My ears pricked up when the R3 announcer stated that Philippe Jordan [pictured] is music director of the Vienna Philharmonic. Actually … he heads the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (Wiener Symphoniker, although he steps down next year for the Wiener Staatsoper). And while last night’s concert, advised as featuring the Philharmoniker (which anyway has famously been without a music director/principal conductor since the early-1930s), might have found Jordan directing that august ensemble, it was unlikely. So, I checked, something very easily done…
https://www.musikverein.at/en/concert/eventid/40150
BTW, it was a good gig, well-worth catching for Bach’s Magnificat and Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony.
If you read/remember my related Mehta post from exactly a week ago: Sherlock Holmes has struck again!
We need you Colin!!!
Stay checking and letting us know please.
Radio 3’s standards have been declining for years – OK, I know that’s the sort of comment that old fogeys make. However, I do expect more than a degree of competence from the BBC. That is what is lacking. One of the many mispronunciations emanating from one of these young things entrusted with breakfast-time presentation which made me squirm was a reference to Charles Monk. She clearly didn’t have a clue about someone who was once Furtwängler’s concertmaster and Music Director of the Boston Symphony. Charles Munch of course. But these people never bother to check either.
Dear oh dear oh dear. All we can do, it seems, to make us all feel better, is to shout at the radio. Caliban is clearly in the temple