“Live” is Alive and Well in Boston

Making a mistake on a blog is a little like fighting with your spouse. It’s the kissing and making up that’s fun. When I wrote about the CBC earlier, I grouped WGBH in with a bunch of other stations that I thought were doing less live music.

I’m delighted to be wrong! Brian Bell writes:

I’ve been doing the live Friday afternoon broadcasts of the BSO since 1991, when William Pierce retired and have been doing Sunday afternoons at Tanglewood, all live, and since this past year, we’re doing the Friday night concerts on Sunday afternoons, which Ben Schwartz referenced. When I started in 1991, I got immediately away from the “single voice for two hours”, and did interviews and produced features from the get go. Some of those features you can hear at BSO.org, look off to the left, and you’ll see the WGBH features button, and they’ve got a whole raft of stuff that I’ve dumped on them over the past year–some if it a tad long in tooth, as I did that feature on the Beethoven Fifth back in 1993! Probably my favorite is on Pictures at an Exhibition, and also there’s a fun 3 way conversation with James Levine and Elliott Carter.

You can go to WGBH or the BSO site.

As I pointed out to Brian, it’s a shame that all that great content isn’t being put out nationally on the radio for all of us to hear. Unless we remember to go online to individual station sites, we sometimes forget to listen to other stations.

I’d like to hear from some more stations that are doing interesting stuff. We’ve heard from KUSC and WGBH. Are they the only ones?