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Showing posts from February, 2005

Brain Food 2

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Listening................ Bloch Quartets 1 to 4 played by Griller Quartet In an earlier post I aked why Domenico Gabrielli's cello works aren't better known. Now this re-issue of the Griller Quartet playing Bloch's four string quartets prompts me to ask the same question - why aren't these quartets programmed today? Ernest Bloch is one of those unfortunate composers branded by a single work, in his case Schelomo (which I have to confess I wouldn't shed a tear if I didn't ever hear again).. His string quartets, which inhabit a sound world somewhere between Shostakovich and Schoenberg, are very different, and something of a challenge, with the first lasting for almost an hour. But they are most certainly great works which reward exploration. The sound from these mono 1954 Decca studio recordings is staggeringly good. The producer is my old boss from my EMI days, Peter Andry, recorded when he was at Decca. I was talking to a violin playing friend about why early

Serendipity 2

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In my post Serendipity and Collaborative Filtering I tried, somewhat clumsily, to explain what On An Overgrown Path was all about, and wrote ..."the site will really work if it triggers more postings that open up Overgrown Paths from some of my own postings". Image from Ruth Phillips web site : Today brought a fantastic example of one of those overgrown paths opening up. I received a message in response to my posting on the Gabrielli cello works from Meanwhile, here in France which is a really excellent blog run by the fine cellist Ruth Phillips, who is also a teacher, and pioneer in music therapy. Ruth also has her own web site for her various activities which is well worth visiting. She also (lucky lady) lives in the Vaucluse, a few miles from L'Abbaye of Ste Madeleine visited in Pliable's Travels . Ruth's husband, the artist Julian Merrow-Smith, also has a wonderful web site , and to make it a clean sweep for the bloggers has his own artist's studio blog

MaxOpus

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I wrote a rave review below for Peter Maxwell Davies' Masses; and here is another rave review, this time for his ground-breaking web site MaxOpus . The classical record companies have done little to adapt to the digital revolution other than promote young violinists in wet T-shirts. The orchestras have been a little more entrepreneurial in setting up their own labels as the majors such as Universal have imploded under the weight of their own egos, but laudable as LSO Live and the other orchestra owned labels are, they really are no more than a Band-Aid (sorry about the pun) as the industry haemorrhages CD buyers and concert audiences. (The trend is illustrated by the fact that two of the three cycles of Bach Cantatas currently being recorded are on artist owned labels after Universal owned DGG and Warner owned Erato pulled the plug on the original corporate backed ventures - John Eliot Gardiner releases his recordings on his own Soli Deo Gloria label, and Ton Koopman on Antoine

Brain Food - 1.

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Reading................. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - the first novel I have read by this Japanese author, who apparentely has a cult following in Japan and elsewhere (I bought it incidentally for 99p in an Ottakars special promotional edition, an excellent initiative that has introduced me to a writerI otherwise probably wouldn't have found). A very readable 'rites of passage' type novel, if a little self indulgent. Surprisingly this is not an early Murami novel, as it does show some of the excesses (and appeal) of first novels such as The Magus. It does suffer from the flaw that death seems to be the preferred way of resolving the characters, three suicides and one from natural causes is I think a fair definition of excess. I thought it could have done with some tighter editing in places, but credit to the excellent translation by Jay Rubin. Nice scene setting detail with references to music from the 60's; not just Beatles as in the title but Bill Evans

The armchair pilgrim

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One of the most interesting books I have read recently is 'Accidental Pilgrim', the story of David Moore's pilgrimage retracing the steps of the VIth Century Saint Columbanus , which I wrote about in my recent post . Monasteries and pilgrimage have been a recurring thread on The Overgrown Path, and another book which has given a lot of pleasure is Kevin Wright's guide to European Monastery and Convent Guesthouses . Last autumn I stayed in the Benedictine Abbey of Ste Madeleine in the Vaucluse, in France, and this guide gives details of hundreds of similar religous houses which offer accomodation, or are worth a visit. It is a wonderful book for the armchair pilgrim. But it also offers more than just a listing of monasteries. Kevin Wright gives a very useful overview of the diferent monastic orders, and their histories. There is a also a more detailed section on Solesmes Abbey which has done so much for the scholarship and use of Gregorian Chant within the church litu

Improvisation 2....

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For the phenomenom of music is nothing other than a phenomenom of speculatiuon. There is nothing in this expression that should frighten you. It simply presupposes that the basis of musical creation is a preliminary feeling out, a will moving firt in an abstract realm with the objet of giving shape to something concrete. The elements at which thi spoeculationnecessarily aims are those of sound and time. Music is inconceivable apart from these two elements. Igor Stravinsky - The Poetics of Music The Overgrown Path to Gesualdo led me on to Dufay's Missa L'Homme Arme in the performance on CD by the Oxford Camerata conducted by Jeremy Summerly (Naxos' Early Music series isn't just ridiculously cheap, it is also ridiculously good). An Internet search on Dufay led me to a recording which I had heard a lot about, but had ignored due to its cult popularity in the 90's. I was quite wrong to ignore Officium , the Hilliard Ensemble's inspirational collabaration with sax

Brilliant Classics

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Today, to say nothing of the inumerable musicains who practise their art with truly wonderful talent, we are witnessing - whether by virtue of some divine influence or the fruit of diligent labour - the infinite flourishingg of composes like Johannes Ockeghem, Johannes Regis, Antoine Busnois, Firmin Caron and Guillaume Fauges, who all pride themselves on following the teachings of such recently deceased masters of this divine art as John Dunstable, Gilles Bichois or Guillaume Dufay. Johannes Tinctoris, Preface to The Art of Composition, 1477 I wrote in the Danish Thread about the superb value for money recordings available from Dutch classical label Brilliant Classics . One of my 'records of the year' for 2004 would be their 4 CD box O Magnum Mysterium. Roughly speaking classical music started just before 1400 in Flanders, where an unprecedented burst of creativity formed the Flemish School, producing the most amazing and complex polyphonic choral textures. The masses in this