From the tenuous links dept. (Singers, women, National heroines…). Lovely, long, quite slow-paced and admiring portrait of Mali’s Oumou Sangare from fan and world music expert Lucy Duran on Radio 3 at the weekend (yes, it’ll probably be overwritten by next week’s show so you should drop me a line if you want an MP3). And, if you’re going CD shopping next weekend, remember that everything Kathleen Ferrier ever recorded is now out of copyright (she died in 1952) so you should be able to buy it all in really cheap new editions. This is what copyright time limits are for. The labels have had their fifty years to exploit the Ferrier catalogue and now it’s someone else’s turn. If we’re not careful, record label whinging (remember the fuss about the fiftieth anniversary of Callas’ 1953 Tosca?) is going to close off recent work like Ferrier’s from the public domain forever.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.