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Showing posts from March, 2006

American music strikes a remarkable chord

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This weekend, Stephen Layton's Polyphony will reunite with the Britten Sinfonia and the American composer Morten Lauridsen. They will be performing Lauridsen's settings of poems by Robert Graves, Mid-Winter Songs, in Norwich and Ely Cathedrals. Fitting venues for music one critic described as " shamelessly ecstatic ", but they are a far cry from the last time the Polyphony/Britten Sinfonia/Lauridsen combination were together in the public eye. That was at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles, home of the LA Lakers basketball team, for 2006's Grammy awards where they had been shortlisted in the choral music section for their Hyperion recording of Lux Aeterna, Lauridsen's settings of sacred Latin texts. Layton (above), the Polyphony founder and director, says he reluctantly declined the opportunity to mingle with Kanye West and U2 - " it's a nine-hour ceremony!" - and the award eventually went to Leonard Slatkin's recording of Bolcom's Songs

Visa bill stops top orchestra's US tour

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One of Britain's leading symphony orchestras has been forced to scrap an American tour, partly because of the "mind-blowing palaver" and cost of securing visas for 100 players and staff. The Manchester-based Hallé had been due to visit the US next year for two concerts, including one at the Lincoln centre in New York, the country's principal classical music venue. But managers said yesterday they had cancelled the tour when they realised that the cost of arranging the visas, estimated at £45,000, would render the trip uneconomic. Other agents said rock musicians, also fed up with the process and expense, were refusing to visit the US to work. Katie Ray, of Traffic Control Group Ltd, which secures visas and work permits mainly for rock bands, said some artists were now choosing not to tour in the US. John Summers, the Hallé's chief executive, said each orchestra member would have been required to go to London after phoning to arrange an interview at the US embassy.

Safe landing - but wrong airport

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I am a frequent flyer with Irish budget airline Ryanair, including my recent Dresden , Berlin , Leipzig and Arhus trips featured in articles here, so I was interested to read this story in today's Guardian ... From a height of 33,000ft, the world below can seem a tranquil if confusing place. Gazing down through a veil of cloud, it's not difficult to confuse one main road with another or to mix up two different towns. Apparently, it's also quite easy to mistake one airport for another, even if you're the one flying the plane. That seems to have been the case when the captain of a Ryanair flight from Liverpool to the City of Derry airport brought his plane down at a military airbase five miles away. The Airbus A320, which was operated by Eirjet on behalf of the budget airline, touched down at Ballykelly airfield at 2.40 yesterday afternoon, much to the bemusement of its 39 passengers. The jet was grounded by aviation authorities, who ordered an investigation, but it

Listen online to an orchestra of laptops

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At Princeton University's faculty of music, the students are as happy to tickle a Powerbook's plastics as a piano's ivories. They have their own wireless-networked orchestra: a 15-piece band that can play anything from electropop to avant garde on instruments specially designed to interface with their laptops. A virtual conductor keeps them on the beat. The Princeton Laptop Orchestra, or PLOrk as it is known, has caused something of a sensation in academic circles, and avant-garde musicians are queueing up to compose for them. " It's much more than I bargained for ," says Dan Trueman, who created the orchestra with fellow college professor Perry Cook. " I'm delighted and terrified by the level of interest ." For Trueman, the project began several years ago when he created his own electronic instrument, a combination of a violin and a theremin that reacted to his bowing movements across a spherical speaker. " It was quite a trip to play,"

Condoleezza's musical mystery tour revealed

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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, for two days this week. On Friday she is taking in a concert featuring the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra , and anti-war protesters have caused some local difficulties, including the loss of the compere. Ms Rice likes her music. When visiting Paris she visited the Conservatoire Hector Berlioz , and reportedly plays in a weekly chamber music group. The good news is that the Liverpool gig is going ahead, but tight security has meant that the concert programme has been kept a secret until this afternoon. The Liverpool Phil's hard pressed Communications Manager, Jayne Garrity, has just emailed over the details, so here, as a little exclusive, are the headlines. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra will perform the first movement of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, Bernstein’s Candide Overture and Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The RLPO will be conducted by Principal Conductor desig

Neil Armstrong finally reveals his moon music

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To celebrate today's total eclipse of the sun in Africa and Asia here is An Overgrown Path exclusive on a lunar story that has fascinating musical connections. Notoriously taciturn first man on the moon Neil Armstrong reveals his choice of fly-time music in a book that just been published. And his musical tastes open up undreamt of connections to Russian government research projects, Soviet agents and Communist propaganda films. Moon Dust by Andrew Smith is a new study of how the lives of the Apollo astronauts were changed by their lunar experience. Most of the nine surviving astronauts agreed to be interviewed for the book, but true to form the first man on the moon did not. But in an email exchange Armstrong identified the cassette of ' strange electronic-sounding music' that fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins had reported him taking to Luna. The cassette in question was transcribed from Neil Armstrong's own LP of Music Out of the Moon featuring Dr Samuel

This is the future of classical music?

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Top-selling classical downloads on iTunes 1 Barber's Adagio for Strings, Op 11, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra 2 You Raise Me Up, from Russell Watson's album Amore Musica 3 Jerusalem, from the Last Night of the Proms Collection, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth 4 Duet from Bizet's the Pearl Fishers, from Andrea Bocelli's Aria: The Opera Album 5 Pachelbel's Canon in D, performed by I Musici, from the album 100 Classical Favourites 6 Nimrod, from Elgar's Enigma Variations, from the Last Night of the Proms Collection, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth 7 Land of Hope and Glory, from the Last Night of the Proms Collection, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth 8 Somos Novios , from Andrea Bocelli's album Amore 9 Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, performed by Vladimir Horowitz 10 Bach's Air on the G String, by the London Symphony Orchestra From Big demand for classical

Now BBC presents Beethoven's greatest hits

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Some time ago the BBC Radio 3 dropped its policy of only playing complete works, and started broadcasting single movements from symphonies and concertos. Yesterday, in their Morning on 3 programme, they took their drive for 'accessibility' still further by playing the Molto Adagio slow movement of Beethoven's sublime Op 132 quartet on its own. Shorn of the framing, and contrasting, Allegro ma non tanto and Alla marcia, assai vivaci Beethoven's great hymn of thanksgiving sounded horribly like film music - which is presumably what the BBC producer intended. But I'm sure the market driven BBC will say the audience ratings justified it, and that they gave their nemesis Classic FM a bloody nose. So to help them understand what they actually did, I offer the noses of two other great works of art shorn of all those boring bits around them. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take

Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven'

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Guitar shop owners across Britain have banned it in fear of losing their sanity, but Led Zeppelin's eight minute 1971 epic, Stairway to Heaven, refuses to go away. Jimmy Page's solo, in a song which has led generations of music fans to sing "ooh, and it makes me wonder", is voted the best air guitar moment of all time. In a survey that reveals just how frustrating those No Stairway signs must be for guitar shoppers, almost 2,000 readers of Total Guitar magazine voted Page's solo better than a list axe-hero moments by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Queen's Brian May. In keeping with the genre's reputation, every single solo in the air guitar top 10 was played by a man imagining a Fender Stratocaster in their hands, most with longer than shoulder-length hair, often permed, and none were recorded after 1991 after which time the popularity of the brazen rock guitar solo waned, derided as pompous and an all-too crass display of self-gratification. Described as

Here comes the sun ...

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Here comes the sun, here comes the sun And I say it's all right Little darlin' it's been a long cold lonely winter Little darlin' it feels like years since it's been here Here comes the sun, here comes the sun ... From the Beatles' Abbey Road British Summer Time started this weekend, and we put our clocks forward an hour last night. The photo above was taken at Holkham Bay , Norfolk, on Saturday afternoon. The temperature was 15 degrees C (60F)! Holkham is a few miles from Sandringham , the country retreat of the Queen. John Philip Sousa conducted his band there at a royal command performance for King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra on the Queen's birthday in 1901. The King demanded seven encores, and awarded Sousa the medal of the Victorian Order (right). " Where shall I pin it?" he asked the composer. " Over my heart ," Sousa replied. " How American!" said the King. In return composed his march Imperial Edward which is

Live symphony concerts available as downloads

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Two programs from the Los Angeles Philharmonic's hip "Minimalist Jukebox" series, performed this weekend, are scheduled for release through DG Concerts and iTunes on April 4. Although pricing is not final, each live concert will probably cost about $10 to download, less for complete individual works. Both orchestras are part of a new initiative by the Universal Music Group built on its Deutsche Grammophon and Decca labels. DG Concerts and Decca Concerts will, between them, ultimately service about 10 orchestras in the United States and abroad. Negotiations are under way with orchestras in London, Paris and three German cities. The current intention is for each orchestra to offer, on average, four concerts a season for digital downloading, and one of the four would also be released on CD. The New York Philharmonic, in its three-year project with DG Concerts, is taking a financial gamble in the hope of reaching a worldwide audience. As part of the contract, the Philharmonic

Elgar, Alsop and Bernstein

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Sir Edward Elgar is currently suffering at the hands of my friends across the Atlantic. First blogger James Reel over at KUAT-FM in Southern Arizona set history straight by telling us that: ' If you are not English, you are more likely to perceive the Elgar Violin concerto as a thematically amorphous, bloated corpse of Romanticism. Sorry, Limeys: Elgar was not a great composer. He wrote a lot of lovely, endearing miniatures (and remember that the "Enigma" Variations are a series of miniatures), but only one large-scale work, the Cello Concerto, of truly international stature. Otherwise, Elgar, like Bruckner, is a provincial composer of severely flawed scores that fervent little fan clubs have bullied us into accepting as masterpieces .' Then last night, on BBC Radio 3 , Marin Alsop showed us how it really should be done, in what the BBC presenter tactfully described as her first 'stab' at Elgar's mighty Second Symphony . Now as my photo sequence shows Ms

The music of Taize

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The Church of Reconciliation seen in the photo above was built for the Taizé Community in 1962 by the German organisation Sühnezeichen . This group of architects was formed after the Second World War by German Christians to build symbols of reconciliation in places of war-time suffering. The original design was by one of the Taizé Brothers, and the Church groundplan has been added to over the years to form a functional and flexible space for worship. Movable partitions are used to adapt the interior, and the usable space can be expanded outside in the summer using tents. The founder of the Taizé Community, Brother Roger (left), was born in Switzerland in 1915. After studying theology in in Strasbourg and Lausanne he searched in France for a suitable location to found a religous community. The derelict rural village of Taizé, near the Abbey of Cluny , was chosen. The hamlet was just a few kilometres from the demarcation line separating unoccupied France from the Nazi occupied zone. Th

I am a camera - Britten's Aldeburgh

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Brilliant weather here today with astonishing light, so no words, just pictures. All photos taken this afternoon (23rd March) in Aldeburgh and Snape using a Casio EX-Z120, and (c) On An Overgrown Path. Other Aldeburgh resources On An Overgrown Path include * Music will rise from the wreckage * Easter at Aldeburgh * A direct line to Britten * East Anglia 1953 - New Orleans 2005 * Photos are (c) On An Overgrown Path 2010. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Another Elgar 'discovery' - it will never end ...

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Back in December I wrote - Another Elgar 'discovery' - will it never end? Fellow blogger Jessica Duchen writing in yesterday's Independent would have us believe not. Nobody seems to have answered my question - Why is classical music so obsessed by 'realisations', 'elaborations' and 'reconstructions' when they are derided elsewhere? Image credit - Soundandvision.com . Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed. 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 Elgar's other enigma

The wheel would scar the earth ...

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In today's UK budget , the chancellor Gordon Brown raised taxes for gas-guzzling vehicles, with the worst offenders now attracting a vehicle excise duty of £210 ($380). The move has been coupled with a zero rate for a small number of cars with the lowest carbon emissions, and £40 duty for cars with low emissions. The only wheel in constant use in old Tibet was the prayer wheel: either the huge fixed prayer wheels, embossed with sacred mantras that were spun by pilgrims at monasteries, or the miniature handheld prayer wheels. The monks were none too keen on seeing the wheel, or close replicas of it, used elsewhere for purposes such as barrelling along a road. An ancient prophecy held that the use of the wheel would scar the surface of the earth, releasing evil spirits and destroying the social fabric of Tibet (and that may yet prove correct). From Heartlands - Travel in the Tibetan World by Michael Buckley (Summersdale ISBN: 1840242094) Now playing: Lou Harrison's La Koro Sutro

More passion for books ...

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I started my recent article What exactly is a 'classic'? with a quote by Marc Van Doren. This was taken from Robert Giroux's Introduction to The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton which I bought the book last year in the wonderful Libraire Shakespeare English bookshop in the Rue de la Carreterie in Avignon , and then read it in the cloisters of the Benedictine Monastery of Sainte-Madeleine at Le Barroux. La Libraire Shakespeare is owned by Wolfgang Zuckermann (photo above), author of five books and former owner of Zuckermann Harpsichords, New York. His magical shop follows the tradition of English bookshops in France first started by Sylvia Beach in Paris in 1919 with the original Shakespeare & Co. Why do so many Americans open bookshops in France? The answer can be found in another quote from The Seven Storey Mountain (first published, remember, in 1948), this time from Thomas Merton himself: 'How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinar

More and more Mozart ...

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The silly craze for wall to wall programming of a single composer's works is spreading beyond the BBC. This week all 23 of Mozart's original piano concertos are being performed in six days by six orchestras and 19 soloists in the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester , thankfully counterbalanced by a little Penderecki and Messian. As if all that wasn't enough the 'inclusive' festival will include audience participation via a collection of Steinways in the Bridgewater Hall foyer which concertgoers are invited to play. How 2006. Image credit - Jan Op De Beek who kindly gave permission for use, do visit his website for more wonderful caricatures, particularly Mahler . 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 Shostakovich and Strictly Come Dancing

What exactly is a 'classic'?

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Scholar and poet Mark Van Doren said: 'A classic is a book that remains in print' . So let's assume that a ' classic ' music composition is one that receives regular performances. By this definition ' classic ' status has been achieved by the Passion settings of Schütz , Haydn , and of course the incomparable St Matthew and St John Passions from the composer 'whose light blots out the feeble rays of other composers. ' But which of the modern Passions will be performed regularly, and become 'classics' ? The trial has only just begun for Oswaldo Golijov's St Mark's Passion. But the verdict on Arvo Pärt's Passio was passed down soon after its 1982 Munich premiere - a contemporary masterpiece that endures today through live performances and recordings. Passio is a setting of St John scored for a quartet of soloists (SA/CtTB) as Evangelist, bass and tenor for Jesus and Pilate, a quartet of instrumentalists (violin, oboe, bassoon

Why computers will not take over our world

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'Here is the relaxing thought: computers will not take over our world, they cannot replace us, because they are not designed, as we are, for ambiguity' - Lewis Thomas' late night thoughts on listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. Disambiguation in Wikipedia and Wikimedia is the process of resolving ambiguity—the conflict that occurs when a term is closely associated with two or more different topics. In many cases, this word or phrase is the "natural" title of more than one article. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different topics that share the same term or a similar term - Wikipedia guideline . Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell is published by Penguin, ISBN 0140047433. 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 * Lost in translation * Wot no computers * Wikipedia is remix *

Steve Reich premiere on BBC webcast

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BBC Radio 3 broadcast an unscheduled Steve Reich premiere yesterday evening. Reich was making a guest appearance on Radio 3's In Tune programme to celebrate his upcoming 70th birthday. The live interview with presenter Sean Rafferty was interrupted by an unfamiliar Reich composition which turned out to be the ringtone on his mobile (cell) phone. It took several moments for the embarassed composer to locate the offending phone in a pocket of his voluminous coat, during which time listeners were treated to some exclusive Reich. You can hear this premiere via the BBC 'listen again' service until 23rd March, the performance is 100 minutes into the programme. Presenter Sean Rafferty was nonplussed. At least it was a composer, and it wasn't a concert .... Image credit - Adfreak.com Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail

Antal Dorati the composer

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Antal Doráti's reputation was justifiably built on his conducting. Just one example is his recording of Stravinsky's complete Firebird ballet which was made for Mercury in Watford Town Hall in 1959. It is one of the major achievements in the history of recorded music and was made on Ampex 350 series three channel ½ inch recorders using valve (tube) recording electronics. (See link in web resources below). Listening to it again does raise the question as to what real benefits do digital recording and jet-setting maestros bring us today? Less well known, but very well worth finding, is a live Missa Solemnis recorded in the Philharmonie in Berlin with Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists on BIS . Beethoven's Missa Solemnis was a very personal work for Doráti, and its score gave the title, and inspiration, to his posthumously published book 'For Inner and Outer Peace' which can be

BBC MP3 downloads fail to get compliments

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And regular reader, and contributor , Alex Noel-Tod writes ..... ' In view of your ambivalence about the BBC (and others') download offers, you might be amused by this bit of PR illiteracy in a press release on the BBC Philharmonic website . " ... featured performances of all the nine symphonies written by Beethoven and was complimented by a free download offer of the performances on the BBC Radio 3 website." There's a world of difference between 'complemented' and 'complimented' , but a world blithely unknown to the BBC Phil website. If Ludwig was around to claim royalties, I don't suppose he'd be offering them many compliments ... ' Image credit from BBC Radio 3 . Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed. 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 t o The BBC&

Shostakovich and Strictly Come Dancing

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On An Overgrown Path is a huge fan of Shostakovich, and has devoted many articles to him in recent months. But if I hear another note of his music on BBC Radio 3 in the next few weeks I am likely to kick in the fronts of my extremely expensive speakers. Wall to wall Shostakovich makes no more sense than wall to wall Bach cantatas , or wall to wall Wagner . Shostakovich is a first-rate composer, but even his most ardent fans must acknowledge that his music lacks the sheer range that distinguishes a true master such as Beethoven. To put it bluntly an awful lot of Shostakovich sounds the same, and some of it is the aural sound equivalent of secondhand chewing gum. Broadcast single composer marathons lacking the frisson of live performance do no more than grab media headlines and boost short term ratings. The Government White Paper published yesterday on the future of the BBC gave some hope as it directed that the BBC 'should not merely chase ratings or copy successful shows on ot