A video popped up on my Facebook feed recently, of a mashup between Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 and Radiohead’s OK Computer. I was a little bemused—I love both works, but I got bored of this after twenty-five minutes, in spite of the fact that the playing was good and some of the mixes worked pretty well. A couple of days later, I saw Tom Service’s review in the Guardian. He didn’t like it.
Whereas – oh sweet goodness, whereas – sorry, I’m in the third movement of Hackman’s Bradiohead right now, and – oh God, no! – Hackman’s idea is to show that Radiohead and Coldplay are “the Debussys of today”, by creating connections, as seamlessly as possible, between the textures of Brahms’s symphony and his (technically accomplished, I’ll give him that) arrangements of the pop tracks.