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Showing posts from August, 2006

BBC Proms Last Night - I flee the country

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The final week of the BBC Proms brings what may well be the concert of the season. Bernard Haitink is one of the great living Mahlerians, and on Wednesday (September 6) he conducts the mighty Symphony No 2, ‘ Resurrection’ . I have attended some inspirational performances by Haitink of this symphony, and next week, with the combined forces of the BBC Symphony and London Symphony Choruses underpinned by the Royal Albert Hall organ , the finale of Mahler’s masterpiece should add some spiritual uplift to what has been a distinctly earthbound season. It is a good week for both the late romantics and adagios , and the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday (September 2) couples Bruckner Symphony No 7 with Karol Szymanowski’s rather neglected Violin Concerto No 1. And can you get more romantic, or adagio , than Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2? I have heard Tadaaki Otaka do it blisteringly well, listen out for his performance on Tuesday (September 5) with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Beyond the borders of language

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The world’s top ten spoken languages: 1. Mandarin – 1000m, 2. English – 350m 3. Spanish – 250m 4. Hindi – 200m 5. Arabic – 150m 6. Bengali – 150m 7. Russian – 150m 8. Portuguese – 135m 9. Japanese – 120m 10. German – 100m Data measured as mother-tongue (first-language) speakers. Source The Cambridge Factfinder, Cambridge University Press 1993. Although we have a universal notation system for the music itself the problem of the language for the text still remains, and the table above shows that English is no longer the safe option for a libretto, and Latin no longer cuts it for sacred works. Lou Harrison (left) came up with a typically unconventional solution. His choral masterpiece La Koro Sutro is a translation into Esperanto by Bruce Kennedy of the Heart Sutra , which is one of the most profound Mahayana Buddhist texts. La Koro Sutro was first performed for an international gathering of Esperantists in San Francisco in August 1972. There is a tendency today to dismiss Esperanto

Masses of early music on iPods

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'Mass settings or collections of motets were never intended to be heard in unbroken sequences as they often are today, and once one has started performing sacred liturgical music to a concert or record-buying audience, and in a context so remote from the composer's intentions, arguments about what is or is not appropriate or authentic in terms of presentation become fairly pointless. It is wonderful that people still love the music, and if a general audience today that might be unlikely to listen to a whole Palestrina Mass might still enjoy one of his beautiful Agnus Dei settings, or a few 'sampled' gems from one of Byrd's large motet collections on their iPods, who should complain?' Those are the words of the founder and director of the William Byrd Choir Gavin Turner. In August last year I wrote a very complimentary review of Hyperion's re-release of Masterpeices of Portugese Polyphony , but also commented: "The only quibble (and it is just a quibbl

Five and a half hours – one piece of music

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Five and a half hours – one piece of music. Par for the course for Wagner operas and the opera bands that have to manfully keep it up for that long. We haven’t had to yet, but now we’re doing Meistersinger in a concert performance for the Edinburgh Festival. A few years ago we did the Trojans marathon – two night’s long – but that, greatest of all operas, comes in perfectly paced bite- sized sections. While at the reins of the Edinburgh Festival, Sir Brian McMaster has given us important stuff to play, and provided me with some of the greatest highlights of my life. We’ve had a summer of biggies. Heldenleben , the full version of Firebird, Bruckners 2 and 6, three superb new pieces and now the Wagner. There isn’t a much bigger test of sheer stamina and concentration than Meistersinger . I’ve got a big problem with it. It simply doesn’t do it for me. But if I’m going to have a bit of a nark about Wagner, you need to be re-assured that I haven’t forgotten my place in life. Ant snarling

It's encouraging people to get into music …

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Are sound samples the alchemy that will turn the base metal of dwindling audiences and falling CD sales into the gold of new young audiences and profitable classical music downloads? After the digital orchestra playing Beethoven and the LSO playing NOTION another London orchestra has joined the sound samples bandwagon. But there is a big difference between the Philharmonia Orchestra’s new Sound Exchange and the other ‘cash for samples’ projects that are currently doing the rounds. Sound Exchange is part of an pioneering new music education website aimed at the hard to reach young audience, and at the centre of it is PLAY.orchestra , a collaboration between the Phiharmonia Orchestra, the South Bank Centre and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. 56 colourful plastic cubes and three hotspots are laid out on a full size orchestra stage on the Royal Festival Hall terrace (photo below), and each cube contains a light and a speaker - sit down on the cube or stand in the

Fairytales - an album beyond words

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I’m a great fan of Swedish jazz pianist Esbjorn Svensson who was a recent guest on the excellent BBC Radio 3’s programme Private Passions (hosted by Michael , son of composer Sir Lennox Berkeley ). Among Esbjorn Svensson’s eclectic choice of music was a CD by an artist that I had never heard of, which Svensson described as ‘ one of the best records I have ever heard .’ So I had to find out more. Radka Toneff (above) was a Norwegian jazz singer who died in 1982 at the tragically early age of 30. Her last studio recording was Fairytales with pianist Steve Dobrogosz. It is a mixture of standards (this is probably the last time an Elton John track will be recommended on an overgrown path !) and original compositions. The interpretations are quite straight, they remind me somewhat of Norma Winstone. But the singing (and piano accompaniment) are totally sublime. The producer was Norwegian bass legend Arild Andersen at an early stage of his career. Esbjorn Svensson is spot on. This is a

Beyond Shostakovich

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'No, I dreamt of a holy mission in life.' Her words were again well practised and cold. 'Living in close proximity to art, religously watching over its creation, assisting at its birth with a thousand details that were in themselves mundane and yet would add up to a great, sacred trust, a short footnote next to my name for all eternity: 'Nina Sukhanova, born Malinina, the daughter of a hack, the wife of a genius". Pathetic, isn't it - all those young Russian girls raised on nineteenth-century novels, searching for an idol at whose plaster feet they might sacrifice their own aspirations, only to wake up decades later, aged and bitter, to find their visions of vicarious greatness shattered, their husbands average, talented nobodies ... Only that's not exactly how it turned out with us, is it, Tolya - and to tell you the truth, I sometimes think I'd prefer such a trite, unambiguous ending to ... to ...' From Olga Grushin's brilliant first novel Th

Simply chic symphonies?

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The Overgrown Path leads to the symphonies of Leonard Bernstein. There have been very perceptive posts from Hucbald (check his excellent blog A monk's musical musings ) and Fairhaven Friend (who contributed my guest blog A year at the symphony ) on my recent Mass post . These prompted me to listen last night to Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony (No 3) in his own performance with the New York Philharmonic and soprano Jennie Tourel . It strikes me that Bernstein’s symphonies contain the same blazing creativity that crackles through Mass , without the excesses and indulgences that flaw it. Why aren’t these works better known? Or am I wrong? Are these simply chic symphonies? Whatever we think of his Mass and symphonies, there is no doubt that Bernstein was a larger than life figure. When I was at EMI/Angel in the ‘70s he was one of our artists. He was contracted with us to record with the French National Orchestra . I clearly recall a Milhaud album with La création du monde and the w

Music beyond boundaries - the birth of rock

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"There are many accounts of what happened next. Dylan left the stage with a shrug as the crowd roared. Having heard only three songs, they wanted 'moooooooooore', and some, certainly, were booing. They had been taken by surprise by the volume and aggression of the music. Some loved it, some hated it, most were amazed, astonished and energized by it. It was something we take for granted now, but utterly novel then: non-linear lyrics, an attitude of total contempt for expectation and established values, accompanied by screaming blues guitar and a powerful rhythm section, played ar ear-splitting volume by young kids. The Beatles were still singing love songs in 1965 while the Stones played a sexy brand of blues-rooted pop. This was different. This was the Birth of Rock. So many taste crimes have been committed in rock's name since then that it might be questionable to count this moment as a triumph, but it certainly felt like one in July 1965. Yarrow appeared onstage,

Peak melody

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The blog Tampon Teabag (yes I know) posted the following very interesting (and long) piece back in September 2005. I missed it first time round, so here it is (language and all) in case you did as well. "Every society throughout history and throughout the world has made and enjoyed music! But we, now, here, in the west are unique… in our hunger for ever more, new music. Music surrounds us: in our houses, blasting out of radios, CD players, computers. It wakes us up, and it sends us to sleep. Outside we pump music into our ears through up-to-the-minute mobile phones and MP3-players... "We cannot get enough of it! We hear it in our supermarkets, and we sing it in our churches and in our karaoke bars. Rock anthems in pubs, and recorder-concerts in schools. We chant it at our football matches, hum along to it in our cars, and dance to it in our nightclubs. We go to Sing-Along-Sound-of-Music evenings. There is no getting away from music. Our lives are musical lives, and our world

Sweden's best kept secret - Jan Johansson

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Sweden is famous for its jazz. Most recently the home grown Esbjorn Svensson Trio has become a worldwide success. Yet the best selling jazz record in Sweden was made by an artist virtually unknown outside Scandinavia, and whose records are very difficult to get hold of. The artist is pianist Jan Johansson (photo above). The recording is Jazz på svenska (Jazz in Swedish), and it has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. Johansson was born in 1931, and met saxophonist Stan Getz while at university. He abandoned his studies to play jazz fulltime, and worked with many American jazz greats, becoming the first European ever to be invited to join "Jazz at the Philharmonic." The years 1961 to 1968 produced a string of classic albums. These included Jazz på svenska and Jazz på Ryska (Jazz in Russia) which are available together on a single CD titled Folkvisor. Jazz in Sweden comprises variations on sixteen Swedish folk songs with George Riedel playing bass. Also worth

I am a camera - Dresden

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In July 1960, Dmitri Shostakovich visited Dresden, which was then in the communist German Democratic Republic , to write the score for a film, 'Five Days, Five Nights' . This was the first time he had seen the devastation caused by the Allied bombing raids on February 14th 1945. The experience directly inspired his Eighth String Quartet , Op 110, which was written in just three days, and dedicated to the victims of fascism and war. The quartet became a musical symbol of the devastated city. In the same way the rubble of the beautiful Frauenkirche (above), which was consecrated in 1734 and collapsed two days after the 1945 attacks, became a visual symbol of the ruined 'Florence on the Elbe.' The cathedral's famous organ by Gottfried Silbermann was also totally destroyed. It had been played by Johann Sebastian Bach in a recital in December 1736. The acoustics of the cathedral were said to have inspired passages in Wagner's Parsifal, and he conducted the firs

Music beyond borders

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I was delighted recently to receive a request from Dennis Wu Ming Yiu for permission to use one of my photos from BBC Proms - summer in the city . Dennis is a producer and presenter on Radio 4, the Fine Arts and Music Channel of Radio Television Hong Kong , and one of many people working in the media who are regular readers On An Overgrown Path . He wanted to use my image in Fine Music , the Chinese language equivalent of the Gramophone. You can see the results illustrating this article, and read the magazine online and listen to Radio 4, including some fine classical music, via this link. One of RTHK's projects is called Music beyond borders , and I was particularly pleased to see an image from On An Overgrown Path appearing in Fine Music as I had worked in Hong Kong on the promotion of classical music in the 1980s. Since then music has truly travelled beyond borders as the former British colony is now the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and the Third Reich

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Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (left) took her first professional steps in the early years of the Third Reich. The young soprano had moved to Berlin at the age of 17, from the provincial town of Cottbus on the Polish border, and entered the Hochschule für Musik . She was just at the right age to be genuinely impressed by the trappings of National Socialism ; in the German capital, she would have got full exposure to flags, speeches and fanfares. She would eventually join three different Nazi organisations and, long after 1945, this may not have caused the stir it did had she herself acknowledged her actions as soon as those circumstances came to light. But very much like her frequent collaborator Herbert von Karajan , she kept denying these accusations when confronted with them, by American journalists as much as by historians. When she finally admitted them, she made light of the matter, claiming that joining these organisations had been routine, and that all her colleagues did it for the s