Musical malapropisms

(This'll be one of these things with potential to run and run, so you can expect additional posts along similar lines. For once, the stupidity of the people I work with can be relied upon to maintain high quality, or lack thereof, in case of sequelitis!)

First up, two which actually pre-date my work in this industry. You know the cards used in CD racks to show you where recordings of one person's music end and another's begin? The classical ones are a notorious breeding ground for spelling mistakes, to a certain extent because of the use of foreign languages, but those in English aren't safe either, it appears. I suspect The merry window may have been done accidentally on purpose, but it is rather good. Just as inspired is the image conjured up by that lost Stravinsky masterpiece, The rite of string. My predecessor in my current position left behind some purposefully dubious boards (renaming Khachaturian "Khacha choo choo train" was the best of the bunch), but overall it's the customers who come up with truly priceless mistakes.

Classic FM is to be thanked for introducing many people to classical music, even though it frequently veers too far towards classical crossover. To date, Andrea Bocelli leads the field for having his name seriously misconstrued, but just occasionally you get to hear another. Ungar's The Ashokan farewell is a perennial favourite with Classic FM listeners, though it took a moment for the penny to drop when I was recently asked for The Shogun farewell. I wonder what James Clavell would have made of it.