The Swedish detective series Wallander is a contemporary television phenomenon. Each episode is 90 minutes long, panning slowly across a grey landscape with a music track that gets more morose by the minim. The tension rises by imperceptible notches to a point where my teeth sink into the armchair. There is nothing like it in television drama, at least in the Swedish original (a British remake, with Kenneth Branagh as the world-weary detective, paled by comparison). Much of … [Read more...]
Germany’s Singing Nun?
May 30, 2010 By
Germany's rare victory in the Eurovision Song Contest - its second in 55 years - was predicted last Monday by the UK trade magazine, Music Week. Good call. An MW feature on the reviving German music market tipped Lena Meyer-Landrut, a Universal-signed number one hit in six countries, to grab the crown. Google and Der Spiegel also claimed prescience. Once she finishes school-leaving exams this summer, Lena, 19, wants to act. That seems a good career move, because … [Read more...]
Artists I’d Like to Kick – 3
May 28, 2010 By
Given that it's illegal to sell a polyester shirt as silk, I struggle to understand why so many record companies think it's okay to push out pop trash on their classical labels. And then they have the effrontery to be amazed when those labels lose their once-loyal public. The history of crossover is short and nasty. It began in the 1990s when the CD boom faded and most shops still had classical shelves. Fill those racks with more popular material, ran the argument, and you maintain … [Read more...]
Tom Cruise introduces Melvyn Bragg
May 27, 2010 By
Walking down the South Bank last night to the funeral of arts broadcasting on British commercial television, I tripped over a red carpet and asked WTF it was there for. National Movie Awards, apparently. This is where people who go to multiplexes get to nominate their favourite heart-throbs and win a chance of attending the ceremony. As I am digesting this information, a limo draws up and Tom Cruise comes walking towards me. Some women start screaming and a clutch … [Read more...]
Artists I’d Like to Kick – the second list
May 26, 2010 By
All day long, people have been volunteering entries for the list of musicians who should never be allowed back on a classical label. Adding to the first ten I named, here's a second crossover sin bin from a wide range of readers: 11 Katherine Jenkins - how could I forget the 'opera singer' who cannot sing an opera? 12 Bocellism - as one wit refers to him. 13 Ex-advertising composer Karl Jenkins 14 Publishing dynast composer Ludovico Einaudi 15 Somebody known as Rhydian 16 … [Read more...]
Artists I’d like to kick
May 26, 2010 By
Several respondents to yesterday's post called for a clean-up campaign of record labels that put out non-classical material under a classical banner. I share their view. When I go to a vegetarian restaurant, I don't want to find chicken livers in my lasagna. They may be perfectly good livers, yielded by the happiest and most willing chicks, but if the sign outside says vegetarian that's what it ought to be - and, if it ain't, there are laws that deal with people who pass one thing off … [Read more...]
Lies, damned lies and… record charts
May 25, 2010 By
My first university lecture in Sociology, long ago, dealt with the official abuse of data and quoted Mark Twain's famous aphorism (which he attributed dubiously to Benjamin Disraeli): 'There are lies, damned lies and statistics'. The account of UK classical record sales in 2009 from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) calls that admonition gloomily to mind. If you believe the BPI, two Universal labels now command more than half the UK market. Deutsche Grammophon … [Read more...]
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