No sense of occasion

Like most cities of some size, Washington, D.C. (or the District of Columbia, to use the more formal name currently favored, I gather, by various local officials) has a 'classical' radio station. To say that its programming is timid and unimaginative would be an understatement. It shuns most twentieth-century music like the plague and -- oddly, perhaps, for a station located in the country's capital -- it slights American composers. (In years of listening I have yet to hear so much as a single note by one of the great American composers, Charles Ives.)

However, one might have thought that even this radio station would have bestirred itself this evening to play a Van Cliburn recording or two. But no, as far as I could tell it was business as usual. (Luckily, I have the CD of Cliburn's 1958 performance in Carnegie Hall of the Tchaikovsky with Kiril Kondrashin, who was the conductor at the Moscow competition, and the RCA Symphony Orchestra.)

P.s. Actually I think the recording I just mentioned was done in a studio. (Doesn't especially matter.)