Bad news for Puccini lovers
From June 1998 to last May I was a part-time producer for the now defunct Radju FM Bronja. During that time I produced a considerable number of classical music and operatic programmes, including commemorations of the birth or death of great composers...
From June 1998 to last May I was a part-time producer for the now defunct Radju FM Bronja. During that time I produced a considerable number of classical music and operatic programmes, including commemorations of the birth or death of great composers like Verdi, Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak.
All the material I used for these programmes came from my private CD collection.
On May 20 this year I offered to produce a series of programmes for the autumn schedule to commemorate one of the most beloved of all opera composers, Giacomo Puccini. Puccini's 80th death anniversary falls on November 18.
Unfortunately - more for lovers of opera, and of Puccini in particular, rather than for myself - I was turned down by the selection board of PBS programmes. Apparently, this great composer of some of the world's best loved operas means very little to the people deciding what programmes are to be broadcast on Radio Malta, since some of the programmes which used to be aired on FM Bronja were transferred to this station and to Campus FM, the University radio after FM Bronja was very unjustly closed down.
So much for the promises made by our cultured and music-loving politicians that the station would not close down!
We Maltese music lovers should be eternally grateful to the government for its effort to promote musical culture but at the same time we say shame on the government for depriving Malta of its one and only cultural radio station.