David Ayers

So much for my theory then.

The 'list price' of a Naxos CD in the UK seems now to be £7 (over $10 incl. sales tax). Some on UK amazon are listed at over £8. Only a few years ago they were £5. I'm wondering how is pricing elsewhere and whether they can't quite trade on the CD collecting bug as much as they used to. They record a lot of minor repertoire and maybe collectors are getting bored with piling up all that stuff. Any observations?

Maybe worth considering. A box set would reach fewer people and move much more slowly, I suspect. Although collectors love a niche product!

It's a bit boring, in fact. Won't the mediocrity of the LP, since it can easily be heard for free, work against sales of the live box? In any case, good luck, but this would not be for me.

I have my doubts about that ECM policy. If people can't find a legal mp3 they are more likely to go to torrent/blog world.

Can't you tell us what you said? Or did you sign a clause saying you would never repeat a word of it...?

It seems most folks here use a mixture of media, just the balance that varies according to preference or purpose. I find storage such an issue, though, personally. I just hate to see the physical media cluttering up the place...

gelukkige verjaardag! (hope Leeway got that right... )

Well, I have a thought on that. The BBC showed her funeral. The BBC extracts money from me at point of law (if I have any access to TV I must pay for the BBC). So the family found a way to pick my pocket, I can't do anything about it. In return for the $$$ I am sure they can tolerate a little dissent about their tasteless death-fest.

Well I left before she finished. I heard much of the third and fourth minute. For me, there are signficant problems of intonation, and the bawling, heart-on-sleeve style doesn't disguise them, but just seems crass - Karaoke as the reality of art, not its drunken amateur imitation.

Pitch perfect and as tasteful as can be. What was I thinking? Like I'm going to sit through that cheesy schmaltz again.

Just ran away from the howling vulgarity of Alicia Keyes for some reason 'live' on the BBC at Whitney's funeral. Yikes. Even if she could hit the pitch and stay on it I'd hate it but I loathe that uh shall we call it 'popular microtonal' style.

For my curiosity, where did you see Berne, what was the capacity of the venue and what was the actual attendance (in your estimation, I mean)?

OK here's my second contribution. I am going to stick to recommending compositions and not CDs, although in this case I only know the work from CD. Really with Hans Werner Henze I want to attract attention to two. One is the Requiem, an instrumental piece with major parts for trumpet and piano that started life as two separate concertos. The recording by Metzmacher is a classic and I know it has fans on this board. Henze is very like Strauss in his love of sensuous immediacy and very free approach to form. He is also very much a vocal composer. The comparison with the reactionary Strauss would no doubt annoy Henze politically and aesthetically, but it helps explain that the centre of gravity in his works cannot be found in his symphonies, many of which are symphony in name only and several of which are derived from his operas. An exception is the 7th which he called 'germanic' and the 9th. The 9th I find of intense interest but it is harder to approach than the Requiem. It is not musically more difficult, but it is a choral symphony in which the choir presents the narrative of The Seventh Cross by Anne Seghers, a novel about an escape from a German concentration camp. This means that in practical terms it is helpful to have the libretto, if not the score, as it has to be followed. It also means the work is quite dour and jarring, as it is a refusal of the optimism of Beethoven's Ninth. It is also a very dense work and therefore hard to record, which means you very much have to listen through the recording. I have the EMI version but the Wergo version is reported to be similar. Despite all those caveats, and although the work is not clearly a 'success', I think its existence is interesting and getting (somewhat) to grips with is a worthwhile exercise. I am interested in works intended to be public and from that point of view this is one of the more notbale of recent decades.

Easy reach of the capital is probably 20-25 million people (within, say, a one hour train journey). I do know that outside London orchestral programming is less cosmopolitan. In London the early C20th is routine, and not just the Rachmaninov and Elgar but the Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Britten, Berg, Shostakovich. There's a difference between major concerts and special events such as the Total Immersion weekends, where the former really are about creating large audiences and the latter are more specialised and focussed (so you don't e.g. have to sit through Debussy and Stravinsky yet again to get a bit of Dutilleux (as we did recently at Gergiev's concerts). The South Bank is a democratic venue both in origin and in its current existence, and it is easy to see that orchestral programmers work hard to generate audience buy-in for their ventures (recently, Unknown Prokofiev, Bartok Infernal Dance series, soon Boulez conducts Szymanowksi and Scriabin [i'm going, but, uhh...] next season Gergiev conducts Szymanowski [more uhhh from me] Salonen conducts Lutoslawski [yay-ish] and many and various. These bodies are so expensive to run that they have to work on developing audiences which want to go beyond the Planets and Rach3, and they are quite evidently succeeding. I like what they do and I understand their constraints, but I am not too excited about this South Bank season as it seems to be more about packaging. That said, if the book, concerts and broadcasts create a synergy, that does no harm.

Maaany people who are interested in music report that they avoid Radio 3 because they don't enjoy the talking. That includes me. If everything is perpetually geared to introducing audiences, there is then nowhere for those audiences to go once the introductions are over, except back out the door. Same for concert programming where, if the 'modern' offerings are mainly a certain restricted canon of works which are constantly being 'introduced' then the audience who basically gets those works and has heard them in concert many times has nowhere much to go. So far the announced concerts seem to make no break with the usual, and are not even flagged as part of the series, which makes me think this series is a kind of presentational afterthought. However, if future announcements reveal things being done on a scale not previously seen then it will begin to look different. I don't think this is commercially driven, I think it is an attempt to address a pressing question about how large audiences are to be persuaded of the validity and developing purpose of the musical canon. I am just not clear if there is any additional resource, and I doubt somehwat the 'introducing' model (do we need 'introducing' to Rite or Leningrad yet again?). I'll be happy to be surprised.

Um, I think the South Bank Centre and the BBC basically are the establishment. Unless you know of some other? But yes, if you look at the published programme of the LPO it doesn't even mention this series, and its concerts contain the usual C20th elements. So far, all this seems set to add is the TV commentary which, like Radio 3 chit-chat, tells me very little that isn't already general knowledge. Of course, if the second part of that year (which falls the season after next) takes its late C20th remit seriously I shall be most interested, but I doubt orchestras will program any more Stockausen and Henze than usual - a little, as usual, but not more than usual. I hope to be surprised. I always want things to be better, it's true.

Add that his sound is too bald and exposed and he never gets through a solo without fluffs - even though all he ever plays is what falls most easily under the fingers.

Don't think it amounts to all that much if you look at e.g. the programme of the LPO which is supposedly the principal partner of the whole thing. In fact you wouldn't know. The TV coverage will be unbearable, not for the music but for the inevitable watery commentary. I enjoyed this gentleman's misunderstanding of when the C20th starts and ends: I suppose as its safely tucked away on BBC 4 they can say and do what they like - no-one will even know it's there.

Not worth a cent when they were alive, then, Whitney and Jacko? Of course on this board we are only interested in living artists.

Here's your link: http://www.indiegogo.com/Calling-All-Romantics Good luck - there's a lot of call on people's $$$ these days. I guess your main problem there is what happens to contributions if you don't raise the minimum you need for the project.

This one is a MUST.

No - the idea is to find a contact at Toshiba/EMI in Japan...

Um, if they do then - uh - not very well...

Details of these two on the ECM website now - nothing about the Kikuchi/Morgan/Motian yet which seems to be in a release-world of its own. The Jormin is songs in Latin. Yeah yeah I know. Anders Jormin Ad Lucem Mariam Wallentin voice Erika Angell voice Fredrik Ljungkvist clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone Anders Jormin double-bass Jon Fält drums Billy Hart All Our Reasons Mark Turner tenor saxophone Ben Street double bass Ethan Iverson piano Billy Hart drums