Lully

Giovanni Battista Lulli; 28 November [O.S. 18 November] 1632 – 22 March 1687) was an Italian/French composer, dancer and instrumentalist of Italian birth, who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France and became a French subject in 1661. He was a close friend of the playwright Molière, with whom he collaborated on numerous comédie-ballets, including L'Amour médecin, George Dandin ou le Mari confondu, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Psyché and his best known work, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

There’s an issue with two of the weekly slots … Sunday jazz and Tuesday baroque. The issue is that there’s only so much of it for a start, and among the output are great composers and works at the top, down to dross at the bottom.

Everyone wants the great or good works but after you’ve run those, you get into a dire situation before you can run them again … plus YT only allow a certain amount to be available anyway. Often it’s a poorer version which makes it through, whilst the best has a price tag placed on it where the uploader is trying to cash in on someone else’s work.

There are two expressions which spring to mind, faced with this … the first is from a song by two chaps called Chas and Dave and the line was there ain’t no pleasing you. The other is finding yourself “between a rock and a hard place”, expending more and more time and effort searching for something which will please … when that time could have been spent researching the current topics we’re all engaged on.

The last point is that when the recipients are themselves the experts and you’re just a generalist … a jack of all trades, then it makes far more sense to ask those experts to suggest great recitals and performances to run themselves or at least send the urls, rather than get into this circular guesswork, slapped down, guesswork thing.

It comes down to incentive, dunnit?