They stand side by side agog droopy of eyelid and slack of mouth unable to believe that there exists such
They stand side by side, agog, droopy of eyelid and slack of mouth, unable to believe that there exists such a place as Soho. Most people seem to emerge from the experiment more at ease with their prejudices than they went in. Previously the programme has featured a Tory councillor who went to live on a muddy traveller’s site, and disgraced New Labour lobbyist Derek Draper playing host to an old Socialist for a few nights This time it’s gays v. This is also why the Britain of TV is so much more cosmopolitan than Britain out-of-doors.BBC2 had something of a culture-clash night on Wednesday.
Living With The Enemy BBC2
Close-Up BBC2
The culture clash is one of television’s big things. It’s probably the ease with which telly can juxtapose things that makes it such an obsessive chronicler of difference. But more of that next week.”: ENO, WC2 (0171 632 8300), in rep to 10 November ‘Spirit Garden’: RFH, SE1, (0171 920 4242), to 28 October.. And it was a delight that the overall Record of the Year was the Hyperion coupling of Martin and Pizzetti Masses by the choir of Westminster Cathedral under James O’Donnell: due recognition for what is arguably now the finest ecclesiastical choir – and choir director – in Britain. My one disappointment was that the NMC disc of the Elgar-Payne 3rd Symphony got nothing. It was encouraging to see the Best Concerto go to Joshua Bell’s Decca disc of the Walton and Barber, and interesting to note the new-found strengths of French and Italian ensembles in period performance. Sales figures are sustained largely by compilation discs and issues that are hardly “classical” at all, like James Horner’s Titanic score Companies are folding.
New product is being stifled by the endless re-release of old catalogues. And the biggest companies seem to be taking the hardest knocks. Deutsche Grammophon – once the classiest name in the industry – got a Special Achievement Award on Monday, in recognition of its 100th anniversary, but not a single prize for any of its discs from the past year. But their eloquence is undeniable; and you can’t help admiring them in the way that Oscar Wilde admired his blue-and-white china. A touch embarrassing; and you could see it on the DG faces.On a happier note, it was good to see the pianist Stephen Hough take the Best Instrumental award for his Hyperion release of the obscure but mesmerising Mompou (my choice last Christmas as disc of the year). Something, somehow, to live up to, like a rule of life.The only rule determinable from the Gramophone Awards on Monday was that in the record business people come and go And at the moment, it’s more go than come.
Star Isle and A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, which featured in the BBC Symphony’s opening concert under Andrew Davis, feel too much like the accompaniment to an imagined film: Wagner would have called them effects without causes. The place was full of former executives, reflecting the demoralised state of the classical CD market at the moment. It plots a space in which the listener lingers here and there over some pleasurable sound or texture. It’s an Eastern attitude and yet the language he deploys is of the west, its antecedents Messiaen, Ravel, Debussy: which is why this festival has programmed him alongside French composers, and why he is the only Japanese composer to have broken through the barriers of Western consciousness.Until his death two years ago, he was a constant presence in the London concert world, delivering scores that spoke with haiku-like particularity, but none the less remained a Japanese response to Europe So they must be judged by European standards As such, they don’t always succeed. Stockhausen has been a great, fermenting crucible of influence But the work itself, I’m not so sure about Perhaps it’s not addressed to us. Perhaps it’s music for the spheres.The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, by comparison, is earthbound – though on rarified, rather exquisite terms suggested by the title “Spirit Garden” which adorns the current South Bank festival of his creative life His music doesn’t move from A to B. As the score is marked in dedication to one “Jaynee Stephens for her 20th birthday”, I suppose this comment is addressed to her; and it exemplifies the autobiographical in-jokery which can be one of Stockhausen’s more tiresome qualities.That said, the 50 minutes of Der Jahreslauf passes in a flash.