(In practice, on those rare occasions when a complete cycle is performed, the physical demands on performers invariably mean that it’s spread over a week). Twenty years ago, BBC television very successfully broadcast the great Bayreuth centenary Ring under Boulez and Patrice Ch?au, one act at a time over 10 weeks.The Easter Monday broadcast took a different approach, and presented it in a way that has until now been the preserve only of the maddest of Wagner Societies, playing the entire cycle back to back. The station will carry on with the project, though some composers might not be quite so rewarding in bulk – Telemann week, anyone? – and others don’t supply enough music. Ravel would be over in a day, and Webern in a not very long afternoon.
In this new enterprise, Radio 3 on Easter Monday broadcast Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung in a very unusual way. Bach was given this treatment, and Mozart, and listeners valued this opportunity to plunge themselves into a single composer’s work, however substantial. Rather than moving from one thing to another, it has mounted, with considerable success, days and weeks devoted to a single composer. He looks like a comedy version of an electrical accident, Ken Dodds circa 1956.
It looks like a novelty tea cosy or a thick, filthy dandelion. He really needs a haircut.simoncarr75 hotmail
More from Simon Carr. Radio 3 has been experimenting with programming music in a saturated way. I’m willing to allow her to correct the record.” It’s how it works there.NB: Peter Ainsworth’s hair can’t go without mention. Elliot Morley says parts of the South-east are suffering their worst drought in 100 years.
Do you notice the parched white bones of cattle in the dust bowl outside Rose Cottage? What it means is, he has found some figures to justify a hosepipe ban.And second: Theresa May referred to the PM’s assertion that no one in the South-east waited more than 13 weeks for an appointment with a consultant. She had a letter from a constituent who’s having to wait 20 weeks. The Prime Minister misled the House, so would he come and put matters right?Geoff Hoon said: “I’m sure the honourable lady didn’t mean to say the Prime Minister misled the House. It almost certainly comes down to getting people to separate their rubbish.Political grammarians may like to add a couple of examples to their files. That’s human nature.So, maybe the Vital Villages and Market Town Initiative will work its magic and maybe it won’t.
The Government funnels money through the Regional Development Agency to regenerate vital villages and market towns (partly by giving them Beacon Status) and those of us who watch will see the slow evaporation of money time and effort in more box-ticking, micro-management.Ben Bradshaw (whose hair, incidentally, is back on form) told us packaging minimisation is at the top of the government’s waste hierarchy and that the steepness of the landfill tax escalator is the best driver of the landfill allowance trading scheme in the government’s waste review process.This very likely means something but it costs a lot of public money to pay people to understand it. Because the more they tell us to do, the less we want to do it. But it’s not just Tories, politicians of every sort find themselves doing it. It’s what happens in politics and may even be what politics is about. They begin by thinking: “A farmer in my constituency, whose interests I was elected to represent” and immediately on being elected change to “one of my farmers”.
Because they own us they feel entitled to push us around And the more they push us, the more they want to push us The more they do, the more they have to do. A new Conservative MP said: “One of my farmers…” You might think that’s just a Tory thing; a proprietorial born-to-rule sort of thing “One of my farmers” (try it).
Besides, if they really wanted their children to be happy, they would, in most cases, have kept them at home.terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker. Only a fool or a sociopath (of both of which, come to think of it, there were a fair number when I was at Wellington) would argue against the headmaster Anthony Seldon’s plan to teach happiness lessons, but I fear it will impress less than he imagines.While his recipe for contentment, “knowing one’s limitations, accepting oneself for what one is”, may be wise and gentle, most ambitious parents will interpret it as a recipe for mediocrity. Then she shopped him.It is difficult to decide who emerges from this story with least credit. Surely we are now grown up enough for public money and time not to be spent on idiotic cases like this, however amusing to read about.* For anyone who has spent their formative years at the place, the photographs of Wellington College in this week’s press beside headlines about happiness will have caused a certain amount of head-scratching.The school serves a purpose and happiness is undeniably important; it is the connection between the two that somehow fails to compute. He invited her to his room and, it is claimed, tried it on with her, making “a pervy, Benny Hill, lascivious, groaning sort of noise”.
