Every year the BBC extravagantly boasts that its Promenade Concerts are “the world’s greatest series of concerts of classical music.” Well, let’s see… This is how they bill tonight’s offering:
“The BBC Proms takes over the newly refurbished Battersea Arts Centre for a showcase of provocative, witty and boundary-crossing composer-performers, who have been driving new music in previously unimagined directions.”
It’s nothing but a pushy blurb for so-called “progressive” pop music – wow! Look at us – in the argot of St Trendy and All Change.
Well, everyone can have an off day. I bet this first week of the 2019 season has been a lot better than that. Well, again, let’s see…
Last night they gave us: “Woodstock, music from the Apollo moon mission and The Beatles.”
OK – so you’re allowed two off days. The BBC needs a lot more than two…
Thursday it was, “Trip to the moon with favourites from CBeebies.”
Wednesday: “Hans Zimmer, film music’s living legend.”
Tuesday: “The wild and colourful…” But how do you listen to wild colours? “…beauty of Arizona mingles birdsong with desert winds.”
Never mind, things can only get better. Don’t bet on it. Next week they will give us: “Angelique Kidjo, the undisputed queen of African music.”
And after that delectation; “A late-night tribute to the celebrated salsa songstress Celia Cruz.”
I’m all for freedom of speech… and for freedom of singing and playing. But to call these items examples of “the greatest in classical music” is false pretences, a breach of the Trades Descriptions Act and a downright lie.
It’s all in the BBC’s agenda of anti-elitism, yoof and getting down and dirty. It’s the living – by which I mean dead – example of what Gertrud Himmelfarb meant when she said: “The counter-culture is the culture now.”
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Here’s PC even the BBC hasn’t managed yet. Who would guess the US has a bunch of self-regarding ninnies like this?
Comments on the Salisbury Review blogs have of late often become personal and rude. Unlike the left which traditionally always rushes to suppress views contrary to its own, the Salisbury Review will print any well argued political position however much it conflicts with its beliefs.
Abuse I will remove. Editor
If you’re “somewhat bemused”, George, what a tedious life you must kive.
I’m somewhat bemused. A perfectly sensible and logical article is placed on the SR website. Then, instead of comments discussing that specific subject, we are treated to tcbh* ad-hominem slagging matches between a few regular contributors that are usually way off the subject. Do please give over; if you’ve nothing useful to add to the discussion, then don’t. [*tcbh = too clever by half.]
Hear hear! I sometimes think the Salisbury review should disable comments as they rarely do the articles any credit.
So you want discussion to be controlled eh? Only two of the 15 comments were on music, and that doesn’t include yours. Go ahead. It’s free site. And give my regards to Vladimir Vladimirovich when you drop in for orders again.
Sorry, I’d respond but I don’t have a mouth full of plums or an enormous rod up my arse.
Good luck..
I gave up on the Proms years ago, but BBC Radio 3 still broadcasts some good concerts from the Edinburgh Festival (not to be confused with the idiotic “Fringe”). Next week we can look forward to Beatrice Rana playing Chopin, Ravel and Stravinsky, the Casals Quartet playing Haydn, Bartok and Beethoven, as well as assorted songs and piano pieces by Schubert, Mahler, R Strauss and Grieg. No doubt the Edinburgh Festival will also soon fall to the barbarians’ siege, so catch these concerts while you can.
Great music will be available whatever happens in Edinburgh or elsewhwre.
There is room for everybody’s tastes.
Andrew appears to have wandered into an adult conversation by mistake.
This is probably the shortest ever sentence demonstrating both massive irony and a complete lack of self-awareness.
Thank you for your contribution to said conversation. Probably best not to bother next time.
Andrew. It is a pity that it has come to this, but your posts from the start tended towards the personal, attributing motives (correctly or not doesn’t matter) rather than narrowly concentrating on the matter, reason and evidence. You share responsibility for the way the discussion has gone.
However, as I’m sure you know, sustained exchanges are rare these days, and however futile and irascible are worthwhile in their own right. The uncertainty principle in physics applies to discourse too – there is no certainty in human affairs (except in a few extreme cases) and if we all recognised that (in my opinion) it would make the world a nicer place for everyone.
Well I’m sorry Michael, but your very first personal post directed at me suggested I needed medication for a mental illness. I have never reciprocated. Everything I have said was a response to what you’ve posted. You’ve spoken about everything from Nazism to totalitariaism. However, I will now.
What a nasty, pathetic little person you are.
Some people need to calm down. My remark was a joke, though I can’t trace the comment to check.
By the way, it would be nice If you could present so.e actual quotes for your rather silly accusations.
Just saying.
In other words it is the truth and young Andrew “doesn’t do truth”. There are plenty of sites for Banter Merchant such as yourself, take a deep breath leave the adult sites and find your true home. It will be no great loss to the SR.
“Young Andrew”.
You ignoramus. Is that the best insult you can come up with for someome you disagree with?
Come back when you can add something a bit more intelligent.
Give them enough rope and they hang themselves! We’ve upset young Anderew but he barged in with his Banter Dictionary.
Myles Harris – I will leave it at that.
It used to be quite interesting reading the comments on articles in the Salisbury Review. Of late they seem to sunk to the level of the “yes you did,” “no I didn’t” comments in the average rag!
No they haven’t. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
You’re a joke. The point was, it was totally unrelated to the article, and the first thing that popped into your head was a shoehorned in snipe at a “burka woman”. How telling.
I was wondering what the latest in the series of “I worked with disadvantaged kids” series would be. So you “know” two gay people do you? Well done.
Young man, unlike you I am too old to know everything. Your twitter-type remarks illustrate very well that the biological evidence that the human brain is not fully mature and wired up till the early 20s underestimates the time needed.
You cannot separate cool dispassionate evidence from your hostility.
Hostility in my experience (which has include inter alia dangerous characters and burka-clad victims of Arab atrocities) has its roots in unhappiness in childhood: one sees it in abused children and even in those whose parents have failed them by dying. My mentor 55 years ago asserted that he had never met a hostile person who was not hostile to his parents. I found that to be true in practice and through study – Irma Grese, Stalin, Saddam and so on.
Perhaps you need to acquaint yourself with what evil really is.
Browning: Ordinary Men (WW2 death squads); Svetlana Alexievich: the Unwomanly Face of War (Russian teenage girls in the soviet army, WW2). You could also look up the UN report into Human Rights Abuses in Kuwait committed by Iraqis and Palestinians. You’ll be horrified but enlightened. Good luck.
It is completely pointless of course to recommend that you reconsider your own pompous, supercilious attitude, and personal attacks and speculation about somebody you do not know at all.
You start off saying you don’t know everything, yet everything you post subsequently seems to indicate that you actually think you do.
I’m starting to think it’s all over between us Andrew. C’est la vie.
On the subject of PC, if the police track down the burka woman who shouted at Pride marchers, what is the identity parade going to look like?
You were doing really well until this. What does the id parade look like when the bank robber is wearing a mask? I think the reaction to the recent school protests has been clear, so I don’t think “pc” is the thing you need to be worried about.
It was a joke, genius.
The reaction to the school protests has been to allow behaviour that would have been halted at once had it been any other fascist group. That’s our useless politicised police for you. Further, the reason there have been no protests elsewhere is because the bigots have had their way. When asked for support, HMG showed cowardice and left schools to cope. There’s a state school in Bradford called Al Aqsa. Nothing to worry about there.
BTW I don’t think the woman should be hunted. She’s entitled to her opinion and several gay Tories would agree that a month celebrating homosexuality when a day suffices for mothers and veterans is bizarre. I know two gay people and they don’t go about covered in baby oil, wearing feathers or carrying hate banners about ‘terfs’
TV with yapping inanities from presenters is not the best way to listen to music BUT I did enjoy the Public Service Broadcasting group’s trip into space. Far from being dumbed down, the arresting and moving section on the Apollo fire that killed three men 10 minutes before launch was above the audience’s capacity – wholly inappropriate applause indicated that young people’s emotional and cognitive development has some way to go even in their 20s.