What might be read on nights like this

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

Leonard Cohen


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Those are my principles....

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Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc and   Lebrecht Weekly, 12/05/2023   "Why I cannot, in good conscience, review this record I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter....Christian Thielemann, in the recent film ‘Music under the Swastika’, claimed that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s complicity in the Third Reich was justified by his legacy of extraordinary recordings.  Leonskaya’s presence in Putin’s Russia is not dissimilar. What are we to make of them?... The performances, per se, have nothing to do with the present situation. And yet, everything.I cannot review them". . ..and if you don't like my principles... well, I have others . Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc , 19/11/2025 "The Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven has cancelled a December 4 concert by the Russian-Georgian Jewish pia...
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Swamped by a tsunami of classical populism.

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These photos show me with Jonathan Harvey in 2010 recording an interview for Future Radio. As I will be away from blogging for a while I am leaving you with a long listen. My broadcast interview is available via this link from the archive website of the then Future Radio station manager Tom Buckham. The 87 minute broadcast ends with a performance of Jonathan's masterpiece for large orchestra and electronics Speakings with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. (For those with 2025 attention spans a transcript is available via this link .)   Jonathan Harvey was a composer with Buddhist tendencies . His composition ... towards a Pure Land for large orchestra evokes the state of mind in Buddhism beyond suffering where there is no grasping. Two years after I recorded the interview Jonathan left us far too early to travel towards the Pure Land - Nibbāna . Since then his eclectic vision of a new music for a new audience has been swamped by a tsunami of cl...
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We are encouraged to be victims

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Maria Farantouri went into exile when Mikis Theodorakis' music was banned after the 1967 military coup in Greece. By performing Theodorakis' songs around the world she nurtured international resistance to the military dictatorship and made the Greek public familiar with the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning poets George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis and other important Greek poets.   On the  1967 LP  seen above Maria Farantouri and John Williams perform Theodorakis' music. (Farantouri is the usual transliteration of the Greek, rather than Farandouri as on the record sleeve.)  After the military coup d’état in 1967 the new regime banned Theodorakis’s music and he was eventually arrested. But he managed to send a short message to Maria Farantouri, advising her to leave Greece.  Maria Farantouri was just twenty years old when she left Greece for Paris, and she gave many concerts supporting the anti-dictatorship movement.  Through her political engagement...
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Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol...
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Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich all sound like film music

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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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John Lennon beyond the Maharishi

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I don't believe in magic, I don't believe in I-Ching,I don't believe in Bible, I don't believe in tarot, I don't believe in Hitler, I don't believe in Jesus, I don't believe in Kennedy, I don't believe in Buddha, I don't believe in mantra, I don't believe in Gita, I don't believe in yoga, I don't believe in kings, I don't believe in Elvis, I don't believe in Zimmerman, I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me That litany of rejected influences comes from the track God on the 1969 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album. John Lennon dismisses two elements of Christianity, the Bible and Jesus, and five of Eastern traditions, I-Ching, Buddha, mantra, Gita and yoga. But intriguingly Lennon does not reject Islam as an influence. There may well be a simple explanation for this: namely that Vedanta and Zen Buddhism but not Islam were the esoteric traditions of choice for the the 1960s counterculture. But there is another possibl...
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