Hear & Now : Howard Skempton, etc 04.10.2014

[Grade 5 Failed]

They say an intellectual is someone who can hear the second movement of Mahler 7 without thinking of Castrol oil.

That's me done for then and I feel obliged to add that when I was 13 and borrowed a copy of Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony performed by Klemperer (and the Philharmonia?) from my school record library I was thrilled to find the openings of the first and last movements were used to provide music for the opening titles and credits of the BBC's then recent adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and that led me to discover so much more music and realise it was all around me in my everyday life

[smittims]

That's fine. I discovered Bruckner's seventh when the scherzo was used as the title msuic for Rupert of Hentzau. And Ivan March discovered classical music by seeing Walt Disney's Fantasia with its mutilated version of the Pastoral symphony. As long as you get there,that's what matters.

[mopsus]

They say an intellectual is someone who can hear the second movement of Mahler 7 without thinking of Castrol oil.

There go my intellectual pretensions then.

[Serial_Apologist]

There go my intellectual pretensions then.

[Serial_Apologist]

That's fine. I discovered Bruckner's seventh when the scherzo was used as the title msuic for Rupert of Hentzau. And Ivan March discovered classical music by seeing Walt Disney's Fantasia with its mutilated version of the Pastoral symphony. As long as you get there,that's what matters.

My father always said that Disney's portrayal of the Pastoral wrecked the work for the rest of his life, as he would always visualise skipping gazelles. Mum said it made her think of Babycham - or maybe it was the other way around..

[smittims]

joking apart, though,isn't it fascinating how different people react differently to a hearing of a particular presentation of a piece of music? As a child I was delighted by the dancing hippos and crocodilles in the Ponchielli extract from Fantasia. At the other end of the scale there's Lawrence's fatal heart attack at the end of Abigail's Paety, to the sound of Beethoven;s fifth, which he delfiantly plays to annoy his wife.