Ooh, ooh, absolutely! I was at a talk Martin Butler gave about his music last year (think I started a discussion about it on the old R3 boards) when I think Chris Fox quite embarrassed Martin by the extent of his publicly-expressed enthusiasm for Hootenanny! I've never actually heard the piece entire, so I'll tune in after the Big Brother eviction show.

PS. Am I missing something?
PPS. The Bernstein title is one of those things that you can never quite take seriously again after you've tried to text someone about the piece, as I once did, and had your predictive text mechanism turn it into 'Prelude, Fugue and Sheep'.

Actually, I'm going to step gently out onto the limb and say that it's actually a better piece than the Stravinsky, for my ears.

And, um, _yes_, Evan, you should actually listen to a piece b/f voicing an opinion about it.  Perhaps you've been spending too much time on the American versions of these boards, in which such behavior is the norm.

Two out of three excellent performances; but there's a hopping mad Ron here, feeling that the third work (actually the Martin Butler, the first in the programme) was given a pretty half-hearted performance, rhythmically sloppy and generally showing signs of being little more than a cursory read-through, with nary a sign of the bounce and élan I know this work to have. Just to make sure, I've been into the Dough archive box to find my aircheck of the previous radio performance to listen to, to ensure that I've not been labouring under some disillusion about the piece. Not a bit of it, the hair's standing up on the back of my neck again; with a committed performance the piece positively crackles.

It does seem very sad to me that the Beeb can allow itself to represent a living composer who's not heard all that frequently on its wavelengths so shabbily. Is there no quality control any more? Was nobody aware that it was a somewhat subfusc performance, and as such might seriously misrepresent the composer's work?

<bangs head against brick wall emoticon>

Well, I did say that I couldn't take the title seriously, but still.  If it helps I don't much care for the Stravinsky piece either.

(slinks away to NMBx)

Darn, am away so missed all this, and the broadcast.    But from what Ron says, perhaps it's just as well.
Tinners, IIRC ( ), the piece's title is taken from that of leftist political fundraising events common in the folk movement in the US during the thirties and forties. So the Beeb copywriters simply seem to have got themselves muddled.

George, 
There's a pretty good recording by Orkest de Volharding, who commissioned and first performed the piece. It's on Challenge 70057.

Oh, and also IIRC, the piece has absolutely NOTHING AT ALL to do with jazz.