I might just give my TV an extra piece of chocolate tonight. It's been a good boy today. Four and a half hours of jolly good stuff. And if I hadn't sold my soul to Rupert Murdoch, I would only have had one of those hours. It's probably a good thing that I am off work sick, because how could I possibly fit four-and-a-half jolly good TV hours into a schoolday? I'm going to have to ask that nice French doctor for another month off, I think...
First off was Spanish Night with the Berlin Philharmonic from Waldbuhne. I've seen it before - The Performance Channel seems to have programmes on a three month rotation - but it's good fun, and repeated next week.
Bath and dinner were followed by Howard Goodall's Big Bangs about the invention of the stave , an event surely as important as, and preceding, the invention of double-entry book keeping (and the semi-colon). Or as Goodall posited, the printing press and, I would add, the steam engine.
Hot on the heels of this of this was The Genius of Mozart on BBC2. A bit patchy in places - interesting concept, having Leopold and Nannerl talking direct to camera, and at one stage I was confused thinking it was real archive footage of young Wolfgang walking in the woods with his father...However, it was fun to press the red button and get some extra narrative, plus a useful aide memoire to what was played as background music. I actually burst into tears at Ave Verum Corpus, which is, frankly, a bit sappy of me, but then I realised that I haven't taken my happy pills and vitamins today.
This was followed on BBC4 by Mozart Uncovered, which was really interesting. Charles Hazlewood spent half an hour explaining the piano concerto, and then the next half an hour was a performance. I wasn't sure at first of the musical map - it seemed a bit Noddy, then I cottoned on, and it was interesting, especially in the performance to be able to anticpate the key changes, the introduction of a new theme, and elements such as the dialogue between the woodwind and the piano. This is how telly should be, and I've never before felt the benefit of the red button. The evening was rounded off by a short documentary on finding - possibly - a forgotten Mozart manuscript in Huddersfield. Not a great programme but better than realitycelebritydietdecoratingrelocatingdating TV.
I'm going to have trouble taping all this next week when I'm away - and The Tales of Hoffman (which I've seen before, but it was 23 years ago and it marked the time I realised that opera wasn't just that boring stuff that the parents were into - my evil manipulative parents had also forced my sister and I to watch the star being interviewed on Parky on Christmas Day, the result being that we insisted on watching the live broadcast...!)
I then ran around the backroom like a headless chicken on acid trying to decide which of my much Mozart I should play, deciding that the only CD version I have of Ave Verum Corpus is actually blasphemous in that it is performed less-than-perfectly. And I now realise that the tape of Le Nozze di Figaro highlights is showing signs of overuse. I have a CD of the complete thing, and the vinyl is upstairs, but...
You know, the BBC so rocks!
