This Lazy Sunday it's time to pull the duvet up tight and get cosy and warm, as Worm casts us adrift on the dark and stormy waters of the North Atlantic... In 1967, a couple of twitchers on a jaunt to the Hebrides to look for migratory arctic birds were met ... Read More...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon
Dabbler music
Did Beethoven and Tchaikovsky write any bad music? Yes, says Mahlerman, but he loves it anyway. Here are his guilty pleasures... I'm on thin ice this week; I don't think I really know what I'm talking about. A painting or a book is a physical object that we 'read' with interest, ... Read More...
Not your usual warblers... On a Friday night at 9pm BBC4 occasionally show some of the best documentaries on rock and pop music I’ve ever seen. Yes, they are indeed worth the license fee on their own. A couple of weeks ago they showed Queens of British Pop and it got ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman searches for serious music in the Emerald Isle, and not in the pubs... 'They lived and laughed and loved and left' James Joyce - Finnegans Wake London, 1741. George Frederic Handel is ill, and virtually bankrupt. The 56 year old has had some success with operas, but a number of ... Read More...
Today we enjoy some samples from around about 4000 years of Russian rock. What it lacks in groove it makes up for in lyrical folkiness... Among the titans of Russian rock, few are more legendary than Boris Grebenshikov, founder and sole constant member of the group Akvarium. This year he has ... Read More...
Is serious music a man's game? Not necessarily, says Mahlerman... Back in 2006 Nicholas Kenyon, then Controller BBC Proms, received an unmerciful kicking in the press and elsewhere for not including a single work by a woman in that season's programmes. And even when the compositions of women do appear, they ... Read More...
War? What is it good for? Not quite absolutely nothing... Throughout the twentieth century, war inspired many musicians and composers. Some glorified it, but many opposed it. The protests against the Vietnam War arguably help mould a style of popular music that came to define a decade. It’s notable that the ... Read More...
A disproportionate number of composers have been homosexual, and in an age when it was necessary to hide the fact. This week Mahlerman looks at how repressed or forbidden love might have found expression in great music... If I were to try and make out a case for homosexual composers producing a 'gay ... Read More...
This week's Lazy Sunday is brought to you by Frank Key, and you're either going to love it or hate it... There is a small number of musicians we might categorise as “polarisers”, those who provoke the passions. Those who like them really like them, love them to the point of ... Read More...
Four greats who proved that inspiration cannot be taught in music lessons... It was the gruff Johannes Brahms who said 'Study Bach - there you will find everything'. But it took the promotion of this great master in the second quarter of the 19th Century by Felix Mendelssohn, and his steady ... Read More...
