Posts

Showing posts from April, 2007

Theremin album back from grateful dead

Image
'Starting out on another concert tour in the fall, (Paul) Robeson took along with him as "associate artist" (and more! - Pliable) Clara Rockmore, the pert, feisty, attractive second wife of Bob Rockmore, and the world's leading theremin player (an instrument whose tone and dynamics are created by the juxtaposition of the hands in an elctromagnetic field). Clara Rockmore had begun her musical life as a prodigy (as had her pianist sister, Nadia Reisenberg ), winning admittance at the unprecendented age of five ( Heifetz had been eight) to the conservatory in Petrograd to study violin with the famed Leopold Auer , teacher of Heifetz, Zimablist , and Elman . An injury to her arm forced her, at age nineteen, to give up the violin and turn to a career with the theremin.' From Paul Robeson by Martin Bauml Duberman (Pan ISBN 0330313851). And right on cue Bridge Records have just released Clara Rockmore's Lost Theremin Album . With the duo of Rockmore and Nadia R

Nobody’s perfect …

Image
From Media Monkey’s Diary in today’s Guardian : - Poor Norman Lebrecht, and we never thought we’d say that. First the Sunday Times’s Michael White, in a review of Lebrecht’s book, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, called him “the Jilly Cooper of music journalism”. Ouch. Then outgoing BBC Proms boss Nicholas Kenyon had a pop, saying of his successor, Radio 3 controller Roger Wright : “he did give Norman Lebrecht a radio programme, but then again nobody’s perfect.” Double ouch! Lebrecht, the Evening Standard’s arts supreme and assistant editor was on holiday last week. Monkey wonders if he had time to dip into Jilly’s latest b0nkbuster. Nicholas Kenyon’s comment is a first-class case of musical dog eating dog, and here’s another great example. Typo above is deliberate to allow the many readers who arrive on the Path, through corporate firewalls to read this post . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or crit

Rostropovich – reaching out for the music

Image
There are three ways of knowing a thing. Take for instance a flame. One can be told of the flame, one can see the flame with his own eyes, and finally one can reach out and be burned by it – Sufi scholar. Some of us are told of music, some of us can see music, but Mstislav Rostropovich, who died today age 80 , reached out and was burnt by it. I first met him after he conducted a wildly exuberant performance of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony with the Snape Maltings Training Orchestra in 1977. Rostropovich had a long-standing relationship with the Aldeburgh Festival, and with its founder Benjamin Britten , who had died the previous year. This relationship had produced the Cello Symphony , the Cello Suites , and a Cello Sonata , all of which Britten wrote for the Russian cellist. Back in the 1970s I was working for EMI, and Slava’s relationship with the company went back to 1956 when he recorded the Miaskovsky Cello Concerto . In 1974 Rostropovich and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevska

Joy of Music - a celebration of diversity

Image
Joy of Music is a book by Leonard Bernstein based on the scripts he wrote for an educational TV series in the late 1950s. The book is a celebration of diversity, ranging from American music theatre, through Mahler and the importance of contemporary music, to Bach’s use of counterpoint in his chorale preludes. My photographs are a visual celebration of the vibrant musical life beyond busking superstars , child prodigies and MySpace . The photos were all taken at Oxfam Books and Music, Norwich on 26th April 2007. Just left click on the images to enlarge, you'll see real diversity - everything from Monteverdi to Stockhausen , and there is even a record deck to audition them on. I’m now away for a few days, so do explore the joy of music through the wonderfully diverse mix of music blogs listed in my side-bar. The sleeve above is Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations , so why not read about the best damn record he ever made ? All photos copyright On An Overgrown Path , 2007. Any

Pity the poor BBC presenter

A novelty at this years' BBC Last Night of the Proms, conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek , is Fučík's Entrance of the Gladiators.

Mahler’s message for German parliament

Image
Early in the morning of 26th April 1986 two explosions destroyed reactor no. 4 at the Soviet nuclear power station at Chernobyl in Ukraine. This started the chain of events that led to the world's worst nuclear power accident, and left victims like the children seen above in an oncology unit in the area. 26th April 2007 is Chernobyl Day, and On An Overgrown Path can exclusively reveal that Germany’s Environment Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, is using Mahler’s music to send a powerful message to the country’s parliament. Last year I told the story of the 20th anniversary Chernobyl concert held in Berlin which featured Thomas Quasthoff singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder . Sigmar Gabriel is Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety in German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet. This week, in a dramatic gesture that underlines the terrible risks associated with nuclear power, he has sent all 614 elected members of the Bundestag a CD of the Chernobyl anniver

Having a ball at the 2007 BBC Proms

Image
West End star Michael Ball has also been signed up to perform an evening of show tunes at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 August as part of the 2007 BBC Promenade Concerts season announced today . Ball, who has starred in The Phantom of the Opera, Aspects Of Love, Les Miserables and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, will perform hits from West End and Broadway musicals. Outgoing Proms ditector Nicholas Kenyon said: "I think he is one of the great, intelligent singing artists alive today. "He deserves a place at the Proms just as much as performers in the great classical tradition. Our job is to cover the whole waterfront." The Proms programme also includes a concert featuring scores from celebrated British films including The Dam Busters, Shakespeare In Love, Bridge Over The River Kwai and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone . Report from BBC News. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, but at least there is an end to the drought of women composers . Any copyrighted material on thes

Music blogging from Palestine

Image
Read about music making on the West Bank in Simon Hewitt Jones' blog , and see the video of the Queen of the Night aria sung in Arabic, with traditional Arab instruments. The picture above is from the blog, and shows audience members taking their seats at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace for a concert violinist Simon played in. Ramallah has featured in the news in the past week in connection with the dreadful kidnapping of BBC journalist Alan Johnston. Now read about Lebanon - a war of our time 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Berlin Philharmonic's first Black conductor

Image
“At a concert this week in Berlin, Berlin's famed 65-year-old Philharmonic Orchestra was led by a U.S. war correspondent in battledress. Besides being a war correspondent, the guest conductor was a Negro, born in British Guiana. The 2,000 Berliners and the 500 Allied soldiers in the audience found it quite an experience. They applauded warmly when the conductor led the orchestra through Weber's familiar Oberon and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. They broke into cheers, and called him back five times, when he gave them Berlin's first hearing of fellow-Negro William Grant Still's boisterous, bluesy Afro-American Symphony. Slender, serious Rudolph Dunbar is no musical freshman. He studied at Manhattan's Julliard School, has several times conducted the London Philharmonic. He was in Berlin as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press of Chicago. Shortly before the Berlin Philharmonic's Conductor Leo Borchard was accidentally killed by U.S. sentries, he had in

Nice one BBC Radio 3

Image
Nice that my article Classical music - revolutionary, elitist, popular supplied the closing moments for this morning's BBC Radio 3 programme on the French presidential elections. Even nicer that presenter Iain Burnside name checked On An Overgrown Path twice, and credited, my translation of Nicolas Sarkozy's comment. You can hear the programme here until 29th April; you need to listen at 1 hour 54 minutes, and there is a fast-forward facility. As I've written here before Iain Burnside's Sunday morning programme is a shining example of intelligent radio, together with Michael Berkeley's Private Passions . It is surrounded by a rising tide of mediocrity , and is one of the few Radio 3 time-slots not yet infiltrated by 'classical joc' of the moment, the dreadful Petroc Trelawny . But for Iain's sake I hope BBC Radio 3 Controller Roger Wright didn't catch the mentions of On An Overgrown Path . Not only is Iain Burnside an uncommonly intelligent rad

Classical music - revolutionary, elitist, popular

Image
Could it happen anywhere else? The four leading French presidential candidates answer questions on classical music . Here is a translation of leading rightwing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy's comment - The music we call 'classical' is the most popular since it has transcended time, fashion, and society to become contemporary. The music of Mozart and Beethoven was perhaps revolutionary, even elitist at the time, but how we can claim it's not popular? For online translation tool click here . And that's the second appearance here by Sarkozy (photo above) in as many days, which shows untypical impartiality on my part. With thanks to Clive Davis' blog for the heads-up. 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Youthful optimism will triumph

Image
Today's Observer leader says it all - Julia Pryde is not a household name. She was a 23-year-old graduate biology student who wanted to encourage recycling at the cafeteria at Virginia Tech University. Her face is not as universally known as that of Cho Seung-hui, the man who shot her and 31 others on campus last week. Cho secured his status as an icon of infamy by taking time, amid the massacre, to send a video manifesto to a TV network. Cho wanted not only to terrorise his fellow students, but to stare the world in the face, or rather, to force the world to look him in the eye. NBC has been criticised for showing the footage. Although there was a legitimate public interest in airing the material - it helped explain the dark motivation of the killer - the decision to run it on a constant loop within hours of the killings was clearly not taken with any consideration of sensitivity to survivors or victims' relatives. NBC apologised and toned down their coverage. But in the mode

When Sarkozy comes marching in

Image
Nicolas Sarkozy (left), front-running rightwing candidate in tomorrow's French presidential election, spent the last day of his campaign yesterday electioneering around Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. There are some saints there as well.

On Quoting Shakespeare

Image
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare it's Greek to me , you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning , you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days , you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger ; if your wish is father to the thought ; if your lost property has vanished into thin air , you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy , if you have played fast and loose , if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle , if you have knitted your brows , made a virtue of necessity , insisted on fair play , slept not one wink , stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches , had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing , if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a fore

When will they ever learn?

Image
So building a 12ft high concrete wall is the new US strategy in Baghdad. When will they ever learn . When will they ever learn ? When will they ever learn?

Busking in the limelight

Image
Tired of contrived stories of highly paid musicians 'busking' ? Then follow this link for a real busking story.

CD sales can only go up

Image
Back in February I wrote a piece about BBC Proms supremo Nicholas Kenyon's move to the top job at the Barbican. It was titled 'Towards a one-party musical state' , and ended with these words: 'As if all this is not enough, today's rumour in London is that Radio 3 Controller Roger Wright will take over Kenyon's vacated Proms seat, leaving the door open for another BBC apparatchik to take over Radio 3. Can this really be healthy?' Today no one was surprised to hear we now have a one-party musical state. Roger Wright has been appointed the new Director of the BBC Proms in addition to his duties as Radio 3 Controller. Here is the BBC press release. CD sales can only go up. Now read about classical music broadcasting Harvard style 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 an

New music for an ancient liturgy

Image
The liturgical music of the Orthodox Church contains many riches, and discs already featured here such as Brilliant Classic’s Sacred Russian Choral Music and Liturgy of St John Christendom, and Ivan Moody’s Akáthistos Hymn are in constant rotation in my CD player. They have been joined recently by another disc from the enterprising Gagliano Recordings label, this time of music by a contemporary Greek-American composer new to me. Tikey Zes was born in Southern California in 1927, and studied with Ingolf Dahl . His career has included recording the music of Ockeghem , and holding the posts of Professor of Composition at San José State University and choir director of the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas in San José, and my photo above was taken in that church. The new Gagliano CD Tikey Zes Choral Works includes sacred pieces from the Orthodox liturgy starting with the Great Doxology . As well as liturgical music Tikey Zes has composed a song cycle for high voice and piano on p

How long is long enough?

Image
Three wonderful concerts in just over a week left me wondering how long is long enough? At Norwich Cathedral last Friday Stephen Layton with Polyphony , Trinity College Choir and the Britten Sinfonia offered a concert of glorious Poulenc and Messiaen lasting 64 minutes excluding the interval. The second half comprised just the Poulenc Gloria , which lasted 27 minutes. The duration of 64 minutes is, of course, the length of a CD, which is no coincidence as the programme will be recorded by Hyperion in the next few days for future CD release. But 27 minutes doesn't take my prize for the shortest programme half. Just eight days before at Snape , the up and coming Russian Alexander Polianichko conducted the Britten Pears Orchestra in a stunning second half of just the 1919 version of Stravinsky's Firebird. Now at little over 20 minutes that takes my prize for the shortest ever programme half. Can any readers beat it? Just hours after the fleeting Firebird we experienced prog

Just the facts …

Image
Message received today - That e-mail exchange with Norman is amusing, seeing as there was never a point when funding for the cycle was in question. Like many American orchestras, we are paid for recordings by our own organization, and under our contract, we receive a certain amount of guaranteed media pay regardless of whether CDs and broadcasts occur or not, so it's always in our management's best interest to record and broadcast. BIS picks up the cost of production and engineering, and everybody's happy. Sorry to disappoint Norman, but as usual, he's talking nonsense with no real knowledge of the situation. As far as I know, I'm the only member of the Minnesota Orchestra (above) that he's met, and I suspect that his animosity came from an old grudge against our CEO at the time, who once penned a highly unfavorable review of a Lebrecht book... Sam Bergman, viola Minnesota Orchestra Now it would be nice to hear the facts about those BBC choral evensong tapes

I don’t care what they say about Stokowski

Image
“I know there are other things in music that are more important,” he said in his eighties, “but after all, sound is what we’re selling. I hate nasty tone. Even the timpani should sing. I remember the cymbals in the Bruckner Seventh when Furtwängler did it with the Berlin Philharmonic – a shower of stars. Not a bang or a clap, which is what you seem to get these days. I don’t care what they say about Stokowski. He was good. He could achieve a lovely sound. I learned something from that.” Another great conductor, Reginald Goodall , talks about Leopold Stokowski who was born on April 18th 1882. Quote from Reggie, the Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas, John Murray ISBN 1856810518 For Stokowski downloads take this path , to read about Fantasia click here. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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 a

Bach chorale's secret French connection

Image
As the French presidential election approaches On An Overgrown Path travels to the Languedoc region of that fine country, and, totally unexpectedly, uncovers a Bach chorale's French connection. Nîmes has some of the best preserve Roman public buildings in Europe. The jewel in the crown is the 1st-century temple known as the Maison Carrée , shown in my photo above, which has survived virtually intact because it was fortunate enough to stay in use for a remarkable range of activities including a meeting hall, stable, Catholic church and archive. The miraculous Maison Carrée is mirrored across the central piazza by Sir Norman Foster's remarkable 1993 Musée d'Art Contemporain and Médiathèque (photo below and background of header photo). This inspired building is, as the Lonely Planet guide says, 'everything modern architecture should be: innovative, complementary and beautiful.' The Maison Carrée itself dates from 19 BC and was originally dedicated to Caïus Ca

Built on rock hard evidence

Image
'I can say no more to protect sources, but those of you who read my weekly column should know I never speculate. What you read is built on rock-hard evidence' ~ Norman Lebrecht in Slipped Disc April 10 2007. '... while the BBC is mending fences with the music industry which howled blue murder over Beethoven and acted as if Radio 3 was destroying its business when, in fact, no label had issued a (Beethoven) symphonic cycle in three years, and none was likely to do so again' ~ Lebrecht Weekly April 5 2006. 'The third disc in Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra’s Beethoven symphonies cycle features one of the greatest of all symphonies: Beethoven’s Ninth ... the new album is part of a five-year, five-disc plan designed to record the complete Beethoven symphonies. In January 2007 Vänskä and the Orchestra recorded the First and Sixth Symphonies for a fourth album' ~ Minnesota Orchestra website 'The Complete Orchestral Works of Ludwig van Beethoven - Thi

Spring Symphony

Image
Now playing ~ Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony on a Decca Jubilee LP, with Britten himself conducting, and with stunning 1961 pre-digital Kingsway Hall sound . Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra , but premiered by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Eduard van Beinum in Amsterdam in 1949, the Spring Symphony is about the reawakening of the earth and the new life which that brings. It is a hybrid work, part symphony, part oratorio and part song-cycle, and sets texts by several poets for the large forces of soprano, contralto and tenor solos, chorus, boys' choir and orchestra. The texts are boisterous, and include John Clare's inimicable The Driving Boy. Britten's setting of the last lines of the poem are always sung with particular relish: Cracking his whip in starts of joy A happy, dirty, driving boy. My photos were taken yesterday around our house here in Britten's East Anglia, where we are currently basking in temperatures hotter than the Medite

Imagine there's no piano ...

Image
Today’s Guardian reports : Welcome to the Imagine piano tour, the brainchild of singer-songwriter George Michael and his partner Kenny Goss, who runs a Dallas art gallery , and featuring the piano bought in 1970 by John Lennon and put in his studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire (photo above). On Saturday it was placed outside the Ford's Theatre in Washington where 142 years earlier Abraham Lincoln was shot as he watched a performance of Our American Cousin. Last week it was outside the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville during the execution of a death row prisoner, and before that it was in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, and at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on the anniversaries of the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King respectively. Michael bought the piano six years ago for £1.5m - a record price at the time for pop memorabilia. Having bought in, as it were, to the history of the song, the couple felt it would be wrong to leave the piano l

When record shopping was fun

Image
Telemann.live journal has a nice piece about my recent L'Oiseau Lyre article . I couldn't resist reblogging this comment posted there by a reader: I can remember when record shopping was fun, and I think I could make the point that most of the advances in recorded music engineering and production were made for classical music up to the advent of the Beatles and their own production company. I still have at least two of the first three classical LP's I bought in Boston at the Jordan, Marsh dept. store record dept. in the summer of 1969. My idea of an afterlife would be the Harvard Coop record dept. under the helm of manager Helga Newcomb, circa 1974. She knew everyone's tastes. I'll partipate in the choral music scene here in Boston as long as it's still viable and buy their recordings. As for the rest, it's a lost world. . . Now read about my first classical record. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpo

What a bum note, Norman

Image
It's Critics 2 Creatives 0 in today's Observer . First English National Opera's production of Philip Glass's Satyagraha concedes an early goal to Anthony Holden: "Oh, do get on with it ~ As music, extremely well performed, it is interesting for 10 minutes, pleasant for another 10, then insufferably monotonous for the ensuing three hours-plus. Some will emerge believing they have seen an inspirational affirmation of the human spirit, others a non-violent attempt to bore the oppressor into submission." But that's nothing to Norman Lebrecht's defeat by Adams Mars-Jones: "What a bum note, Norman ~ The strange fascination of reading the book lies in seeing how an unstable emulsion of attitudes breaks down into its components. The style is desperately uncomfortable, full of high-impact, low-logic phrasemaking: 'He was on a vertical curve'; 'Prolific? He invented the word'; 'Vladimir Horowitz had more comebacks than Lucifer.'

Encore - new music for prepared keyboards

Image
Piano stories are the Da Vinci code of music blogs. After huge readers for that notorious story , the saga of the dropped Bösendorfer broke reader records here last week. So now, if you are prepared, why not read about a burning harpsichord and a grand piano up a mountain ? 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

So it goes ~ Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-1977

With many thanks to reader Storey Clayton who helped put this wonderful tribute together. More related links here On An Overgrown Path , and a nice appreciation, with the same title, in today's Observer. Now read why we aren't marching in the streets anymore . 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk