Planetarium
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| Album cover from 1970 |
(Almost) away from questions of bias...
BBC Radio 3 has been building up all week to a BBC Symphony Orchestra performance tonight of Holst's The Planets, first performed 100 years ago this very day.
Now, please guess (if you want to) just who BBC Radio 3 has invited to guest host the performance tonight?
Go on, go on, go on, have a guess!...
Go on, go on, go on, have a guess!...
(Clue: It's surely the choice you'd expect the predictable BBC to make if it's a classical piece vaguely connected to 'space' and 'planets', even if the piece is actually far more astrology than astronomy - not that that's the kind of thing that would bother the BBC! - and even if the presenter in question is far more closely associated with Blairite pop music).
So it's surely got to be?...
Further Clue: His name is an anagram of 'Cox Brian'.)
Personal blogger moment:
While other late 80s teenagers were cheerfully singing along to Kylie and the rappy disco stuff emerging at the time I, having joyously enjoyed the Golden Era of Pop Music (1981-1986), was now disenchanted with pop and clinging on to Holst's The Planets instead.
That, along with Copland's Appalachian Spring, Chopin's Etudes Op. 10 and Bach's Happy Chappy Clavier (played on a harpsichord by Wanda Landowska - and broadcast on Radio 3 before 7am, when every other '80s student was asleep) - was the very thing which really hooked me on classical music.
While other late 80s teenagers were cheerfully singing along to Kylie and the rappy disco stuff emerging at the time I, having joyously enjoyed the Golden Era of Pop Music (1981-1986), was now disenchanted with pop and clinging on to Holst's The Planets instead.
That, along with Copland's Appalachian Spring, Chopin's Etudes Op. 10 and Bach's Happy Chappy Clavier (played on a harpsichord by Wanda Landowska - and broadcast on Radio 3 before 7am, when every other '80s student was asleep) - was the very thing which really hooked me on classical music.
But, yes, it was The Planets, beyond all of those, that particularly obsessed me at university, long, long ago. I'd write endless pieces of coursework to The Planets, only pausing to rewind my cassette tape back to the beginning every fifty minutes or so. It was my muse. I'm sure I listened to the piece well over a hundred times over a year.
And I still like it. And it still never grows stale for me.
And this was the very version I kept listening to. It was performed by my Morecambe friend Eric's musical accomplice Andrew Preview and a non-BBC London orchestra...
...and it still sounds worth listening too at least a hundred times more:
...and it still sounds worth listening too at least a hundred times more:
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