder who's doing MLA conference blogs this year? T Scott Plutchak managed to get going before the conference had even started. A quick Technorati search turned up the following:

Mohammad Al-Ubaydli

The Krafty Librarian who asks for volunteers to contribute from MLA