Forum des auditeurs passionnés et critiques de France Culture

The Musette The Early Music Show Sun 16 Oct 2022. À l'heure de ce billet, "4 hours left to listen" ! Autant dire que ce relais est "pour information" et pour l'exemple joint.

Une émission passionnante, d'histoire de France, d'histoire musicale et de musicologie entre la spécialiste Lucie Skeaping et son invitée Dr Amanda Babington (présentation de très grande qualité). Probablement un des meilleurs numéros de The Early Music Show de l'année, sinon le meilleur.

Lucie is joined by Dr Amanda Babington of the Royal Northern College of Music to find out more about the history of the type of bagpipe we know as the musette.

Pourquoi France Musique ne produit-elle aucune émission de ce genre ?

Pour compenser la disparition de l'émission du site de Radio 3 : à l'Alliance Française de Manchester Online Musette concert & talk 2 November 2021.

Online talk on the Musette, its history and repertoire, with our special guest Amanda Babington. She played the instrument live, showed us how it works and demonstrated the allure of its unique sonority. Drawing on her own research, she explained how a French instrument ended up in the West Highland Museum in Fort William (Scotland!).

Une émission comme on rêverait d'en écouter une sur France Culture : Sunflowers BBC 4 [2003 & 05-08-2021]

An evocation of the artist Van Gogh and the passion for sunflowers that obsessed him during his final fraught year.  Tim Marlow investigates. With Antony Sher as Van Gogh. Made to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh's birth.  Producer: Merilyn Harris - First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2003.

Un documentaire riche et varié, au montage stimulant. On y entend de nombreuses voix qui abordent l’œuvre et la vie du peintre et, tout du long, des extraits de la correspondance de Vincent avec son frère Theo. Une émission qui s'écoute deux fois de suite, sans une once d'ennui, tant la demi-heure présente des angles et des environnements sonores variés.

Ouverture sur Berlioz et lecture remarquable de la correspondance de Van Gogh (avec Theo et Gauguin) ; visite de la National Gallery avec "l'enquêteur" ; écoute d'une guide qui interroge des enfants de classe élémentaire devant la peinture ; rencontre d'un historien de l'art ; témoignage d'un gardien de musée ; visite à Amsterdam au musée Van Gogh avec son conservateur ; témoignage de lycéens à la National Gallery ; interview de la responsable de la boutique à la N.G. ; interview d'un visiteur américain, amateur d'art.

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers. This is one of five versions of Sunflowers on display in museums and galleries across the world. Van Gogh made the paintings to decorate his house in Arles in readiness for a visit from his friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin.
‘The sunflower is mine’, Van Gogh once declared, and it is clear that the flower had various meanings for him. The different stages in the sunflower’s life cycle shown here, from young bud through to maturity and eventual decay, follow in the vanitas tradition of Dutch seventeenth-century flower paintings, which emphasise the transient nature of human actions. The sunflowers were perhaps also intended to be a symbol of friendship and a celebration of the beauty and vitality of nature.
The sunflower pictures were among the first paintings Van Gogh produced in Arles that show his signature expressive style. No other artist has been so closely associated with a specific flower, and these pictures are among Van Gogh’s most iconic and best-loved works.

Dans le numéro de Private Passions du 11 août 2013 (BBC Radio 3), l'écrivain Adam Nicolson (né en 1957) proposait d'écouter une lecture de "Little gidding" de T.S. Eliot par Alec Guinness. La poésie lue par un acteur de qualité, sans rajout de fond sonore, dans une émission de radio : possible à la BBC et autrefois sur France Culture.

Adam Nicolson has the privilege, and the burden, of an extraordinary inheritance: Sissinghurst, that quintessentially English house and garden created by his grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In his own right, he’s the author of a series of highly esteemed history books and television series, about the making of the King James Bible, about the English gentry, and most recently about 17th-century writers. But it’s that Sissinghurst connection which fascinates us all: growing up with bohemian writers and artists, there must have been music going on there all the time? Not at all - Adam reveals that his family were musical philistines. His father hated music because it moved him, and made him emotional : so for an Englishman of that generation and class it was deeply suspect. It’s only in middle age that Adam is discovering music, and he admits cheerfully that his musical taste is 'dreadful'.

He also talks about walking 6000 miles round Europe, about his love for the Hebrides, and about his disastrous 'open' marriage. Adam and his wife had a deal : they were allowed to have two affairs a year, as long as they were abroad. This too was the legacy of Sissinghurst, and a father who urged him to have as many affairs as possible. What followed was predictable, and messy, but with a happy ending - as Adam’s choice of music reveals.

A light-hearted programme, which includes music by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Eric Whitacre, Prokofiev, Roberta Flack, and a reading by Alec Guinness of T.S.Eliot's 'Little Gidding' (1972).

À 50'58, lecture du passage donné dans l'émission (cf. ci-dessous [V]) : Alec Guinness reads Four Quartets by TS Eliot



LITTLE GIDDING (No. 4 of 'Four Quartets')

I
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
             If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.
             If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.


II
Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
      This is the death of air.
There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
      This is the death of earth.
Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
      This is the death of water and fire.
In the uncertain hour before the morning
    Near the ending of interminable night
    At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
    Had passed below the horizon of his homing
    While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
    Between three districts whence the smoke arose
    I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
    Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
    And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
    The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
    I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
    Both one and many; in the brown baked features
    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
    So I assumed a double part, and cried
    And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are you here?'
Although we were not. I was still the same,
    Knowing myself yet being someone other—
    And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
    And so, compliant to the common wind,
    Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,
In concord at this intersection time
    Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
    We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,
    Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:
    I may not comprehend, may not remember.'
And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse
    My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
    These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
    By others, as I pray you to forgive
    Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
    For last year's words belong to last year's language
    And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
    To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
    Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
    In streets I never thought I should revisit
    When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
    To purify the dialect of the tribe
    And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
    To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
    First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
    But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
    As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
    At human folly, and the laceration
    Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
    Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
    Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
    Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
    Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
    Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
    Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
    He left me, with a kind of valediction,
    And faded on the blowing of the horn.


III
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.


IV
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
    Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
    To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
    We only live, only suspire
    Consumed by either fire or fire.


V
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
    Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

3 days left to listen ! Romanian Radio Day Tue 1 Nov 2022.

Cristian Orosanu conducts the Romanian Radio National Orchestra in a concert of Elgar's Cello Concerto and Romanian composer Paul Constantinescu's Concerto for String Orchestra.

Un concert de grande qualité dirigé par Cristian Orosanu à Bucarest, diffusé dans Through the Night  : prise de son au plus près de l'auditeur radiophonique, superbe.

L’œuvre centrale  peut convenir à un dimanche matin ensoleillé :



La première œuvre est à conserver en mémoire :



et à écouter dans une des versions disponibles en ligne, ici avec le même chef d'orchestre :

Paul Constantinescu: Concerto for string orchestra - Kamerata Kronstadt & Cristian Orosanu



Dernière œuvre avec un violoncelliste, Răzvan Suma, qui fait des étincelles, l'auditeur écoute comme s'il était à deux mètres du musicien :




Bis :


Et complément de programme roumain ajouté par la BBC :


(The Wonderful Announciation (CD with carols from Romania with Angela Gheorghiu)
December 25, 2013).

"Trei Crai de la Rasarit"- Corul Mănăstirii Cămârzani

Une émission à ne pas manquer Shirin Neshat BBC 4 This Cultural Life [22-10-2022].

John Wilson s'entretient en visioconférence avec Shirin Neshat qui se trouve à New York. Comme à son habitude, il intervient sobrement et établit un lien de confiance avec la personne invitée. La fin de l'émission est déchirante. John Wilson tient bon, sans pathos. On aimerait avoir une telle personnalité à France Culture.

Shirin Neshat is the world’s foremost Iranian-born artist. Best known for her black and white portraits of veiled women, often with hands and faces overlain with intricate Farsi calligraphy, she works primarily as a photographer and filmmaker. A winner of one of the biggest international arts prizes, the Praemium Imperiale, she has shown art in galleries all round the world - except in Iran, as she has lived in exile in America since 1996. As human rights protests continued in Iran, a huge artwork by Shirin, called Women Life Freedom, was shown on billboards at London’s Piccadilly Circus where a rally was staged in support of Iranian protesters

Shirin Neshat tells John Wilson about her upbringing in an artistic, liberal family who lived amidst the conservative and religious Iranian city of Qazvin. She recalls how she was studying art at the University of California, Berkeley, when the Islamic Revolution took place in 1979. With new restrictions imposed on women, including the mandatory veil, she decided to remain in America. Returning to Iran for the first time in 1990, she was shocked by the changes and began to make artworks in response, primarily exploring the theme of power and oppression in two series of works entitled Unveiling and Women Of Allah. Shirin also reveals the huge influence on her work of the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad, who was killed in a car accident in 1967 aged just 32.
Producer: Edwina Pitman
Extracts from The Wind Will Carry Us by Forugh Farrokhzad, read by Shahrbanou Nilou

À 1'22'', évocation de Forugh Farrokhzad dans le film d'Abbas Kiarostami (1999). "The Wind Will Carry Us" (1999) & Observations from a 1999 Iranian film about death and immortality.


Entretien avec la réalisatrice iranienne Shirin Neshat, à l’occasion de son passage au Festival du film international de Genève (GIFF) pour la présentation de son nouveau long-métrage Land of Dreams, Usbek & Rica, Pablo Maillé le 28 novembre 2021.

Trop court : un mois en ligne  (la BBC = pingres !) ; trop tard : pour écouter une merveilleuse interprétation de concert de 2000 (si l'on entend bien le présentateur, toujours très discret sur les références jamais signalées sur la page) au Risør Festival of Chamber Music et dans une prise de son du meilleur niveau :



donnée dans Through the Night Schwanengesang 26 Oct 2022.

Un commentaire sous une vidéo YouTube de cette œuvre renvoie vers "Stern, Schneider, Katims, Casals, Tortelier". Entendu ! Schubert: Quintet Op. 163 - Stern, Casals, Katims, Schneider, Tortelier, 1952 - Columbia ML 4714.

Queen Elisabeth Competition Laureates 2022 BBC 3 Through the Night [29-11-2022]

The top three prizewinners from Belgium's Queen Elisabeth Competition 2022 perform Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich.

Concours Reine Elisabeth VIOLONCELLE 2022 ---- 09/05/2022 ➔ 04/06/2022.

The twelve laureates of the 2022 Cello Competition :



Video -- Closing concert Cello 2022 :

Dans le programme musical de Private Passions avec Julia Blackburn BBC 3  13 Nov 2022 [59 minutes - 21 hours left to listen]



La version diffusée n'est pas disponible en ligne :


The Agincourt Carol



Agincourt Carol, "Deo Gracias Anglia" [English, 15th Century


Une version moins esthétisante, aux accents folks des années 1960, assez séduisante : The Agincourt Carol ℗ 1968

En introduction de New Generation Artists The Mithras Trio play Mozart's Trio in B flat  14 Nov 2022

Chamber music from Radio 3's New Generation Artists: the Mithras Trio and soprano Katharina Konradi perform an all-Mozart programme.

Die Zufriedenheit (1785)  - Christian Felix Weisse (1726 - 1804)

Wie sanft, wie ruhig fühl' ich hier
Des Lebens Freuden ohne Sorgen!
Und sonder Ahnung leuchtet mir
Willkommen jeder Morgen.

Mein frohes, mein zufried'nes Herz
Tanzt nach der Melodie der Haine,
Und angenehm ist selbst mein Schmerz,
Wenn ich vor Liebe weine.

Wie sehr lach' ich die Großen aus,
Die Blutvergießer, Helden, Prinzen!
Denn mich beglückt ein kleines Haus,
Sie nicht einmal Provinzen.

Wie wüten sie nicht wider sich,
Die göttergleichen Herr'n der Erden!
Doch brauchen sie mehr Raum als ich,
Wenn sie begraben werden?

Barbara Bonney Geoffrey Parsons "Die Zufriedenheit" W.A. Mozart


Julianne Baird, Soprano & Colin Tilnet, Fortepiano :  Mozart - Die Zufriedenheit, K. 473

Elly Ameling & Dalton Baldwin Mozart: Die Zufriedenheit: Wie sanft, wie ruhig, K.473

L'émission hebdomadaire de 20 minutes "In Touch" (avec transcription) sur BBC 4 animée par Peter White, aveugle de naissance, s'adresse aux aveugles et aux malvoyants.

Le numéro du 20 novembre 2022 avait pour sujet Can You Prepare for Blindness?

Il y est surtout question du deuil difficile à envisager par des personnes dont le métier est l'art visuel. Autres points : comment faire face quand on vit seul ? Quels groupes d'entraide peuvent intervenir ? L'émission fournit conseils pratiques et soutien, comme dans "Woman's hour" à la différence que Peter White ne joue pas au psychologue ou à l'assistante sociale réconfortante.

Une bonne émission qui a nécessairement sa place à la radio, média non visuel, ce que Radio France veut faire oublier.

Getting a diagnosis that your sight will deteriorate or eventually be gone entirely, can be life changing news. But can you prepare for it?

We brought together three people who are different stages along the sight loss path. Pauline Mottram received the diagnosis that she will definitely eventually go blind only a few days ago, and so we invite Amit Patel, who ten years ago went blind overnight and Marcia Beynon, who has a progressive condition and is yet to lose more of her vision, to offer some tips and guidance on this life changing event.

They all tackle the question: can you really prepare for blindness?

Très séduisante interprétation de



lors d'un concert diffusé sur BBC Radio 3 dans Through the night Thun Castle Concerts (Mon 5 Dec 2022, 3 days left to listen). Un concert donné en juin 2021 et dont a été retranché le quatuor de Beethoven.



Pacific Quartet Vienna Concerts Archives




Vidéos


Pacific Quartet Vienna, W.A. Mozart Streichquartett KV 421 d-moll, 1. Allegro moderato