Horror of horrors

And I notice that Mylene "I'm a celebrity get me out these clothes" Klass isn't listed on EMI's artist page alongside the like of Sabine Meyer (had to mention her because I am loving her new French recital disc)...pretty much like how Alfie Boe isn't listed alongside Ian Bostridge and Joyce DiDonato.

She is a disgrace. What business does Classic FM have broadcasting her performance of Nyman's "The Heart Asks Pleasure First" (in her own unbearably soupy arrangement) when Jean-Yves Thibaudet and even Nyman himself (not my favourite pianist by any length) have recorded it?

Oh, come on. There's a pretty young woman who is less talented than other musicians who is succeeding nonetheless, based on her looks? This kind of thing has happened throughout the history of recorded music. She's not a good pianist, and no one will listen to her in ten years when she's no longer as pretty. In the meantime, we'll just have to deal with it and indicate to people who ask that there is a pianism that is beyond her.

I suggest this litmus test: put Myleene in front of a major orchestra and conductor playing the Tchaikovsky first concerto and see if she survives.

Norman,

This performer (note I avoid the word "artist") exemplifies the alarming dumbing down of European musical "kulture" and the repeated attempts on the part of European record companies, managers, and promoters to foist "crossover" music on us all. You have well and eloquently documented this in The Life and Death of Classical Music and in Who Killed Classical Music.

I had never heard of Myleene Klass. I linked to her Amazon page via your posting on Slipped Disk. I am still aghast at this woman's display: pretentious, phony, surface-sexy but cold as ice, like bad soft porn. And then, there's her playing... Thanks for brightening my day with some musical humor, the way Florence Foster Jenkins, Michael Aspinall, Cathy Berberian, Anna Russell and PDQ Bach do so well. Miss Klass is not in their class, but she still made me laugh heartily. Maybe she is having a good laugh on us all and we just don't know.

She's a good-looking babe, with absolutely zero talent. Every bit of British TV I've caught in recent weeks, courtesy of BBC on line, is so god-awful tacky that I am not surprised this woman is a noted TV host in merry olde England.

Beyond that, she is a crass example of promotional bullshit, in the same league with blind pop singers masquerading as operatic tenors with the help of their managers, Greek hunks posing as pseudo-classical concert pianists on PBS, virginal young lassies singing Ave Maria in vibrato-less girlish voices, and the awful posing of Dutch violinist-conductors with long hair surrounded by violin-playing girls in pretty gowns.

And, I hate to tell you Norman, most of it is being exported to us from - you guessed it - Europe. For each Josh Groban we spawn, your Euro-trash lovers trump us with ten Yanni's made-in-Europe. Thanks for fighting the good fight, Norman, even though it feels at times as if we are losing the war.

I wish I'd heard the Radio 3 programme (aperitif time on a Saturday is not ideal). I can't find it on "Listen Again" so hope it will be repeated - or that a list of the CDs in question will be posted up somewhere.

You can listen again here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/speechanddrama/index.shtml