I’ve had the Nielsen scan figures in and they show a TV album at the top of the classical charts.
Nothing innately odious about that, but then I’m in a minority about Downton Abbey. I watched about ten minutes on television and decided static wallpaper would be more interesting. It was glossy, mushy, predictable, stereotyped period drama and the music, by John Lunn, was a dumbed-down version of Michael Nyman’s score for The Piano. Don Black wrote the song lyrics. You can catch some here.
But the public can’t be wrong, and the charts never lie. So why do I feel as if some monstrous fraud has been committed against the public IQ?
Here’s Nielsen:
CHART: Current Classical Traditional
Week Ending: 01/08/2012 Display: % CHG
Wks Lbl 2W RK LW RK TW RK Artist Title TW Sales % CHG LW Sales RTD Sales
On
1*DOWNTOWN ABBEY TV SOUNDTRACK
2 GABRIELI/BACH/REVUELTAS/PROKOF CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA BRA
3 LANG LANG LISZT – MY PIANO HERO (VINYL)
4 KARADAGLIC*MILOS MEDITERRANEO
I have just been informed that the Menuhin Competition for young violinists will be held in the great man’s home country for the first time in 2014.
The immediate next contest is in Beijing in April this year, with 230 contestants. The last one was in Oslo, Norway.
The competition is dependent on a host conservatory offering it a base. The 2014 location will be Austin, Texas.
Past winners include Tasmin Little, Isabelle van Keulen, Nikolaj Znaider, Ilya Gringolts, Ray Chen and Julia Fischer.
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City on April 22, 1916.
Tommy started out as a radio presenter and has never lost those skills.
Now that he has retired from singing, he will present public interviews with personalities – ‘great and small,’ he says, and from all musical genres – on the stage of the Konzerthaus Berlin. It’s bound to be fun.
Watch him introduce the series here.
The story of the Chilean miners trapped underground for 17 days has been made into a concert oratorio by composer James McCarthy. It makes a lovely noise and will be premiered on February 5 at the Barbican by the Crouch End Festival Chorus. Watch first rehearsal video here.
He’s been the talk of the net for 36 hours, ever since the alarm on his phone went off during the closing pages of Mahler 9 and conductor Alan Gilbert stopped the performance until he was sure the device had been switched off.
The man was quickly identified by New York Philharmonic officials as a long-term subscriber, and they are being very careful not to disclose his name because, they say, it wasn’t his fault and they don’t want to lose his business. Already, there are philistine tabloids baying for his blood.
Here’s the story (and you read it here first): the guy had just bought himself an i-phone. No longer in the first flush of youth, he was not quite sure how the darned thing worked but he knew his etiquette well enough to shut it off before the concert started.
What he did not shut off was a preset alarm. When it gave a marimba ring, he thought it must be someone else and looked around in irritation. Then he found it was him, and the conductor was glaring at him like a schoolboy who’d let off a stinkbomb. Mortified? Our guy didn’t know where to look.
He’s gone to ground, maybe Florida, and will never live down the shame.
I’m not going to be the one to disclose his name.
But it does make a case for concertgoers, especially the over-50s, to be asked to check in their phones with their coats. Right?
It’s reassuring to know how hedge funds work. If they win, they clean up. If they lose, they sue.
Terra Firma, which bought EMI at an inflated price and lost its lawsuit against advisors Citigroup, has just lost a document grabs bid against its accountants. See here. EMI has since been sold by Citigroup to its former competitors, Universal and Sony, and is heading for the breakers’ yard. It’s a sad and shabby episode in the history of the recording business, but the hedge fund makes no apology for its appaling conduct.
