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Showing posts from June, 2007

Moving the music business on

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'The music industry has reacted angrily at a decision to give away the new album by US musician Prince (right) with a tabloid newspaper. Planet Earth will be given free with a future edition of the Mail on Sunday . The 10-track CD from Prince - whose hits include Purple Rain, Sign O' The Times and Cream - is not due to be released until 24 July. Paul Quirk, co-chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said the decision "beggars belief". The Mail on Sunday's recent CD giveaways include Peter Gabriel, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, UB40 and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Stephen Miron, the newspaper's managing director, said: " No one has done this before. We have always given away CDs and DVDs, but this is just setting a new level." Mr Miron declined how much the newspaper had paid to secure the deal. He added that the newspaper was not out to put music retailers out of business. "They are living in the old days and haven't devel

Is this a record?

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Classical music blogging's poster boy Norman Lebrecht is back on BBC Radio 3 today (June 30, and for seven days via Radio Player ) with a programme about classical recordings that he thinks should never have been made. Rumours that there is a sequel about radio programmes that should never have been made have been denied. The photo is from my post about something that will be in short supply at 12.15h today on BBC Radio 3 - joy of music. 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

Flying the BBC Proms flag

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Hesse Lecture 2007 - Sorry you felt the need to speculatively review this in advance….how odd. As you've written a great deal of interest about the Proms in recent seasons I thought you might like to see the real thing. A shorter version will be in The Guardian tomorrow I believe - Nicholas Kenyon This was the email sent to me yesterday by Nicholas Kenyon about my post on his 2007 Hesse Lecture, which he gave at the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival . Sure enough, a shorter version appears in today's Guardian. But there is no mention at all that the lecture was commissioned by, and given at, the Aldeburgh Festival. Instead the full page article gets the following sign-off: Nicholas Kenyon is director of the BBC Proms, and becomes managing director of the Barbican Centre in October. The Proms: A New History is published by Thames and Hudson. BBC Proms runs between July 13 and September 8. Information and tickets: bbc.co.uk/proms or 020-7589 8212 Not only is Nicholas Kenyon director of

Classical music and a wider audience

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I've uploaded the full text of Nicholas Kenyon's 2007 Hesse Lecture today. It's a very long read, and there are some gems hidden in it, particularly for a download doomsayer like me. Here is the condensed read: "The cosmopolitan world will challenge every idea of a musical canon as never before, but it has huge potential. What we have now is: 1.4 million downloads of Beethoven symphonies from the BBC website, a free offer taking the message of classical music to a wider audience some of whom had never encountered it before, stimulating the market and encouraging listeners to buy CDs. In fact Radio 3’s initiative was so successful, that the new BBC Trust, the successor to the BBC Governors, has prevented it happening again. In a recent ruling it has forbidden the BBC to include classical music in any of its free downloads, even short extracts of works, on the grounds that it is distorting the marketplace --thus at a stroke undermining the BBC’s historic commitment t

A ruthlessly market-driven broadcasting system

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In today's Guardian Nicholas Kenyon speculatively reviews Saturday's Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment concert at the Royal Festival Hall. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about BBC Proms Director Kenyons' Hesse Lecture at the Aldeburgh Festival , and today I received this email: Hesse Lecture 2007 - Sorry you felt the need to speculatively review this in advance….how odd. As you've written a great deal of interest about the Proms in recent seasons I thought you might like to see the real thing. A shorter version will be in The Guardian tomorrow I believe - Nicholas Kenyon I'd hate to be thought odd. So here, scooping the Guardian, is the attachment: Metropolitan, micropolitan, cosmopolitan: the BBC Proms, the Aldeburgh Festival, and the future - given in the Jubilee Hall on Tuesday 19 June 2007 during the 60th Aldeburgh Festival by Nicholas Kenyon . It’s not given to everyone to invent a word, but you’ll notice that one of the three words in my title is inv

Not posh enough for an opera house?

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'While it seems to me right that the American musicals should come to be seen as a kind of operetta and therefore incorporated into the repertoires of opera houses, the present tendency seems to be to do this only with musicals of the more pretentious kind. This year, for example, English National Opera has put on Kismet and On the Town - the one with music by Borodin and the other with music by Leonard Bernstein , both of whom may be regarded as "serious" composers. The truth is that the best stage musicals (even in terms of their music) tend to be the more unashamedly popular ones, by people such as Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Richard Rodgers. Yet these are clearly not posh enough for an opera house' ~ writes Alexander Chancellor in today's Guardian , while elsewhere in the paper the ENO production suffers a fair amount of collateral damage from Tim Ashley. Now read about the virtual disappearance of classical music across the Channel in Par

Bruno Maderna the composer

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My recent post about the BBC Legends release of Bruno Maderna conducting Mahler's Ninth Symphony attracted a lot of readers. So it is good to see a new CD of Maderna's music on the Vienna based Col Legno label. The new release features Maderna's three oboe concertoes played by Fabian Menzel with Michael Stern conducting the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra . In my post I wrote: 'I can...express the hope that we may see a revival of interest in Maderna the composer as well as Maderna the conductor' . Looks like it could be happening. For more on Maderna on the path visit The Year is '72. Photo shows Bruno Maderna (centre) in 1958 with two other important contemporary composers - Pierre Boulez (left) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (right), credit Drammaturgia.it . 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). Re

Here comes water cooler television

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'The BBC yesterday unveiled its long-awaited iPlayer catch-up service, hailing it as the biggest change in the way we watch television since the introduction of colour 40 years ago. After more than three years in development, the corporation said the free catch-up service for all BBC programmes would launch on July 27. After installing the iPlayer on a PC, viewers will be able to download almost any programme from the previous seven days at will and store it on the computer for up to 30 days, after which it will be automatically deleted. Viewers will be able to search for their favourite shows via a linear schedule, genre or channel. Links to the iPlayer will also be scattered liberally around the BBC website and flagged up after BBC shows. BBC Vision director Jana Bennett predicted the iPlayer would revolutionise the way we watch television, allowing more people to participate in drama "water cooler" events while at the same time allowing them to discover lesser-watched

Leading violinist's novel spelling

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The first novel by Emerson String Quartet violinist Eugene Drucker is published in July. The subject is a German violinist who is forced to play, against his will, for prisoners at a concentration camp. The title is The Savior , and that spelling will pose a few problems in England. Which reminds me of this early post on the path . Eugene Drucker is on the left of the photo. 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

The long tail of radio

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Contributor Antoine Leboyer writes this piece in praise of the Radeo internet player which I featured here recently, and which can be downloaded here : My last weeks have been hectic. Travels, airport delays, long days with evenings alone in anonymous hotel rooms away from my family. All more reasons to try Radeo. Here is a summary of my experience and basically why I am really starting to get hooked. There are several reasons for this: • Live Performances : Artists are always better in live performances than in the studio. My primary appeal in trying Radeo was to have access to a large variety of concert broadcasts around the world. A couple of days ago, I was able to compare on the same evening two very different performances of Brahms First Piano Concerto, one from Paris with Ax and Chung followed by one from Munich by Barenboim and Jansons. Fascinating comparisons in terms of tempis, orchestral colors and balance. • Quality : The sound is on most stations as acceptable as sound f

I was revolted by Schoenberg

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Largely positive reception for John Tavener's new work The Beautiful Names . So here is an interesting aspect of Tavener: I have always been drawn more to the archetypal levels of human experience and human types, which is why I think I was drawn to Stravinsky and revolted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg (left) was for me the filthy, rotten 'dirt dump' of the twentieth century. I personally could not stand the angst-ridden sound of decay in his music, the vile post-Freudian world. Basically, I do not respond to the so-called 'Germanic Tradition', whose by now rotting corpse - the hideous sound world of its fabricated complexity - smothers archetypal experience that I have always sought. - John Tavener writes in The Music of Silence, A Composer's Testament (Faber ISBN 0571200885). But Schoenberg could be just as bitchy. Read here what he said about Toscanini. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, rev

The pigeonholes of old are dissolving

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"Orchestral music is quite marginalised but I don't think that all pop music is evil or that pop equals cultural ignorance and orchestral doesn't. The pigeonholes of old are beginning to dissolve and musicians are working with other artists and barriers are breaking down. But it doesn't mean that everything has to be crossover; there's also a place for what you might call pure classical music." Jonathan Reekie (photo above), Chief Executive of the Aldeburgh Festival tells it like it is in The Independent in 2005, and puts his money where his mouth is with a triumphant 2007 Festival that featured everything from William Byrd to the electronica of Faster Than Sound and Elephant and Castle , and ended this afternoon with some pure classical music in the form of a life-affirming B minor Mass with Masaaki Suzuki conducting the Britten-Pears Baroque Orchestra and singers from the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme . Barriers are certainly being broken dow

Music blogs and the only show in town

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Good for music blogs to see the official Aldeburgh Festival website quoting reviews from the Times, Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and On An Overgrown Path . I wonder if a certain music journalist still thinks "until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town"? Photo by Pliable 21 June 2007. 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

I hear those voices that will not be drowned - 2

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Even a blogger needs a break. Downtime at Aldeburgh between Masaaki Suzuki's organ recital and the controversial new Elephant and Castle . Photo credit Mrs Pliable . 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

I hear those voices that will not be drowned

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Put Guardian critic Andrew Clements in a plush upholstered seat in a concert hall to listen to Shostakovich or Mahler's parodies of popular tunes, and chances are he will wax lyrical in his review. Ask him to walk around outside Snape Maltings and experience a multi-media and amplified opera which includes, horror of horrors, a Beatles tribute band, and he will grumpily find it 'in a word, dreadful.' Fortunately I don't earn my living in London churning out reviews of unamplified Mahler and Shostakovich in twentieth-century concert halls, so here are my pictures, and impressions, of Aldeburgh Festival's new commission, Elephant and Castle . Opera is the original multi-media art form, and it all started with Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607. The proscenium arch single location format using natural acoustics has been the status quo for four-hundred years. Isn't it time to at least challenge that status quo ? Director Tim Hopkins sets out his position clearly:

Now try some delicious Thomas Ades

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Thomas Adès' opera The Tempest is being broadcast by BBC Radio 3 from Covent Garden at 18.30 BST on Saturday 23rd June, follow this link for the webcast. Staying with Adès, if you find Elgar too romantic and pastoral try Adès' first string quartet Arcadiana . It was commissioned for the Cambridge Elgar Festival in 1994, and has a sublime tribute to Sir Edward in the form of seventeen bars in E flat, the key of 'Nimrod'. Not what you would expect from Adès, and quite delicious. Thomas Adès' Arcadiana is on the EMI CD of his music Living Toys , available at budget price. 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

BBC launches time travel technology

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The photo above was taken at Masaaki Suzuki's wonderful Aldeburgh Festival recital in Framlingham Church yesterday morning. He played Jean Adam Guillaume Guilain , William Byrd , Henry Purcell and J.S. Bach on the Tamar organ seen here, which dates from 1674. The BBC recorded the recital, and their microphone array, with four crossed transducers, can be seen to the right of the organ. I have written here about the much-hyped BBC iPlayer . This may not yet be launched, but it certainly promises some mind-boggling time shift possibilities. Masaaki Suzuki's recital took place on 21 June, here is the note from the Aldeburgh Festival programme booklet : This performance is being recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast on Lunchtime Concert on 11 June. Now, for more time travel, follow a path which leads from Framlingham Church to Glenn Gould . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only,

Essential minimal piano collection

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June 2007 is rather early to be talking of CDs of the year, but it is going to take a lot to trump the treasure I have for you today. The Minimal Piano Collection is a survey of minimalist works for the solo piano. The breadth of the survey is shown by the composers represented - Philip Glass , John Adams , Simeon ten Holt , Arvo Pärt , Erik Satie , John Borstlap , Yann Tiersen , Michael Nyman , Jeroen van Veen , Wim Mertens , Tom Johnson , Jacob ter Veldhuis , Klaas de Vries , Carlos Micháns , Terry Riley and Friedrich Nietzsche - yes, you read that last name right. The joys are too numerous to list, but include John Adams' China Gates , Arvo Pärt's Variatonen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka , and a complete In C from Terry Riley, here is the complete track listing. The pianist for this extraordinary 9 CD survey is the Dutchman Jeroen van Veen , who also contributes his own Minimal Preludes Books 1 and 2 . The record label is the Dutch independent Brilliant Classics which has

From Britten's Children to BBC impartiality

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A major new report has just been published by the BBC with the trendy, but torturous, title of From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel . The subject is the BBC's impartiality, or lack thereof, and fear not dear reader, I am not commenting on the report, but you can download it here . But the author of the report is worth a comment. John Bridcut is an independent film maker who will be known to readers for his excellent documentary Britten's Children , and the book of the same title which has featured On An Overgrown Path . The book has just been published in paperback . Silly me, I thought it was to coincide with the Aldeburgh Festival , but Faber obviously had bigger things in mind. 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