Essential Classics - a programme surely on the wrong station

[french frank]

Fingers crossed.... Here I go again

You mean you're actually on your bike now, while you're posting messages? :-O

[Caliban]

No, trying to close the computer to set out !!!!!

[Don Petter]

I tend to ride on the basis that everyone out there, at the wheel or on foot (or on other cycles - often the most dangerous of all) actively wants to kill me

"All the infections that the sun sucks up", as you have so aptly put it?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

ff

Look what's happened to the specialist jazz programming: slightly depleted and most of it up in the graveyard slots.

excuse me ma'am but i beg to differ, R3 jazz programmes have been seriously depleted if you take the demise of Jazz Legends and the excellent Jazz File into account .... these were programmes, like Jazz Library [budget cut] where knowledge and thought were not merely evident but deployed to effect .... now we have Requests, celebrity columnist style presentations and good ol' fashioned record pushing as our main fare ... jazz broadcasting has been eviscerated on R3 ....why? because he can get away with it

[french frank]

ff

excuse me ma'am but i beg to differ, R3 jazz programmes have been seriously depleted if you take the demise of Jazz Legends and the excellent Jazz File into account .... these were programmes, like Jazz Library [budget cut] where knowledge and thought were not merely evident but deployed to effect .... now we have Requests, celebrity columnist style presentations and good ol' fashioned record pushing as our main fare ... jazz broadcasting has been eviscerated on R3 ....why? because he can get away with it

I won't disagree with you, Mr Jazbo. Though Jazz Legends was replaced by Jazz Library (a bit of a gain? ), and the 30 minutes of Jazz File was replaced by a 30-minute extension to Jazz Line-Up. The loss of the Jazz Library repeat and cut in its new programmes has, I think, been countered by an extra 15 minutes somewhere?

But I'm very willing to concede that jazz has been given an unacceptable knock, starting back in 2007. I agree with RadioCentre that the programmes that are seen as 'distinctive' and specialist should be given a higher profile and be more integrated into the Radio 3 schedule. And that includes the speech programmes ...

[Is that better? ]

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i believe Legends and Library were both in existence and the one did not replace so much as survive the other .... it is not the quantity at issue but the ripping out of the quality ...

[french frank]

I've just received an email from someone: "11.27am - and Rob's announced, 'Dorothy has just texted in to say that she thinks that [Bruckner's Ninth'] was absolutely wonderful'. "

(That would be the 'Finale' of Bruckner's 9th, I presume, what R3 now thinks of as 'a longer work'.)

[Caliban]

Sorry ff but the only reaction to that has to be:



Trouble is, the 'email/text Petroc/Sarah/Rob' formula throws up countless examples of equally inane stuff.

[Ferretfancy]

On Wednesday morning we got Brahms's Schickalslied, Mozart's Prague and Schubert's String Quartet D 887. Yesterday it was Nielsen's 2nd and Beethoven's Op.111 with Arrau,and this morning we heard Weber's Konzertstucke, Berwald's 1st Symphony, and a newly revised version of Bruckner's 9th.
I'm beginning to suspect that some of our stated misgivings about the relentless trivia may have been heard, at least by some of the suits.
Of course. it doesn't do to be too optimistic.

[aeolium]

I have seen playlist items in EC which individually I might have been inclined to listen to, such as the Schubert D887. However there is still the problem of the 'packaging' in which this programme is wrapped, the trivia, the emails/texts, and the prospect of having to wade through this rubbish to get to something worth hearing is for me a major deterrent. Also the concept of 'Essential Classics' is something which I really don't think should be promoted by R3 - it is much too close to what is constantly promoted on CFM, and R3 should not be taking that as a model. What it means is that the same kind of music is heard over and over again, and I want to hear classical music off the beaten track. If not on R3, then where?