A report from Slipped Disc correspondent Jonathan Elvey:

Here in Athens this week we were reminded for the umpteenth time of
the unique ability of music to inspire,nourish and console. You can
imagine how regular culture has all but disappeared here at the
moment, and our lovely concert hall, the Megaron, is dark and empty most
nights. But a couple of weeks ago Peter Wispelwey held our chamber
hall regulars spellbound when he came to play all six of Bach’s cello
suites over two concerts in one evening , and some 80 % of us were
there for the whole thing. Maybe that’s not surprising for a
specialist gig in a small space. But this week, not only was the main
hall think RFH stle and capacity – virtually full two nights running
to see the Concertgebouw with Andris Nelsons play Petrushka – like me,
many of the first-nighters came back the next night to listen all over
again to this wonderful orchestra play music which in the right hands
sounds as fresh as the day it was written. A small reminder of the
better things in life when we are dealing with some fairly tricky ones
most of the time.

Jonathan Elvey

Nico Schilder has written to me from Holland with what purports to be the ultimate guide to classical radio stations online. I haven’t browsed too far afield yet, but the research is impressive and if you feel a pressing need to catch up with what’s playing in Latvia or New Zealand, this is the place to go: http://www.classical.dj/europe.html

Colin Eatock, the Canadian writer, despairing of finding a trustworthy guide to classical blogs online, has compiled his own. It is astutely divided into categories: composers, independent views, music business, music magazines, newspaper critics, performers, presenters, scholars. So many, in fact, you’d have to take a week off work to read them all – and that’s just the English language converage. The list is here: http://classical-music-blogs.weebly.com/index.html

Thanks to both of these dedicated compilers. I should bookmark the two urls.

Dangerous work, conducting. Read on.

I was searching youtube for a piece of cantorial liturgy when this film from a few days ago, stopped me stone dead.

Seen from behind, it looks like a traditional orthodox Jewish wedding. The groom is wearing the strictly-orthodox kittel, or shroud.

Then you notice that both grooms are wearing it. A landmark. Watch here.

I suspect that 2011 will go down as a turning point in concert etiquette. What goes on in the hall is no longer confined to those who sit in it – as we have seen several times with demonstrators and disrupters in the hall and substitutions and childbirths from the backstage. Anyone can tweet from anywhere and it’s about time concert organisations got to grips with that reality, like it or not.

A new etiquette is coming to being to replace the old, and Cincinnati is the first to recognise its relevance. As Janelle Gelfand reports here, the orchestra has set aside a corner of the hall for those who wish to communicate during a concert. Seems pretty civilised to me.

photo: AP

Our Social Correspondent reports the happy union in marriage of Maxim Vengerov,

violinist of this parish, with Olga Gringolts , sister of the violinist Ilya Gringolts .

The wedding was a strictly private family affair in the south of France and no photographs are being released at this moment.

We wish the young couple and their families many years of happiness.

I was fairly confident that Radio 3’s Saturday feature would miss the point of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on record and, sure enough, I was not disappointed. The point is that a work of 1,000 performers is unlikely to be credibly conveyed through two living-room speakers or mobile headphones (let alone mobile phones). So the record industry, in its prosperous studio times, went for tame-down performances that yielded note-perfection at the expense of mass excitation. Among these performances, the programme’s choice of Claudio Abbad was among the more respectable.

But if you want the verve, the vigour and the veracity of what the symphony really sounds like when a dedicated conductor builds a performance from raw materials and lets rip on the night there are, for me, five outstanding choices – the first of which took place about a year too late for inclusion in Why Mahler?

1 Riccardo Chailly, Lepizig, May 2011 (Accentus)

2 Klaus Tennstedt (LPO Live) – a little rough, but preferable to his studio takes.

3 Tennstedt on DVD (EMI)

4 Mitropoulos in Salzburg (Orfeo)

5 Horenstein, the 1959 UK cycle premiere (BBC)

All else is compromise.