A Mind Blowing Performance

I stopped paying much attention to Beethoven in 1981, after having a quasi-religious experience while listening to Mozart’s Great Mass in C minor. I never stopped listening; I simply stopped listening properly. I now glory in his rediscovery. I bought the Hogwood/Lubin/AAM PC box set in 1990 out of  a sense of duty. It’s an astonishing achievement. Here is the 1st movement of No. 5 in Eb major. What I most like about this performance is the total abandonment of restraint within a set of broadly Mozartian assumptions.

For the Symphonies, though, Mrs Gabb has bought me the 1963 Karajan set. John Kersey recommends it; and, while she won’t let me remove the cellophane wrapping until Christmas Eve, and will then nag me about the state of my hearing whenever I play the disks, the YouTube previews sound very exciting.

Next year, I may give up on torturing my women with the flute, and take to the piano.

p;

Nigel Lawson Puts the Boot into the Greenslime Beeb

LETTER TO LORD HALL FROM GWPF TRUSTEES (The Global Warming Policy Foundation)

The Global Warming Policy Foundation – 14 December 2012

Dear Lord Hall,

As Trustees of the all-Party and non-Party Global Warming Policy Foundation, we would like to wish you every success in your new and important post of Director General of the BBC. It is clear that you have a number of urgent matters to attend to in your post. But when you have done that, we hope you will find time to turn your attention to a matter which, although not urgent, is of considerable importance: the BBC’s treatment of global warming and climate change issues.

Gay Marriage, political correctness and Newspeak

by Robert Henderson
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/gay-marriage-political-correctness-and-newspeak/

The commonly made objections to Gay Marriage are (a) marriage is traditionally between a man and a woman, a fact underpinned for many opponents by religious beliefs that only a man and a woman can be married, (b) claims that expansion of the definition of marriage to include same sex relationships will undermine the family and (c) such a novel status creates a legal anomaly whereby homosexual relationships become in some areas privileged over close non-sexual relationships between people of the same sex, for example, two elderly spinster sisters living together.