On An Overgrown Path

On An Overgrown Path is taking a sea interlude until the end of September. To reduce maintenance I've locked the post facility, but you can still email me via - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk. And you can still listen to my Overgrown Path radio programme on Future Radio while I away at 5.00pm UK time on Sunday evenings, click here for the audio stream (real time only). The featured composers are: Sept 2 - Terry Riley & John Adams Sept 9 - Beata Moon , Elizabeth Maconchy , Elisabeth Lutyens & Vanessa Lann Sept 16 - Judith Weir , Morten Lauridsen & Bayan Northcott Sept 23 - Lou Harrison Follow this path for highlights of the last twelve month's posts, and this one for contemporary composers worth exploring. While I'm away support the other fine music blogs here . Remember, it's the music that matters. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link . Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream v

There is more music by Bach than by any other composer in my CD collection. But until last week one Bach has been absent. Johann Ludwig Bach (1677-1731), seen in the portrait here, was a distant cousin of Johann Sebastian, and was the first Bach to be employed in a leading musical position in a court, serving the ducal court in Meiningen for twenty-eight years. In 1726 J.S. Bach performed eighteen of his cousin's cantatas, and integrated some of the stylistic elements into his own compositions. Much of J.L. Bach's music has been lost, but eleven motets, twenty-two sacred canatatas, a Funeral Music and Mass, two secular cantatas, an orchestral suite and a double violin concerto survive. The CD that I added to my colection was an important new recording of ten of the motets by the Belgian choral ensemble Ex Tempore Gent (photo below) and the Orpheon Consort directed by Florian Heyerick. Much headline seeking nonsense has been written recently about the impending death of cl

Tomorrow night West End star Michael Ball sings an evening of show tunes at the BBC Proms . Outgoing Proms director Nicholas Kenyon justified his appearance with these words: "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". Which resonates with a story from 1995, when Nicholas Kenyon was controller of BBC Radio 3 . Here is the story from the late Humphrey Carpenter's excellent official history of the network . And the words in the headline are not mine, they come from that very same official history. Radio 3's new 9-10 am programme would be called Morning Collection , and would be presented by Paul Gambaccini [photo above], the transatlantic-born disc jockey whose 'music for lovers' programme on Classic FM had been a target of some mockery in the statuion's early days ... He would now joi

It's an English Bank Holiday weekend. After endless rain the weather is glorious. But nature hasn't forgotten the bad weather. This photo, taken a few minutes ago, shows the first autumn crocuses appearing in our garden here in East Anglia . More English sunshine on my Overgrown Path radio programme this afternoon on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time, with Sir Malcolm Arnold's English Dances Set 1, Guitar Concerto, and suite from the film Hobson's Choice . Click here for the audio stream . Now read about a neglected 20th century masterpiece . Convert on-air time to your local time zone using this link . Windows Media Player doesn't like the stream very much and takes ages to buffer, WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of

Aude Gotto writes: When the King of Hearts’ Gallery in Norwich first exhibited my personal collection , composed exclusively of works by living artists, I wrote in the introduction: “This is the collection of someone who didn’t like contemporary art.” A reassurance for the public who generally feels wary of anything "contemporary”, with some reason, it has to be said,in the light of the Turner Prize and other such highlights of the “art world.” The same wariness applies to modern music, because of what has been termed the “squeaky gate” school, which makes a concert more of a headache than a pleasure. However, I have come a long way over the years, discovering that there are many talented artists and musicians who use a contemporary idiom to express themselves in ways that are both beautiful and arresting, and who are worth making the effort of opening one’s mind to new forms and harmonies. Indeed we have had quite a number of contemporary works performed at the King of Hearts:

The more profound problem is really about demographics. The audience is getting older and we don't know what to do about it, so we have the spectacle of a bunch of middle-aged people in the grip of some comb-over compulsion. Youth. Where is it? Why doesn't it watch us? How do we get hold of it? This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money. Jeremy Paxman (above) tells it like it is in television - and classical music. Essential reading in today's Guardian , and an essential reminder that youth is not a time of life, it is a state of 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

Equality is a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . So it was good to see the fine young conductor Ivan Volkov pulling out of his Edinburgh concert this week due to 'impending fatherhood' , and being replaced by the excellent Susanna Mälkki . Slightly disturbing, though, that the main work in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's programme was Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex . Find Oedipus Rex , and a lot more Stravinsky here . Image of Antigone Leads Oedipus out of Thebes by Charles Francois Jalabeat from Wikipedia . 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

Drew80 has left a new comment on your post " A year of stories that had to be told ": Pliable, I could not agree with you more about the "volatile mix of musical vision, politics and commercialism" with which the Venezuelans are marketed, and I could not agree with you more about the presence of Venezuelan flags at an orchestral concert. Goodness gracious! If Russian or German or American youth orchestras appeared in London wrapped in their countries' flags, they would be booed off the stage mercilessly, and deservedly so. Posted by Drew80 to On An Overgrown Path at 4:20 PM Photo credit Deceptively Simple . 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

On An Overgrown Path is three years old today, and this is post number 1171. The site has received close to a million hits, and the word count is now not far short of a staggering half a million. That is twice as many words as Alex Ross' new book , and half as many as today's BBC Radio 3 presenters use to introduce a single concert . The last twelve months gave me the opportunity to explore several new paths . Two of the most rewarding articles to write were those on the black Guyanese conductor Rudolph Dunbar and the Afro-French composer Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges . Appropriately, yesterday was the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition , and I am writing this before we dash off to the radio studio to present a studio discussion on the slave trade. My radio co-presenter is my wife Sorojini. As usual several different paths intersect here. Sorojini was born in Georgetown, Guyana , as was Rudolph Dunbar . A colonial labour system broug

BBC Radio 3 presenter Louise Fryer (left) is gaining something of a cult following for her faux pas . In April she famously muddled her Mozart and Haydn quartets. And during tonight's BBC Prom she introduced the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment as the Orchestra of the Age of the Environment . Just don't let her near the Prom on September 8 . One of the composers is Julius Fučík Now learn how to pronounce Annie Proulx . 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

Here are Pliable's personal picks for the remainder of this year's BBC Proms season. All Proms are available for seven days online, detailed programmes and broadcast times for every concert are available from the BBC web site . * August 29 , 10.00pm - important contemporary music is once again consigned to the bed-time ghetto . Works by Oliver Knussen, Anton Webern and Julian Anderson are performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. * August 30 , 7.30pm - a rare opportunity to hear Artur Honegger's excellent 1946 Symphony No. 3 Symphonie liturgie played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony under Mariss Jansons . Herbert von Karajan's recorded legacy has dated somewhat, but his recording of this symphony is definitive. (Lovely Lauterwasser cover photo as well). * August 31 , 7.30pm - shout it from the rooftops - the world premiere of Thea Musgrave's Two's Company, a BBC commission. I wrote about Thea Musgrave's concerto for orchestra, Helios, a few

Length was also a problem in the brand new John Adams work. By default, this turned out to be the world premiere of the Doctor Atomic Symphony - the scheduled premiere in St Louis last March was postponed because the score had taken Adams longer than he anticipated. But in creating a four-movement, 45-minute span by recomposing music from his 2005 opera, Adams seems to have trusted the original material too implicitly. Without the narrative and text to provide a spine, the result is all surface, lacking in rigour and any genuinely striking ideas, save for the trumpet solo that appears in the final section, which lingers in the mind through its sheer sentimentality. It was no help to either of Adams's works that the playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra left such a dreary impression of routine. The whole concert, beginning with a drab account of the suite from Aaron Copland's ballet Billy the Kid, was of a programme left one rehearsal short of a top-quality result. Andrew Cleme

rchrd has left a new comment on your post " A title given by the Gods ": Congratulations on your radio program . I've been doing Music From Other Minds on local KALW in San Francisco nearly 3 years now. The 115th weekly program will be broadcast on Sept 7 after a summer's break. Doing radio programs like these are like inviting friends over for a listen .. "here's something I found recently that I want you to hear" I got my musical education by listening to the radio back in the 50's in New York City. Those days with significant classical music programming on the air are long gone. So I figure now it's all we can do to put interesting things on the radio. Good luck with the project. Richard Friedman Listen to the music of Sir Malcolm Arnold on Sunday 26 August at 5.00pm British Summer Time on Overgrown Path radio . More classical webcasts here , and tune in to the long tail of radio here. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as

The Dream of Gerontius and the two symphonies are Edward Elgar's masterpieces. But in this his 150th anniversary year, these works are missing completely from the BBC Proms , the self-styled 'world's greatest classical music festival'. Yet the same festival finds space for even more 'third pressing Mahler' ( not my words ) after last year's abundant crop . But over in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, the Bard Music Festival (photo above) manages to include both The Dream of Gerontius and the E flat Symphony to huge acclaim, as part of a visionary celebration of Elgar's music . Elgar once said "There is music in the air, music all around us, the world is full of it and you simply take as much as you require." Clearly upstate New Yorkers require more of it than London concert goers. Now read about Elgar carrying on Beethoven's business . Header photo shows the stunning Frank Gehry designed Fisher Centre for the Performing Arts at Bard

Wonderful to see so much enthusiasm for the BBC Prom by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and Gustvo Dudamel . But respect also to Alice O'Keefe in the Independent for mentioning the unmentionable. But with Venezuela fiercely polarised over the "Bolivarian revolution" spearheaded by President Hugo Chavez (above), Dudamel's de facto position as an ambassador for his country is far from easy. Since the government refused to renew the licence for RCTV , the opposition television station, earlier this year, there is increasing unease about restrictions on the freedom of expression. Dudamel himself was criticised when he conducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra playing the national anthem at the launch of TVes, the state-controlled channel that replaced RCTV. One "open letter" circulated on many blogs compared him to Wilhelm Furtwängler , the conductor accused of being a Nazi supporter. Dudamel is unapologetic. "The launch of TVes was

There's no such thing as 'the music audience'. They like the organ, or they like chamber music, or they like symphony concerts, or they like opera, or the nineteenth century, or new music. But they don't like each other. There is a mass of different audiences. So any (radio) schedule you put together is going to displease more people than it pleases. - said former BBC Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond . Will a 'long tail' of Bach orchestrated by Webern and au naturelle , and Boulez displease more people than it pleases? Listen here at 5.00pm British Summer Time this afternoon (August 19). And now read John Drummond describing how Simon Rattle, literally, revived a great contemporary composer. Convert webcast time to your local time zone using this link . Windows Media Player doesn't like the stream very much and takes ages to buffer, WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand r

Not my words , but Geoff Brown's in the Times Jetted to stardom in his mid-twenties, with a post as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the offing, Gustavo Dudamel doesn’t impress all the time. He’s best experienced live in concert, or at least on DVD. Even working with his amazing Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela , as he is here, not all his passion and charisma carries over on to CD. Speeds can be reckless and his handling gauche, either through inexperience or lack of sympathy with his repertoire. Dudamel is a talent that needs careful handling. So far, he’s not getting it. Deutsche Grammophon , his label, seems keen only on letting him fire the big guns, putting him in competition with history’s finest. His Beethoven release (Symphonies 5 and 7) had its disappointments; so, certainly, does this Mahler Five. This was the work that made Dudamel’s name internationally, when his conducting won him the 2004 Mahler Competition in Bamberg. Yet as captured by the m

Here are Pliable's personal picks for the coming week's BBC Proms . All Proms are available for seven days online, detailed programmes and broadcast times for every concert are available from the BBC web site . * August 20 , 7.30pm - Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face - Suite, London premiere, plus Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle in a complete performance. Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra * August 21 , 7.30pm - World premiere of John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony which is a BBC joint commission, plus his Century Rolls. The composer conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra , and Olli Mustonen rolls in the opening work. * August 22 , 7.30pm - Mahler Symphony No. 3 with Claudio Abbado and Lucerne Festival Orchestra * August 23 , 7.30pm - Handel, Purcell and Telemann played by the combined Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, plus the divine Kate Royal. * August 24 , 7.00pm - my prediction for one of the Proms of th

Many musicians have wondered why Boulez used the German title Cummings ist der Dichter for a work based on an English poem. Here is the answer; "I was commissioned to write a piece for the festival at Ulm. I couldn't find a title for the work when they asked me what to print on the program. In a letter in German - my German was not very good at that time - I wrote: 'I have not chosen a title yet, but what I can tell you is this: Cummings is the poet.' A reply came from a German secretary who had misunderstood my letter: 'As for your new work, Cummings ist der Dichter.... ' I found that mistake so wonderful that I thought, well, then, that's a title given by the Gods" ~ from Boulez - Composer, Conductor, Enigma by Joan Peyser (Schirmer ISBN 0028717007) Pierre Boulez (above) will be one of the composers in my Overgrown Path webcast on Sunday August 19 on Future Radio . I am playing his Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna bookended by Bach. The opening

Six million people are listening to the radio digitally in the UK - a massive rise since 2003, new figures have revealed. Twelve per cent of listeners tune in regularly using digital radio, TV and the internet, while 25% of regular analogue users have also tried digital. In 2003, only 900,000 people were regular digital listeners, according to radio industry analysts RAJAR in figures revealed today. Overall radio listening figures have also risen, with 91% of the UK population accessing radio broadcasts. BBC Radio 3's reach is 1.78 million – down on the year (1.83m) and the quarter (1.90m). Listener share for Radio 3 of 1.1% is the same as last year, and slightly down on the quarter (1.2%). These new figures simply confirm what has already been said here . Specialist internet stations broadcasting over the internet and other new media are the future , and the BBC's repositioning of Radio 3 to appeal to Classic FM listeners is not working. The continuing decline in the reach o

Jazz pianist Bill Evans was born on August 16 1929. His influence has spread far beyond the jazz world . Brother Roger, founder of the Taizé Community , was stabbed to death on August 16 2005 while at evening prayer in the Church of Reconciliation in Taizé. The influence of this ecumenical community has been felt throughout the Christian communion, and beyond. The photograph above of Brother Roger's grave in Taizé was taken by me last September. The article it was originally published in is the most frequently visited on the whole Overgrown Path , receiving thousands of hits every month, many from Wikipedia . (And this is the second most visited article.) In two weeks time we will be back on that remarkable green hill far away . 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 - ov

If you are a keen record collector the chances are that sleeve notes by Alan Blyth (left) will be on a number of your recordings. He wrote for many of the UK's leading newspapers, appeared regularly on BBC radio, was assistant editor at Opera magazine and a longtime contributor to The Gramophone , and published many books including Remembering Britten . He was music critic at The Listener for three years, and used this platform to criticise the programmes of the then BBC Controller of Music, William Glock and Pierre Boulez . His last set of sleeve notes will appear posthumously on the re-issue of the 1959 recording of Handel's Acis and Galatea with Joan Sutherland and Peter Pears . Alan Blyth died on August 14 2007. Follow this path to The Times obituary. Photo credit The Gramophone. 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 owne

" And the work of Michael Nyman arose chiefly from his rejection, as a critic and composer, of ascetic, Bolulez-led modernism " - this week's gem from the peerless journalist who also wrote about "the flaws of a classical blogosphere that trades in unchecked trivia." For more on Pierre Bolulez follow this path. 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

Music from Venezuela is big news this week as the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venzuela hits the BBC Proms as part of their eight concert European tour . And later Gustavo Dudamel takes them on an autumn US tour , and then prepares to become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic . Great news for classical music. But in the published programmes of the US and European tour by Dudamel and his Venezuelan youngsters there is not one work by Venezuelan composers, nor is there any music by living or female composers of any nationality, although their box office friendly BBC Prom does include music by the 20th century composers Silvestre Revueltas (1894-1940) from Mexico, Alberto Ginastera from Argentina (1916-1983), Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Elsewhere on their European tour, and on their first two Deutsche Grammophon releases, Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra move even further back in history, with music from colonial