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Showing posts from October, 2005

In praise of ... Hyperion

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Hyperion Records has an entire Guardian leader (or should that be lieder ?) devoted to their complete cycle of Schubert songs today. See In praise of ... Hyperion Image credit - Blue Aran Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Hyperion Records face 'catastrophic' damages bill and Paying the Piper.

The Frauenkirche rises from the ashes

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Let's celebrate the rebuilding, and yesterday's re-consecration , of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in Dresden which was destroyed in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of the city in 1945. Follow An Overgrown Path to Dresden 1945 - London 2005 for more on the terrible events of sixty years ago. Image credit - BBC Report broken links, missing images and other errors to overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Moments that take our breath away .....

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Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away (Anon) Reaction after performance of Bach's Mass in B minor in Holy Trinity Church, Blythburgh on Saturday evening. The Halesworth Festival choir, orchestra and soloists were conducted by Christopher Bracewell. Picture credit - Musical Group on a Balcony by Gerrit van Honthorst (1590-1656) linked from Web Gallery of Art Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to The real piano man

£33m tax bill for orchestras

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'British orchestras face a £33m ($60m) tax bill that, if collected, could "kill them all off in one fell swoop" according to one orchestra insider. "The problem is so gigantic that literally everyone would go bust," said another symphony orchestra source.' See Charlotte Higgins' article in today's Guardian . Picture credit - Bernard M. Snyder, one man band Report broken links, missing images, other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Is recorded classical music too cheap?

Striking a bum note

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Q: What's a record company? A: An organisation whose survival depends on suing those who are potentially its best customers. See John Naughton's excellent article Striking a bum note in today's Observer. Image credit - SWREG Report broken links, missing images and other errors to overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Music-like-water

Over my dead body..............

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Problem 1 - Build a new shopping mall in a historic city centre with limited available land. Problem 2 - A large portion of the available land is consecrated, and used as a cemetery for the late-Gothic parish church of St Stephen's, with its splendid hammer beam roof, tall aisles, and clerestory dating to the late 15th century. Solution - Build the mall around the cemetery, and put a main access path across the consecrated ground. Project - Chapelfield Mall , Norwich, UK. Architects Chapman Taylor . Opened October 2005. Image credits - Pliable's son using Casio EX-52. The picture above is a photograph of the actual notice that has been put up in the cemetery. Report broken links, missing images or other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Danish thread

This quartet is going places....

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I've been lucky enough to hear many great string quartets live over the last couple of years, including world class ensembles such as the Lindsays and Borodins . But right up there with the best was last night's stunning performance by the Sacconi Quartet (above) at the Halesworth Arts Festival. This young British quartet formed when they were students at the Royal College of Music in London in 2001, and have since gone on to win a slew of prestigous awards including the Trondheim and Bordeaux International String Quartet Competitions, and this year's Royal Overseas League chamber music competition. They are committed to music education, and have a programme of recitals in London schools in collaboration with the Cavatina Chamber Music Trust . (I ncidentally, their name comes from the outstanding twentieth-century Italian violin maker and restorer Simone Sacconi, whose book "The Secrets of Stradivari" is considered an indispensable reference work for viol

Brilliant Renaissance Masterpieces

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Enterprising Dutch label Brilliant Classics has found a very clever formula. It is being extremely successful in Naxos' core territory of the super-budget market by only offering multi-CD boxes containing some very worthwhile recordings. I've written before about some of them being too good to miss , and while in France a few weeks ago I picked up one of their new releases which I really must share with you. Renaissance Masterpieces is thankfully not another ' Greatest Hits of Polyphony' package. Yes, there is some wonderful Tallis, Byrd, Lassus, and Palestrina on three of the five discs, but even that is cleverly chosen with no Spem or Byrd Masses . The other two discs contain great delights from two lesser known composers which are worth the very reasonable price of the set alone. Do you know the music of Eustache du Caurroy (French 1549-1609) or Phillipe de Monte - photo above - (Flemish 1521-1603)? If not buy Renaissance Masterpieces, I promise you will

György Ligeti's Private Passions

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BBC Radio 3's Private Passions is one of my favourite radio programmes. The format is deceptively simple. Personalities from the arts and public life are asked to play the music that is important to them, and explain why. Central to the success of the programme is the presenter Michael Berkeley , who has pretty impressive credentials. He is a well known broadcaster and journalist, son of Sir Lennox Berkeley, was a very successful Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music , and is one of our leading contemporary composers with commissions including a Concerto for Orchestra for the 2005 BBC Proms season . The programme has led me on several invaluable overgrown paths , including those to Swedish pianist Jan Johansson , and Norwegian singer Radka Toneff's sublime interpretation of Weill . You can listen to the latest Private Passions programme with this link . In 2005 Private Passions celebrated ten years of broadcasting. And to celebrate Faber have

Chanticleer rocks with Sound in Spirit

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Concept albums have been at the cutting edge of rock music for decades. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band , released by the Beatles in 1967, was the definitive concept album which set the ground rules of a common musical theme with linked liner art, and tracks that sequed into each other. Many other major bands of that era adopted the concept format, notably the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (which started as a rock treatment of Dvorak's New World Symphony ), S.F. Sorrow from the Pretty Things, and the Who's rock opera Tommy . In fact concept albums had been around for some time before the Beatles . Frank Sinatra pioneered themed albums, and his 1955 In the Wee Small Hours used linked material for each track with the theme picked up by the liner graphics. Just before Sgt. Pepper the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was conceived as a linked biographical portrait of Brian Wilson , and was a said to be a major influence on the Beatles. The massive artistic and

You saw it here first.....

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It is good to see that Janet Cardiff's performance installation Forty Part Motet which I wrote about back in May when it was here at the Norwich and Norfolk Festival (photo right), is now playing at the revamped New York Museum of Modern Art. The installation uses a specially commissioned recording of Tallis' Forty Part Motet Spem in Alium with forty discrete audio channels (via DAT) for each of the voices. Forty B&W DM303 speakers are located around the periphery, grouped in eight blocks of five reflecting the five SATB voice groupings in Tallis' score. See this link to my original post which has a lot more information and photos, and follow this one for fellow blogger Jericho's story and photo of the MOMA installation. Photo credit - Taken by my son on his mobile phone! If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Tippett can still empty a concert hall

Medieval muzak

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I am the first to complain about non-stop music in supermarkets, airport terminals, and doctor's surgeries. So I was rather chastened to find a historical precedent from a monastic order no less. The acoemeti were 5th century monks who provided non-stop choral singing. This was achieved using a relay system with a fresh monk replacing an exhausted monk every few hours. There is a mention of the Pope having heard the akoimetoi in Constantinople in the late 5th century. The name acoemeti comes from the Greek akoimetoi , meaning sleepless. So the next time you complain about the background Kenny G as the Starbucks barista prepares your cappuccino grande, remember you may be messing with a fifteen hundred year old tradition. And mentioning monks and coffee, do you know how cappucino got its name? Well actually no one knows for sure. But the most popular theory is that the name comes from the Capuchin order of friars who played an important role in restoring Catholicism to Ref

Terry Riley - Requiem for Adam

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Thirty-nine years ago today on 21st October 1966 144 people, 116 of them children, died when abnormal rainfall caused a mountain of coal waste to collapse onto a school at Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. The disaster happened just as pupils of Pantglas Junior School (right) were starting their morning lessons. It took nearly a week to recover the last body. An inquiry found that the National Coal Board was wholly responsible, and ordered them to pay compensation. Both the National Coal Board and the UK Treasury refused to accept full financial resposibility, and the cost of removing the coal waste from the disaster site fell partly to the charitable Aberfan Disaster Fund . It was not until 1997 that the fund was repaid by the UK Government. The death of a young person is a most tragic and moving event. It is also one of the hardest to express through music. Gustav Mahler set the bar very high with his song cyle, Kindertotenlieder. But contemporary American composer Terry Rile

Masses of Nelson

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Today is Trafalgar Day here in the UK, and we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of that famous famous sea battle. As I drove into work the flag of St George was flying from the churches, the Queen is lighting one of many beacons around our coasts this evening, and tonight's live concert on BBC Radio 3 is Haydn's Nelson Mass. Trafalgar Day has a particular resonance in Norfolk. Horation Nelson was born here in Burnham Thorpe in 1758, the sixth of 11 children. He was made a Captain in the navy at the age of just twenty. He was given his first command when Britain entered the French Revolutionary Wars in 1793. While serving in the Mediterranean he lost his right arm at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and the sight in his right eye in the siege of Corsica. His leadership style was cavalier. In another age he would probably have been chief executive of an Enron or WorldCom . He famously won the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 by ignoring the order to cease action afte

Keep twiddling the knobs Stocky............

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The Guardian's arts correspondent Charlotte Higgins on the price of tickets for tomorrow's Stockhausen concert in London.... 'I was taken aback to be told the price was £35 ($63) per ticket. After all, it's not much more tha an hour of music. And, though he's a living legend and all that, he's only one bloke twiddling some knobs. It's not like there's an orchestra, a choir and five expensive divas to pay for. ' Photo credit: Soeren Stache/EPA via Guardian If you enjoyed this post follow an overgrown path to Paying the piper

Spanish Recognitions

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'To be alone by choice is one of the great luxuries of the world.' While I was staying alone by choice in L’Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine at le Barroux last week I read Mary Lee Settle’s book Spanish Recognitions from which the quote above is taken. Mary Lee Settle has never been a fashionable author, explaining: ' I don’t write about being vaguely unhappy in Connecticut' . Instead she produced epic works such as the five novel Beulah Quintet , and her wise and graceful travelogue Turkish Reflections . Her latest book Spanish Recognitions continues the style of her highly acclaimed Turkish travel volume. The context is unlikely; an eighty-two year old American writer tackles southern Spain armed with a hire car and laptop. But this is most definitely not travel writing in the ‘look at the silly things I did on my travels’ style of Bill Bryson . This is great travel writing equal to the best of Patrick Leigh-Fermor , Jan Morris and Paul Theroux . This is travel w

Mortal defeat for the mob in Paris

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The mob is on the loose. The only way to get your symphony performed is to write it as a ringtone. Reality opera is following close on the heels of reality TV. The technorati predict that soon all those troublesome live musicians will be replaced by note-perfect robots. The only use for CDs is as drink coasters, and if you can't download it nobody will listen to it .......................... Or as Franck Jaffrès writes: ' The internet is transforming our relationship with recorded music and with musicians. The virtual world of the internet shatters the record as an object into sound files of poor quality, ignoring the attractions of a stimulating editorial approach: the high quality of sound recording and its digital mastering, richly informative booklets, original paintings.' But all is not lost. On An Overgrown Path is delighted to report on a major defeat for the mob in Paris, just a few blocks from that darling of the technorati , IRCAM . When the 18th century chur

de Young headlines in architecture weekend

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A big event this weekend for the visual arts in San Francisco with the opening of the inspirational new de Young museum (right). Originally founded in 1895 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the de Young has been an important resource for the arts in the city for over 100 years. Yesterday, October 15, the de Young re-opened in a new state-of-the-art new facility that integrates art, architecture and the natural landscape superbly. Designed by leading Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco, the new museum provides San Francisco with a superb facility to showcase the museum’s wonderful collections of American art from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and art of the native Americas, Africa, and the Pacific. Congratulations and best wishes to the de Young from this side of the Atlantic, follow this link for more information, and a virtual browse through their collections Staying with architecture it was announced today in the U

Renaissance for the nationality that dared not speak its name

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As I write Malcolm Arnold's wonderful First Symphony plays on BBC Radio 3, and CD Review in an hour promises a comparative review of Elgar's masterly Second . And we are celebrating the anniversary year for musical giants Thomas Tallis and Sir Michael Tippett. Earlier this week Irish author John Banville's novel The Sea won the Man Booker Prize . And the media here is buzzing with the two hot news stories, Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize for literature , and the critical acclaim for the new Wallace and Grommit film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit . Mark Lawson says it all in Renaissance for the nationality that dared not speak its name in this morning's Guardian: This new fashionability - indeed even political correctness - of militant Englishness is a consequence of the Iraq war and is what links Gromit with Pinter. Twenty years ago, when the playwright first turned against the British and American governments over their foreign policy, such vociferous opposition t

Messiaen stars in early music festival

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The early music festivals at the King of Hearts, Norwich, UK have always been noted for their breadth of repertoire. And the 2005 Festival, which closes tonight, explored new extremes with a concert of 20th century music for flute and piano. Last night (Friday 14th Oct) pianist Peter Hill and flautist Sarah O'Flynn gave an outstanding performance of an adventurous programme including Frank Martin's Ballade , the flute sonatas of Poulenc and Prokofiev, and Debussy's Syrinx. But the highlight of each half of the concert was a work by Messiaen. In the first half Peter Hill played the Première Communion de la Vierge from the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus , and in the second half he was joined by Sarah O'Flynn for one of only two chamber works that Messiaen composed. Le Merle noir (the blackbird) for piano and flute, composed in 1952, is important as it is the composer's first free-standing 'birdsong' work, and was the start of a ten year period