Today has been less active listening-wise due to a slight crisis at the chocolate teapot factory.

However, in the car on the way in, at an ungodly hour which I never usually see, I listened to (the horror!) Rio by Duran Duran. It’s the first time I’ve heard it in at least ten years, and it’s still quite enjoyable. I really rate Simon Le Bon as a singer, and whichever of the Taylors (John?) it was that played bass. And unlike so many of their contemporaries, they still managed to sound like a live band on record, most of the time. The arbitrary sax solo in the song “Rio” itself is an abomination though.

Once problems at the CTF were in hand, I rattled through This Nation’s Saving Grace and Are You Are Missing Winner by The Fall. The former is a masterpiece. The latter isn’t.

This evening, it’s been wall-to-wall Shostakovich – Symphonies 13, 14, 9, and 4 – the last conducted by Rostropovich with an amazing sense of rhythmic unity and structural logic, and the others by Haitink.