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The Harmonics Vuvuzela for the season’s purest noise goes to Maxim Fedotov, who led the Moscow City Symphony Orchestra on June 16 in performances that included Ravel’s Bolero. Fedotov placed a snare drum at the front of the stage, and assigned the drummer the virtuoso noise-making part, obliging the rest of the sound-makers gathered behind him to compete to see who could be loudest. This display was sponsored by the embassies of Spain and the European Union.

The Vuvuzela award for drone goes to Radio Orphee, the state-funded classical music radio station, for replacing the traditional music programming with talk by self-appointed experts, academics, performers on the make, and friends of the management. Asked to say how much time the new talk format occupies during the broadcasting day, Radio Orphee’s spokesman Oksana Serezhenko said: “Radio Orpheus is a 100% music radio. We have thematic programs which still include music pieces — they take up no more than 30% of the time. If we take programs devoted exclusively to talking, they don’t take up over 5%.”

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