One Man’s War

Having been a concert reviewer for a while now, I was fascinated to come across One Man’s War, describing the wartime concert-going and writings of Lionel Bradley. Employee of the London Library by day, he was a passionate concert-goer and, thanks to his writings, we have some notion of what wartime concert life was like.

Amongst others, Katie Derham talks to Joan Bailey, who worked with Bradley.

In a time when people worry about the future audience for live classical music, it’s interesting to consider people sufficiently passionate to risk the Blitz for the thrill of live performance.

I found this programme especially interesting on two counts:

• I recently saw (and wrote about) the St. Petersburg Symphony give a 70th anniversary performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 7 ‘Leningrad’ which was premièred under wartime conditions – specifically the 872-day Siege of Leningrad.
• One of the works which struck Bradley most was Benjamin Britten‘s Peter Grimes, the Four Sea Interludes from which I also experienced live (and wrote about) very recently.

Summer Lies

I’m not sure how many words have gone in via ears as opposed to eyes, but there are few better voices than Bill Nighy‘s for stories. My favourite (story) recording is his reading of Lunch by William Boyd.

He is currently reading from Summer Lies by Bernhard Schlinck, author of The Reader, which was later filmed.

Why the shabbiness of human relations should make for such good tales is a puzzle – but not a recent one.

A history of cartography

On The Map is Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It was written by Simon Garfield who also wrote a great book about fonts entitled, Just My Type, guaranteed to wake up unobservant eyes – look inside that here.

There seem to be two distinct types of map:

1. to show you how to get somewhere
2. to show you what somewhere (or some situation) is like

The introduction begins with a great example of the latter.

Wake up and smell the expensive coffee…

…because you won’t be able to afford breakfast…

Heard en route to work today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9758000/9758655.stm

 

The other radiohead

The idea for this blog came about thanks to the following:

• being a lifelong radio-head
• the change of life brought about by on demand radio (iPlayer)
• ease of tracking down programmes (iPlayer for iPhone)
• the habit of recommending interesting programmes to friends (especially as BBC radio content can be played by pals overseas)
• a insatiable love of writing
• WordPress for iPhone
• the ability to take care of all of the above on iPhone

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com! This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

Happy blogging!