Goodness me,I didn't know Rozhdestvensky was still alive.

Will he be changing the programme? During his time as Chief Cionductor,BBC SO,he tried valiantly to conduct some English music, with some bizarre results. I was sleft applauding him for programming  'The Apostles'and 'Song of the High Hills' but dismayed at the interpretation.

"The programme will remain unchanged."

This is the advantage of having Facebook, you see!

I'm afraid Genyusha's 'Sancta Civitas'was an example of what I meant! But it was 25 years ago and maybe I was too picky then. I hope you enjoy it.

I shall certainly be interested to hear him conduct the Elgar Variations.

   A real pleasure to see Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, affectionately known as Noddy, back at the Proms again on BBC 4.    A pity that the director seemed unaware of his charismatic flair for expression as it would have been pertinent to favour him more.   The whole evening was a  musical delight.

Rozhdestvensky is also the spitten image of Bert Lahr (the cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz") and I'm only sorry that I cannot download the cover photograph from his his son, John Lahr's biography,  Notes on a Cowardly Lion, which portrays Bert as Estragon in  Waiting for Godot.   After touring the production, Bert said that playing Waiting for Godot in Miami was like doing Giselle at Roseland.         

As a prelude to this evening's Prom, which I have yet to hear, I treated myself to the recently tracked-down BBC Classics live GR RVW5 and Sancta Civitas alluded to above. On sound and performance terms the symphony yielded absolutely nothing to the recent Proms performance, whilst his reading of the choral piece made a decidedly more positive impression on me to that it did on Smitters all those years ago.   

I trust everyone gathered that the podium was the other way round tonight?  ()

We can only conjecture what Gatti would have produced. But what an odd style "Noddy" had. Lots of big gestures, and lots of (from behind) apparently nothing. I was dreading the Enigma, falsely pre-judging it from the Telegraph CDs, but it filled its place very well. Couldn't really hear the organ though (in the arena one never can but this was worse than most) which was a shame, still felt the vibr-rrr-rations though.

I missed it.  Had to do some domestic repairs while my brother was there to help.  We had the Elgar on in the background but I couldn't listen properly.  I'm going to try and record the BBC4 repeat.  The main problem with this is that my cheap Freeview box does a nightly software update unless you're actually there to override it so I'm likely to miss five minutes of the concert - unless I'm incredibly lucky and the update coincides with interval waffle.  I wish I could find a way to reschedule this for the daytime but there's nothing in the manual about it.  Never mind, there's always the R3 repeat next week.