Thursday, April 2, 2009

CBC Orchestra gets new life, but how soon?


The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been under a lot of fire in the past few years for their sweeping changes to the national radio station (Radio 2), which saw the removal of a large percentage of its classical programming, relegating it to a four and a half hour time slot in the middle of the day and removing it from any prime-time exposure (The popular weekend shows "Saturday Afternoon at the Opera" and Sunday Morning's "Choral Concert" have been saved for the time being).

One of the most controversial decisions was to scrub North America's only national broadcast orchestra (which follows many European models), and they played their last notes in November 2008. However, A revival of the orchestra, under the name of "National Broadcast Orchestra" was announced, and a fund raising concert was planned for this spring. An announcement was just made to cancel that concert due to the difficult global economic crisis, however, plans are still scheduled to resume in the fall.

More information about this announcement can be found here.

The grass roots organization Stand On Guard For CBC continues to provide a most informative and up to date webpage and blog on these matters.

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