Thought it might be good to get a general thread going on music and more general arts on TV. We often question whether it's worth paying our Sky subscription, but every now and then something comes along, often on Sky Arts, that makes it all worthwhile.

Last night I caught a programme on the British artist Helen Chadwick, who died tragically young in the nineties. She did a lot of stuff with meat, dead animals, compost and bodily fluids, and yet all of it exquisitely beautiful and not remotely yucky.

I was paticularly knocked out by her dramatic Pembrokeshire seascapes overlaid with micrographs of her own cellular tissue which bought nature at two different levels of scale into the most wonderful juxtaposition.

Other things that have really caught me on Sky Arts are Tan Dun's First Emperor at the Met, the Evelyn Glennie documentary, Touch the Sound, great stuff on Francis Bacon and The Secret Shostakovich. I even caught myself really moved by Sylvia (Delibes?) and, being a nerd, dance has been a medium I have been quite shut off to.

Then there's Cocteau's Orphee which comes around with great regularity, which is always great grist for the dream mill before bed.

John, I've occasionally wondered whether to lash out and get Sky. From time to time I see something in the Radio Times that prompts me - like the departure of Tim Marlowe from Terrestrial - then I look at what is on offer on Freeview digital, my CD and DVD collection of music, and decide not to. There are times when BBC4 lives up to its mission and ceases to be a source of repeats of 'quality programmes' or trails for programmes that might be shown on terrestrial channelsa at some futuire date. One such is right now, with the Proms and that does me fine.

Have just re-watched The Art of Francis Bacon on Sky Arts. Have realised that my first viewing of this film, a few months back, did more than anything to spark the quantum leap in my appreciation of painting that seems to have occurred over the last few months. Lately there has ceased to be much difference between my experience of a painting and my experience of a piece of music. I now spend about the same amount of time looking at a painting that I like as I do listening to a classical movement. The variety of feelings I get while doing so is similar. And I can come back to the same painting at another time and have an experience that is the same but different. I used to think I was an art lover but I actually can't remember what it is I used to do in front of a painting before this fresh awakening. Mainly have an overwhelming sensation that I like what I'm seeing but that I should be seeing far more than I actually am, I think.

This Bacon programme is glorious. Just his works with Bacon's words read by Derek Jacobi. Bacon is an artist who's thoughts about art and life are almost as engaging as his canvasses. I wise and surprisingly gentle nihilism, given the violence of his images. His brushwork has almost infinite depth while his forms and compositions are so clear and direct. I think Bacon wil rise in the general estimation of the art pantheon as time goes on. It would seem to be happening already. But I could see him going all the way to the top. He is, in a sense, the van Gogh of our age, that is if we're preparedd to look at the truth of van Gogh head on.

Another thing that occurs is how good modern TV as a means of preventing painting. The camerawork on this programme takes you in and out from part to whole, bringing all sort s of details vividly to light, and then placing them into the overall composition. While the quality of the image is better than you'd get from all but the most expensive reproductions.

I wish you had preceded that with an appreciation of the short documentary about the early work of the Pre-Raphaelites which went out on Tuesday on BBC4 which also had the advantage of the usual close examination of the canvases - especially as you had mused a week or so earlier about what the Pre-Raphs 'were for'. This half hour documentary answered that question very well as well as conveying extremely well the texture of their painting.
There will be another short documentary next week following their work in pace with the improving drama series on 2 in which the background music is getting progressively quieter as things get more serious, just as I expected.
Subject matter does count for something in painting and as far as Bacon is concerned he is speaking to the converted in my case and his art has no interest for me whatever. What life is and what art can be are two very different things.
His art has nothing to tell me that I don't want to forget.
As for his purely painterly qualities, they can found in the work of many painters. And there are plenty of other forms of painterly qualities in other artists. It's his subject matter and his bohemian legend combined with bourgeois self-loathing that has brought him to the forefront. Why should I struggle to bracket out the subject matter in order to appreciate the paint? Just to prove I can?

But I do very much agree with you about the value of presenting art or painting on TV. I have benefited from it all my life.
But don't forget the 'art of forgetting the unpleasant' as John Cowper Powys called it.

Well beat that! The National Youth Orchestra at the Proms. Better than ever. I hope you were watching Adam, it's so much better when you can see it as well.
The Lutoslawski seems to me to be a work that took on Stravinsky's Rite more successfully than anything else I can think of without being sucked in on Stavinsky's terms and adding much that is not present in the Rite. But I've never heard it sound as good as that before.

Basiledes, Was out last night so the NYO and Petrenko (who we know well in Liverpool!) is a treat in store on my digital recorder.

I'm constantly amazed at what the NYO put on at the Proms - I still remember their Gurrelieder from some years back, a really splendid performance. And the Rite recording with Rattle was quite special as well.

The Lutoslawski is a very underrated work as compared with its Bartok model. I wonder why?

Certainly, pre-photography, and thus fore the PRs, content is half of the equation when considering any painting. In the photographic era, and thus for Bacon, the contribution of content is debatable for any painting. But I think if we agree to compare on the basis of content, then I suspect we are going to end up with a contrast that you will find despicable. I'm afraid that to me ordinary humans are essentially ugly creatures, pink and hairless, more like pigs than gazelles, and for the most part, outside of the their natural state, malformed through over-nourishment. They grunt and snuffle about, engaged in their complex, and largely circular, activites, convinced of the importance of themselves and their projects. I think you see where this heading. Don't get me wrong. I don't place inordinate value on bitterness and grotesquerie in the human in art, but I am intrigued by the modernist quest for the objective and neutral depiction of human facts. I think you can guess that to someone with this sensibility (or not as you may see it :-) the desperate romanticism of the PRs can only seem quaint at best. The blind preoccupation with feminine beauty while having little or nothing to say about the reality of the feminine principle or experience is, to me, an expression of the myopia of the times. Again, don't get me wrong, I love the PR canvasses, their colour and light, but I can't regard their content without my tongue in my cheek. I hope this isn't arousing too intense a hostility.

For me, humans may be redeemable from their material state, but it has to start with the quest for an objective appraisal of what we really are, warts and all. I believe very strongly, that after WWI and the exposure of the Great Lie, we just could no longer afford the luxury of seeing ourselves through the distorting lens of idealising romanticism. This is why I am a modernist through and through, because everything that happened before the Great War was lived and done by sleepwalkers, addicted to idealised and unrealistic forms of beauty. When you put the mighty forces of technology at the disposal of people who see themselves as knights in shining armour or damsels in need of rescue, then the result is nightmarish destruction that can take civilisation to the brink of total collapse. The modernist quest since the Great War has travelled to some dark places, and too often can leave us wondering if there is anything of value worth saving at all. I do live in hope, however, that the journey will prove ultimately worthwhile, and that eventually we will arrive at a new more balanced conception of ourselves. One that affords a measure of dignity based on truth and self knowledge, rather than on vanity and narcissitic projection.

I would accept that Bacon's pictures, taken by themselves, give the strong impression of one more artist, filled with nihilistic loathing, out to shock the bourgeousie from their complacency. But the words that were selected to accompany the paintings in the film throw them into a different and, while still nihilistic, more sane and moderate light, and show that Bacon was much wiser and more grown up than that. He pained the world, the human, as it was. He didn't seek to just isolate the nasty bits and shove them in our faces. He paints an ecclesiastical figure with a thousand overlaid faces, trapped, screaming, rabid, lost. This is not meant to be a mere portrait of hypocricy. It is statement of the ethical contradictions and paradoxes that bind humanity in general. By juxtaposing the ecclesiastic against a couple of meat carcasses he is making clear the background against which all our ethical struggles take place. If we look at that and see pain and horror and then choose to register shock, then it is we who bring that shock to the experience, having chosen to keep our general daily consciousness clear of all this that we have otherwise kept under the carpet of the unconscious. Or we can look at the painting and say, yes this how things are, meat is the beginning and end of everything, and of everything we choose to forget in order to be civilised, and this is the kind of mind I must have in order to accomplish the disassociation. We are then free to admire the extraordinary brushwork that allows a single face to be a thousand, and the beautiful impasto darkness of the unconscious from which the objects of content emerge.

There is the art of neglecting the unpleasant and then the art of integrating and redeeming the unpleasant.

I think you must have missed what I meant what I said that Bacon preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned (- meaning me as the already converted, being a 'gnostic' of course as you should know, and I thought you did so I didn't labour the point). That is why I have no interest in Bacon or many other artists of this negative kidney.
They aren't going to tell me anything I don't already know and wish I didn't know so well through being reminded of it every day without Bacon's 'help'. So much art of this kind I find rather patronising to anyone other than, possibly, the most deluded New Age types. (One shouldn't underestimate how much many people are already aware of this truth. They only fall short of admitting, even to themselves that life isn't ultimately worth it.)
I want art that tell's me something I don't know, or perhaps more to the point, don't feel.

But as usual that was an excellent post of yours, beautifully written and well thought out as a statement. It more or less states my own point of view really, but comes to the opposite conclusions about art. My aesthetics have a lot to do with coming to this opposite conclusion. Art is not committed to telling the truth as I've said before. That's far too easy. It's much more difficult to create meaning or 'discover' meaning through the imagination of art.
That is my main interest in art - the way it can create meaning or 'discover' meaning. You may ask how can you discover meaning and suggest that this is a contradiction but I can only say this is a whole different story that I don't want to pursue here because it takes me into territory that I have spent most of my life thinking about and exploring.

All the same there is also a matter on which you go wrong. You are forgetting that when the PRB started they were Realist artists and the early criticism that was levelled against them, most famously by Dickens was that they presented things in an unnecessarily ugly and honest way as a result of their guiding principle of 'truth to nature'. They refused to idealise for the Academy in the conventional way. It was Rossetti who started the move away from this independently with his creation of the medieval dream based to a great extent on his Italian family obsession with Dante and, particularly for Rossetti, with the philosophy of Love found in Dante's 'Vita Nuova'. This was more and more taken up by the later Pre-Raphs again taking their lead from Rossetti with his interest in Arthurian subjects and his awareness that he was living out the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot story with Morris and his wife. They started as Realists and ended as Symbolists with a convergence of Rossetti and Debussy in 'The Blessed Damozel'. Rossetti had a very great influence on European art towards the end of the century as the Romantic Agony reached it's height in the Decadence both through his graphic 'line' and his exploration of forms of the feminine 'Other'.
Neither Holman Hunt nor Millais were obsessed with female beauty. Fortunately Rossetti was, in both poetry and painting, and was much 'required' by the 'history of art' just at that particular cultural moment. His contribution taken up by a few other later 'Pre-Raphs and Symbolists and then Expressionists all directly linked back to him had more to say about the feminine principle, as you say, than any other school, or period, or lineage of art. And Rossetti 'invented' the androgenous beauty as represented in a female as opposed to being represented by a camp male as in some Renaissance art, either painted by homosexual artists or commissioned by homosexual patrons.
His poetry was as influential as his Symbolist /ArtNouveau icons and was admired even by a figure as implicated in Modernism as Ezra Pound. Most people on this forum will know Vaughan Williams' song cycle 'The House Of Life' based on sonnets by Rossetti, and especially the rapt meditation 'Silent Noon' His poems are in many cases the verbal equivalent of his paintings but also often seek to expand the frozen moment of consciousness as it is transfixed, hypnotised, interpenetrated or absorbed by the Other (When he fails in this he takes refuge in a Dantesque or Neo-Platonic theology of Love in order to explain it). Rossetti is a major figure in European cultural history masquerading as a minor one.

Holman-Hunt's painting of 'The Scapegoat' has been called the first Symbolist and the first Expressionist painting. The Pre-Raphs should always be thought of together with a small number of contemporaries like Madox Brown and Walter Deverall who with the PRB itself pioneered historical documentary accuracy in their paintings and prompted the painters of the Academy to do likewise producing as a result some extraordinary decades of academic 'history painting' that makes you 'feel you were there'. Cecil B deMille and D W Griffith learned everything from them. These paintings are largely unknown now as they have largely disappeared into private collections but many of them were once known through very generously illustrated heavyweight histories of civilisation.
Other later painters followed Hunt and early Millais in the Realist and Poetic Realist direction where what had been genre painting, previously mostly done on the continent where it had even achieved greatness in Spain, invaded the academy and produced a fine body of paintings reflecting Victorian social conditions,
The Symbolists, with their exploration of the subconscious ( picking up where Romanticism left off) were the forerunners of the Expressionists (also picking up from where Romanticism left off). BACON is an Expressionist rather than a Realist as I've mainly heard him described, but which is nonsense. At the very least you would have to settle for 'Realist Expressionist'.

I like to champion the Pre-Raphs in the same way I champion Tolkien because both of them come in for the inevitable condescension that comes from being perfectly straightforward, totally unpretentious and the sort of art that anyone can understand if they are not put off by the fear of being untrendy, uncool or unsophisticated. Both of course were trendy for 3 or 4 years in the late 60's before the inevitable backlash from 'clever folk' for committing the sin of being too popular.
Standing up for them is part of my campaign against received opinion in all its obvious and not so obvious insidious forms.
It works the other way too which is why Mahler's Song of The Earth annoys the hell out of me. The sort of estimation in which that is held strikes me as pure twaddle - profundity for the superficial.

It's just occurred to me that the course of Millais' carreer is a bit like Paul McCartney's: early brilliance bordering on genius followed by almost complete dullness as domesticity stifled him creatively, while selling-out politically. But at least McCartney continued to perform well on stage while Millais became the complete Victorian with hardly a trace of his early promise.

I played the Lutoslawski on CD today and I'm sorry to say it didn't do much for me and sounds just as it always did. I don't think there is anything wrong with the performance or the recording , it just isn't that interesting a work. Nowhere near as good as the Bartok in fact and I can no longer hear those internal Stravinskyan rhythms. It must have been the added visuals of the NYO that pulled the wool over my eyes.
I didn't even like or enjoy the work today, finding it much too simple and sounding much too like Bartok a lot of the time and nowhere near as interesting.

Sorry, are you still talking about the Lutoslawski? What did they play?

Yes. They played the Concerto for Orchestra. I'm sorry you missed it, I know he's a favourite of yours. The repeat will be on the radio later on in the week in the afternoon. But it won't be the same without the sight of that seething sea of orchestral players.

I've had to withdraw everything I said about Lutoslawski's Concerto For Orchestra except what I said about the performance by the NYO. It's not that strong a piece and I never thought it was until last Saturday night. I must make sure to listen again to that actual performance to see if there is something so miraculous about it that comes across in sound only. But the piece is really so simple that I can't see it's possible.
See my amended comments above.
The most obvious thing about it that I dislike is that not only is the main theme not sufficiently diguised as it's being shared around but it hardly ever escapes it's folk origins and never departs from the simplicity and naivete that folk infers in most cases, Folk elements CAN be treated with sophistication that often comes from loss and nostalgia, as in for example Delius, but that's far from the kind of work we are dealing with here.

I'm getting quite enthusuastic about 'Desperate Romantics'; it's a very clever dramatisation and a very lively piece of popular drama on a hugely deserving subject as I hope anyone who has taken the trouble to watch the two half hour 'documentaries' following the last two episodes, will have realised. The Pre-Raphs especially in their early work deserve enormous admiration and should never be taken for granted. These excellent supplementary programmes provide the much needed education in art history that should ensure the respect they are not always given. I do hope they are included on the DVD set of the series but unfortunately the BBC have failed in a similar case to this before, so I'm not confident.

As far as the drama is concerned it's quite brilliant in some ways. I hope anyone inclined to dismiss it as froth has taken note of what I said a week or so back about the way it's constructed on a fully mapped out three dimensional grid of the Quaternio ( not the one in Logic).

S

Basiledes, I suspect you are on the rebound after hearing an absolutely stunning performance by the NYO and then hearing someone else's. I've known Lutoslawski for over thirty years and know the piece well, so a few things in its favour:
1. It breathes new life into old forms - the final movement is a tour de force of contrasts - the Passacaglia changing into the Chorale, and then the final apotheosis.
2. In writing a Concerto for Orchestra, the composer was consciously following Bartok, producing a work showing off the various departments of the orchestra (and does so, brilliantly).
3. Thematically, the Concerto is tightly integrated, more so in fact than Bartok's.
4. Another consequence of the Bartok model was the expectation of a piece that would end in a massive climax. Ironic, as Bartok had originally envisaged a much less showy, less rhetorical ending.

Incidentally, if you heard the music without knowing the composer, you might think it was by a Hungarian composer - the 'snaps' in the first movement are pure Bartok.

There are things in the Bartok that you don't find in Lutoslawski - the send-up of the Leningrad symphony, the humour of the Guouco alla coppie, the reference to Bluebeard.... but I'm glad I have both works.

Basiledes, I'm a bit behind with my 'Desperate Romantics', having only just seen the second episode. Mrs Mondoro, who has done University Art History courses (including Victorian art) and knows the period well in her professional capacity, frequently interjects when liberties are taken with the chronology of events, the paintings themselves, and the development of relationships involving for example Effie and Millais. More seriously, there seem to be some distortions of the characters as presented: Holman Hunt has become a sexual hypocrite - a common traversty in programmes about Victoriana - just imagine what they could make of Gladstone's hobby of rescuing prostitutes! - and Millais has become 'a man on the make', a reading back from his later financial successes. This worries me a little, though I confess I am enjoying the series. It has some virtues that the 'Tudors', another series that took considerable liberties with the facts, lacked in great measure. The use of a 'narrator' is a significent plus, though a fairly commmon device.

As I said earlier, a provisional assessment only. The documentaries - actually repeats from the late spring - do help a lot - though like many such things, there is rather too much repetition from one documentary to the next, unnecessary when most people will be copying them anyway. Again, a common fault these days, especially when there are breaks in between for advertising and the assumption is that the viewer has a very short memory span.

On the rebound? It's a theory I suppose.
Still the work was not new to me although I have not heard it for years but I do NOT recall being particularly impressed with it in the past when I played it in on my old Decca vinyl. The version I played a couple of days ago was conducted by the composer on the CD that came with Music Magazine.
Your defence of it would make sense if it still sounded to me as it seemed to sound on Saturday night but now it just doesn't accord with what I hear and understand. Essentially it's a very simple piece with the same simple folk-like theme tossed around endlessly and not sufficiently disguised mainly I think because it's too simple to disguise.
I strongly suspect that I was distracted by the visuals and also 'benefited' from the fact that I missed the start when the theme is crudely hammered into the listener. This meant that, not having heard it for a long time, I had to find the theme for myself. Not difficult but that combined with the visual distractions meant that my consciousness was more happily occupied than when listening to the CD.
I had a not altogether different experience with his Third Symphony. When I heard the Premier I was highly enthusiastic but on getting the first recording not long after I was very disappointed. That's a much more complex work, but not complex enough.

I believe there is ample justification and evidence for treating Holman Hunt in this way and even if it is slightly exaggerated it makes for excellent drama. In any case to say that he is presented as a hypocrite is an over-simplification as I'm sure you realise.
It's also over-simplifying to say that Millais is shown as being especially on the make from the beginning, in fact I don't think he is shown in this way. That would spoil the Geometry because Rossetti is the one who is shown to be on the make from the beginning. Dramatic balance would not allow that sort of duplication. Millais is shown to be brilliantly gifted but corruptible, either through innocence or stupidity.
But apart from the usual debates about how 'accurate' a drama like this is it is usually conceded that time-hallowed practice allows certain liberties to be taken in the interests of drama as Art, and you can cite any number of precedents from the historical dramas of Schiller, Buchner, Pushkin etc. without having to mention the best known example of W.S. who may not have known whether he was telling it like it was or not, but either way I don't think he would have been much bothered as long as it made a good play i.e. a work of art.
And in this particular case the motive for differentiating the characters in this particular way is very clear and is the reason why I think it's so clever and quite possibly even a little inspired.
He's not just a narrator he is one of the main characters and, although fictional, is a composite of Stephens and Deverall. As I have said already, he is crucial to the geometry of the 4. He is d'Artagnan to their 3 Musketeers: you can work out the others for yourself, bearing in mind that The Musketeers sequence of novels is the greatest epic in modern literature, and the reasons for that are not just the obvious ones.
By the way, if you think that's an eccentric point of view I recommend you read the introduction to the new Oxford World Classics edition where you will find the same judgement.
And it's another work of art, like all of Dumas' novels, where a few liberties are taken with history.
The writer of desperate Romantics may have found his archetypes in Dumas but where did Dumas find them? Deep in his own mind, that's where, like all great artists.

Having a love of the pre-raph art, I consider you somewhat harsh Basiledes in your summation of Millais by your comparison of him to McCartney.

Millais was initially heavily influenced by Rossetti as may be seen in his drawings, however Holman Hunt was his biggest influence and they both had a love of Shakespearean subjects. As he gained popularity, he did fore-go the pre-raph principals and "chased the dollar", and became a wealthy man. However, it is now generally agreed that he was one of the greatest Victorian painters and his portrait of Gladstone is one of the finest examples of that late period. To quote Ruskin " ..whether he is good one year, or bad, he is always the most powerful of them all"

As for the TV serial - it's fun and I am enjoying it!

"Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world"

How delightful to find another Dumas enthusiast. "Three Musketeers" and "Twenty Years After", by all means, although my Boy's Own Favourite is "The Count of Monte Cristo", surely one of the best novels of revenge, and one of the completest. Also with one of the best last lines, which I have already quoted in another connexion. It could serve as the collector's Creed.

On Broadway in San Francisco in the late 1950's, one of the local characters was fitted out in full musketeer regalia, sword, plumed hat, imperial beard and all. Encountering him unexpectedly at the door of a watering hole one evening, I blurted out "Where are the other two of you?" He didn't take it too well.

(The last line of "Cristo": "All human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope." ("Call me. Ishmael" .... is my new answer-back.)

I was reminded today of Suk's tremendous symphonic poem 'Ripening' which was played on Radio3 this morning. Vey complex and very hard to follow the themes much more so than any symphony for very obvious reasons. In symphonies the themes are impossible to miss and so there is no fun to be had hunting for them.
In many ways this work actually IS the sort of thing that the Lutoslawsk 'Concerto' SEEMED to be when I saw it on TV last Saturday having missed the exposition and then with the distraction of the visuals. At least very similar except for obviously lacking the Stravinskyan rhythms from the Rite in the inner parts, which at least in the NYO performance were much more in evidence, it seemed to me, than in the version conducted by the composer. But we all know that composers are not always the best conductors of their own work so maybe there is a chance that Mondoro is right. But I'm pessimistic.

Basilides, what are these distracting visuals? Are we talking about pretty ladies in the orchestra? Whaetver it was it must have been really hogging CPU cycles, as we say in the trade, for there to be such a discrepancy in your experience with and without visuals.

I've been holding back from responding to your reaction to the CfO. I must admit I was surprised at your initial positive reaction. I hold back because I find I need a completely different language to discuss this kind of, what I consider to be, timbral texture music. For me CfO, as with pretty well all of L's mature music is a legal substitute for psychedelia, playing merry havoc as it does with my synaesthesia. Melody is a non-category for me when listening to this. I had no idea there was a folk theme in there, so respect for spotting it. Harmony and aleoterically generated rhythms are subservient to the textures. Dynamics are everything. The opening device of the fortisimo call to attention on a single note, and then furtive twitterings in the flutes, which is then repeated at key points in different families, has the effect of utterly grabbing my attention and then putting me into a place of dynamic stillness, wherein I am completely alert, but feeling movement all around me. For me, it is a supremely easy piece of music to listen to. Easy in the sense of putting me in the deepest state of attention with virtually no effort. Whatever the aesthetic judgement of this approach to composition, it does a thing to my consciousness that is one of the things I value and want most in and from music. What's more, when it is doing this thing to me, I have complete conviction that this is what Witold intended it to do to me. There, finally found the words, or some anyway.

You are describing very well exactly how I felt last Saturday night.
Strangely enough I've just been listening to the last two movements again before coming back to the computer, but this time I was listening in exactly the same acoustic as on Saturday but with the same speakers I've used previously with the CD in another place, and with slightly better results. These are better speakers than the very good ones I was using on the night and in fact the very best I can bring to bear on the business. The results were pleasing, nothing was missed in the detail (we are talking 7 times the price of first speakers with best matching amplifier).

Why were you surprised by my first positive reaction?

No, I wasn't referring to the pretty ladies in the orchestra although naturally I did notice there were quite a few of them and of course it might have played a part - no, I was referring to the general enhancement of the experience because of what these days is the incredibly tight live editing or cutting of the image to the section of the orchestra or the individual player concerned, which the BBC have got done to a fine art - in fact the precision is quite staggering.

'Hogging CPU cycles' - I like that, and will remember it as a useful reference. Mind you it might not have worked like that at all. It may not have been 'distraction' so much as extra CPU activity, as it were.

It isn't the same TV, but US-PBS last night had live from Lincoln Center in New York, the Mostly Mozart Orchestra, which was Mostly Mendelssohn for the evening, Louis Langree and Joshua Bell: Haydn's 104th, Mendelssohn's "Hebrides" and violin concerto with Bell's own cadenzas, which he also had played earlier in a Mozart adagio and rondo (that quoted four times a favourite Haydn tag-line). Long interviews with Langree and Bell (who talked about his ex-Huberman Stradivarius, the one stolen from Huberman's dressing room at Carnegie Hall and not recovered for 50 years, after the deaths of Huberman and the thief. Bell bought it from Norbert Brainin, leader of the Amadeus Quartet.) The interviewer was a rather breathless Alan Alda. This sort of thing was formerly customary on PBS, but now rare, having been pre-empted by "Antiques Roadshow" and worse. Much worse. No pre-Raphs on "Roadshow", more's the pity.