Music Nation on track for sporting high
Music is high on the 2012 agenda at the moment. We've been debating with our external partners what the right song is to mark the One Year To Go celebrations next month; and today we're making public a huge array of classical music-making to complement the Hackney Radio 1 event that we announced in May.
You can read more about Music Nation - which will take place on the first weekend of March 2012 - here.
Hackney was unashamedly targeted at the Olympic boroughs: we want to create a fantastic weekend for 100,000 young people in East London that's then shared by TV and radio.
But Music Nation is, as the title suggests, about offering everyone in the UK a chance to take part in something near them - so it takes in Land's End as well as Shetland.
It's not fair to single out one event, but I'm going to. The one I most like the sound of is the 91Èȱ¬ Scottish Symphony Orchestra's concert for the Clyde Auditorium on the night of Saturday March 3rd.
It's because it explicitly aims to link music and sport, saying it wants to celebrate sporting and musical heroes; and it combines new music - an essential part of the 2012 legacy - with familiar pieces that people can simply enjoy.
I'm not one of the school that thinks culture is only good for you if you feel some pain.
I know from Gavin Reid, the SSO's director, that he has two out-and-out Olympic pieces in mind for the evening.
One is John Williams' .
Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé singing Barcelona
It's unmistakably Williams but it sounds like a composition that goes back to the birth of the modern Olympics in Athens in 1896 if not to Ancient Greece: just part of the Olympic heritage.
The SSO will also be performing Ravel's Bolero, as skated to by Torvill and Dean and watched by 20 million Britons during the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
It's one of those pieces that's become overfamiliar in excerpt form and on "Dancing On Ice", but I heard it in full at a 91Èȱ¬ Prom three or four years ago and it repays listening with a fresh pair of ears.
This set me thinking about what music we believe is essential to celebrating the Olympics. I know from past comments here that "Barcelona" performed by Montserrat Caballé and Freddie Mercury as a meeting of classical and rock has its fans, and picked up the theme.
Or there is, of course, Vangelis's score for Chariots Of Fire which was an official song for LA and was again used by the 91Èȱ¬ in both 1984 and 1988. I wouldn't be surprised if it's heard in the Clyde Auditorium next March.
If you'd like it to be part of Music Nation's repertoire, do let us know - as I'm sure you will if you think I've missed anything.
We'll be returning to pop and contemporary music before too long because I think One Year To Go will move in that direction, but in a whole year of events the pledge remains there will be music for every taste - and some pieces, we hope, that will become new classics.
I'm Roger Mosey, the 91Èȱ¬'s director of London 2012. That means I'm overseeing all the 91Èȱ¬'s 2012 preparations including not just sport but the Cultural Olympiad, our Olympic news and information services and everything that will bring the story of the London Games to audiences at home and abroad. I want to share here what we're planning - and debate some of the big issues. You can also follow me on .
Comment number 1.
At 21st Jun 2011, maxmerit wrote:I can't imagine that the 1.25 million ticketless applicants will be participating in the One Year to Go celebrations. Coe and Deighton should hang their heads in shame for such a fiasco.
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Comment number 2.
At 22nd Jun 2011, maxmerit wrote:I was in company with David Bedford and he said that if the Games had gone to Paris, Londoners would have had a greater chance of actually attending. A rather shameful indictment of a flawed and shambolic ticketing policy.
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Comment number 3.
At 22nd Jun 2011, Roger Mosey - 91Èȱ¬ Director, London 2012 wrote:I told you it was just me and you on culture posts, Max. But I'm not sure that last comment is true? If the number of people who applied for tickets in London was added to the number of French people who would want to attend in Paris, then surely your chance from the UK would be even smaller? It assumes very little demand from London for a Paris Games.
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