Not I, but while we await hearing from anyone else who may do so (and since a few other arguably unlikely cadidates for word setting have also been posted here), may I make a similar case for the dreaful piece of doggerel by Randall Swingler that dogs the finale of the otherwise splendid and all too rarely performed Piano Concerto by Alan Bush? I'm nowhere near my score of this right now, but I'll post it later when I am, if anyone wants it.

To return to Mr Dean, I was not suggesting (nor, I suspect, was the writer who drew our attention to this piece of "advertising") that those words about his piece are either by him or even necessarily representative of him (although if anyone advertised anything of mine like that, I don't imagine myself taking it lying down unless it would guarantee an awful lot of money, which hardly seems likely in this case).

Best,

Alistair

I do! It was really rather funny. The conceit was that it was sung as a Psalm. I assume (but don't know) that it started out as a party piece at and some cathedral's end of term choir party or something like that and took off from there? It was one of those 'novelty' records that made it quite high up into the charts and led to one (or more?) of those strange occasions on Top of the Pops when the studio audience wasn't sure whether they should be bopping along to it or not.

Alistair, what on earth is wrong with designing a concert based o the common experience of these two composers. Both are know for starting their careers as viola players, after all.

That was actually Alice Goodman, BobbyZ. Amanda Holden has mostly done opera translations (and is very good at it too IMHO) but she did the original libretto (from O'Casey) of Turnage's The Silver Tassie. It sounds like a promising collaboration to me.

I suppose the piece that "Vexations and Devotions" reminded me of just a bit was John Tavener's "Celtic Requiem" though more in terms of the general concept than the actual music.

No one else has commented on the work yet (gulp) but I really took to it. I suppose the main criticism I'd have was that some of the 'right thinking' words (as opposed to those that were being satirised) weren't really good enough for the job and ended up a bit mawkish. But that apart, I thought it was great. (I don't mean portentously 'Great', I just mean 'great!'). Given its tag as a 'sociological cantata', which was enough to make anyone head for the hills, it turned out not to be too solemn or pompous about it, which was a change and a relief and allowed it to make its points all the more effectively. And the children's choir were fabulously good. Loved 'em.   

A fine performance of Beethoven's 7th, I thought. Going straight into the second movement, something I hadn't heard before, was surprisingly effective. I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't done more often from now on.

As for the Brett Dean, sure life has its vexations but is hanging on the telephone and reading corporate jargon worth devoting forty minutes and such large forces to? I also thought the recorded announcements just laid it on too thickly; they were in danger of satirizing the music itself. And I don't know whether it was a problem the sound engineers had, my reception or the piece itself but often there were close ups of people playing lots of scurrying notes that were inaudible to me (the piano was an exception). In its favour I would say that it was an original, and often thought-provoking, take on a commonplace problems.

Well, the piece by Mr Brett Dean wasn't bad at all. Only the final movement was a bit too long for me. The performance was good. More a piece for the concert hall than for radio, I think.

I hope that next year the BBC will ask a better writer for the Proms website.

A highly interesting remark, c-d. Many thanks. 

So far, I've discovered that Stefan Wolpe wrote music for a play called Die Mausefalle (1931), not written by Agatha Christie but by Gustav von Wangenheim. One of the songs in this play is called Song von Angebot und Nachfrage.

I found this information in an introduction to Wolpe's music written by Mr Thomas Phleps:

http://www.uni-giessen.de/~g51092/wolpeeinfuehrung.html

According to my Autoren Lexikon edited by Manfred Brauneck the play was a success in Germany and after Hitler took power it was also performed in the United States and in the Soviet Union.

Many thanks, c-d!