Ollie, 

Sir John Barbirolli
Leopold Spoke-owski
Georges Prater

Now, I wish i could be there for that, Ian: a very intriguing and enterprising programme. Rather a lively acoustic, if my memory serves me right (directed and played in The Marat/Sade there for KCL Dramsoc before the new theatre opened). The other one as well for that matter...

Ian,
Is the first concert title Some versions of Pastoral?

I wish I could be there.

Yes - the title comes from a 1935 book by the literary critic William Empson. The idea is to present very different ideas of the 'pastoral' than those which are generally offered up by English pastoralism.

You both are such an impressive personalities for me.
I googled and came up with this:
Empson remarks in the first few pages of Some Versions of Pastoral that:

    Gray's Elegy is an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas:

        Full many a gem of purest ray serene
        The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
        Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
        And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

    What this means, as the context makes clear, is that eighteenth century England had no scholarship system or carrière ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it. ... By comparing the social arrangement to Nature he makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives it a dignity which was undeserved. ... The tone of melancholy claims that the poet understands the considerations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges against them; the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death.

Empson goes on to deliver his political verdict with a subtle psychological suggestion:

    Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the 'bourgeois' themselves do not like literature to have too much 'bourgeois ideology.'

Really??!

Now I'm really jealous, Ron!!!

I went last night to hear Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake in Schumann and Britten, Dichterliebe and The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. This was in the small Concert Room in St George's Hall in Liverpool, where I hadn't been since it re-opened last year. Beautiful room, holds 480 I believe, concert sold out. The programme was my idea of a blissful evening (well, perhaps Schubert instead of Schumann would be better), and I'd never heard the Donne Sonnets live before, though I'm addicted to the Pears/Britten recording. So it should have been wonderful, and almost was, but was rather spoilt for me by the acoustic, which is rather swimmy and ringing, so that words - so important, especially in the Britten - were obscured. I don't think this was Bostridge's fault, though he does have a slight touch of "Singerese" word distortion. It wasn't helped by the fact that the auditorium lights were turned off, so we couldn't read the words, awkward for those who don't know them. His mannerisms weren't as irritating as they are sometimes, and he was clearly deeply committed, tearing his heart out in the Britten to an almost frightening degree. I thought his breathing was a bit dodgy, and he also had to cough occasionally, so I hope he's able to do the Britten Serenade tomorrow at the Philharmonic, where we should be able to hear better. Drake was also very impassioned as he wrestled with the very difficult (I'm told) piano part, riveting to watch. Much to my surprise, they did an encore, a Schumann song that I didn't know and didn't catch the title of. It actually worked rather well, relieving the tension.

It's reassuring to know that there is an enthusiastic audience (including a few children!) for this sort of concert in a city so obsessed with football and the Beatles. The Andreas Scholl concert, which had to be postponed because of illness, was also sold out.