speechification

A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded. And other bits of speech radio might find their way here too.

Of course, one day this might turn into something else, maybe a new skin for Radio 4, maybe a new way of curating radio, or maybe it won't.

Your hosts on this not very wild ride are Steve Bowbrick, Russell Davies and Roo Reynolds. Drop us a line with your thoughts, unless you wish to complain about continuity announcers and their accents.

Nov
12th

Mon

Pierre Boulez at Eighty

Pierre Boulez on 25 October 2004, from the Wikimedia Commons

Here we go: another one from the archives. The thing about Pierre Boulez is that he’s quite difficult to like - and his music is so prickly and deliberately inaccessible. But he’s got the magisterial Gallic charm thing going on. Oblique, Mercurial, uncompromising, obsessed. He’s kind of Napoleonic (Godardian?).

This hour long profile - which went out on Radio 3 a couple of years ago on his eightieth birthday - is really good value: lots of use is made of the Beeb’s exceptional access - all the top names are involved. The result is a portrait of the man but also of a fascinating and contradictory period in musical and intellectual history (MP3).

The pic is from the Wikimedia Commons.

Steve