This week Mahlerman celebrates the great Gallic songwriters... Words; whatever happened to them in popular music? And why was I shocked a few moments ago, hearing the 'song' that is currently topping the charts? Talk Dirty by Jason Derulo has sold 160,000 copies in the last seven days. The second verse ... Read More...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon
Dabbler music
As well as being a remarkably innovative composer, Ferruccio Busoni was a writer, arranger, editor, painter, linguist and intellectual. Was he, in fact, the last Renaissance Man?... When the itinerant clarinettist Ferdinando Busoni's wife Anna Weiss became pregnant in 1865, it was a measure of the instability and recklessness of ... Read More...
The Dies Irae is one of the most-used themes in western music. Mahlerman selects some fine examples... Scholars are split, but to put the four note descending motive (and the bars that follow) into some sort of context, I will give the palm to the 13th Century Franciscan Thomas of Celano for conjuring-up ... Read More...
Unearthed from the archives and now restored with new videos, a post in which Mahlerman treats us to some outstanding Americana... The tradition of playing music at home, all but dead in broken Britain, flourishes still in atomized America and produces, along with the reality-wannabies, a never ending stream of talent ... Read More...
There is much more to contemporary serious music than Alan Titchmarsh's choices on Classic FM. Mahlerman selects some 'post-minimalist' composers who should stand the test of time... Look, let's get one thing straight, I have got nothing against Dr Karl Jenkins, the most performed living composer in the world. Before the doctorate and ... Read More...
Brit selects four gorgeous, popular operatic melodies... Some opera this week - nothing esoteric, the only gimmick is that these tunes are a quartet, trio, duet and solo aria respectively, and they’re in reverse order of loveliness (according to me, anyway) – hence an 'operatic countdown'. This performance of the Bella Figlia ... Read More...
With two thirds of the planet covered by water, is it any surprise that the churning mightiness of the seas and oceans has influenced artists, writers and musicians so profoundly?... Homer acknowledged that there was '...nothing so dire as the sea' and, more recently, the great Philip Roth intoned on the ... Read More...
Mali may be economically impoverished, but as Toby Ash explains, it is musically wonderfully rich... I have quite an extensive collection of world music, but only recently did I notice that the majority of the African tracks were by Malian artists. Why Mali? To be honest I’m not completely sure. There ... Read More...
Hitler's assault on 'degenerate art' - that deemed to be decadent or harmful to the Nazi project - affected not only visual artists but also some very talented musicians. Mahlerman picks out some of the best examples of the Entartete Musik... Almost exactly eighty years ago Adolf Hitler, exercising his recently ... Read More...
A nautical theme this week, as Brit selects pieces from a great movie soundtrack... Not only is Patrick O’Brian’s 'Aubrey-Maturin' series of books one of the great reading experiences available to mankind but it has also spawned a fine movie in Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The ... Read More...
