On An Overgrown Path

'Orchestral concerts must become like football games, accessible, desirable and different' suggests the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, Curtis Price. His advice comes in a Guardian Comment feature by Simon Jenkins who has caught the Gustavo Dudamel and Hugh Masekela bug. Jenkins goes on to explain that in the coming 'revolution in appeal' classical music must include 'added value in congregation' . Simon Jenkins is better known as a writer on church architecture than classical music. So we can forgive him for not knowing that there has been 'added value in congregation' (which when translated from Gordon Brown speak means, I think, audience participation) in classical music for a long time. From the chorales in Bach's Passions, through the Radetzky March at the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Day concerts, to the congregation hymns in Britten's St. Nicholas . But why does every performance today have to include audience ...

'Meaningful dialogues between religions is no doubt one of the most pressing challenges of the modern world. Developments over the past few years clearly confirm what a significant role this aspect of human communication represents. Despite breathtaking technological breakthroughs and the related trend of rational scepticism, man still remains a religous creature. Ignoring this sphere of human personality not only leads to an impoverishment of the spiritual culture of a nation, but also to mutual estrangement of nations. And so what a wonderfully enriching experience it is when two cultures meet in mutual dialogue rather than confrontation.' These words introduce the inspiring new CD Close Voices from Far-away released by Sony in the Czech Republic . The mutual dialogue is provided by the Buddhist monks of Gyosan-ryu Tendai Shomyo from Japan and the Schola Gregoriana Pragensis from Prague, who are seen together in my footer image. The CD was recorded in a former Augustian mon...

'Folksingers, jazz artists and classical musicians made LPs, long-playing records with heaps of songs in the grooves - they forged identities and tipped the scales, gave more of the big picture. LPs were like the force of gravity. They had covers front and back, that you could stare at for hours.' - Bob Dylan writes in his Chronicles Volume One . 'Hi, I wanted to let you know some exciting news today from Deutsche Grammophon (DG), a division of Universal Music Group, who will become the first major classical record label to make the majority of its huge catalogue available online for download with the launch of its new DG Web Shop. ( http://www.dgwebshop.com/ As the world’s leading classical music recording company, Deutsche Grammophon will launch its DG Web Shop on Wednesday, November 28th, enabling consumers in 42 countries to download music at the highest technical and artistic standards. This global penetration includes markets where the major e-business retailers, suc...

Coverage elsewhere of Pope Benedict's musical tastes prompts a couple of back links. This one is about the Pope's visits to the wartime Salzburg Festival. While this one suggests the Holy Father could learn something from a green hill in France. 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

"Stereotypes persist though - a lot of the women I spoke to are still very aware that they're considered a novelty, and most have heard jokes that women can't play ..." - another piece on gender discrimination in classical music? Actually, no. It's a Guardian report on the growth of women DJs. Anyone for a classical music club night? 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

Winter sky over North Norfolk this afternoon. Now playing - Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 by Ralph Vaughan Williams , Sir Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra on EMI LP ASD 2847. The Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 was based on tunes collected from King's Lynn fisherfolk. The town is about 20 miles from where I took this photograph today. In the sleeve notes for the LP Michael Kennedy writes that the Rhapsody "begins and ends with a musical description of the Fens landscape, misty and mysterious ..." Now read about November woods from a brazen romantic . Photograph (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Alex Ross turns to the Venezuela problem , and quotes Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer : "Art within the constraints of a system is political action in favor of that system, regardless of content." I can only agree and re-run this post: The role of the artist in a society where human rights are denied is a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . As I write Maria Farandouri sings To Yelasto Pedi from Mikis Theodorakis’ sound track for the 1969 film Z (poster above). This legendary film was a barely fictionalised account of the assassination in 1963 of the Greek socialist politician Gregoris Lambrakis MP, and the film and its soundtrack, became an international symbol of opposition to the Greek military junta . This dictatorship savagely suppressed human rights until its overthrow in 1974, and brought tanks onto the streets of Athens, as is shown below. The junta was established in April 1967 when right wing army colonels led by George Papadopoulos seized power under th...

Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to watch Trisha Brown levitate on Bach in San Francisco; to help Cage squeeze lemons into his fresh taboule on 18th Street and watch David Tudor mix chili peppers and lasers at the Grand Hotel des Palmes; to play the Sydney Harbour like a bandoneon; to teach advanced-orchestration in the Greek Theater at Mills College with Pauline Oliveros and the ghost of Harry Partch; to shake Stravinsky's hand in the American Sector-Berlin and Varese’s in New Haven; to watch Kosugi dance his electric violin around Marcus Aurelius; to get thrown off stage in London as a warmup act for the Pink Floyd; to meet Stockhausen at a strobe-light show in Düsseldorf; to open windows on Cage’s cue for adding real cold air to his Winter Music; to camp out with Teitelbaum and Rzewski for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point; to hear Terry and LaMonte’s landmark concerts at the Attico in Rome ... Inner Cities is a twelve part cycle for solo piano that lasts for four hou...

Dear Pliable. Just to put things right: The reader who told you that Henri Pousseur's birthplace Malmédy was German speaking , is not quite correct. While Malmédy is part of the so-called East Cantons (which were originally German, but became Belgian after the First World War), and which are now part of Wallonia, it is officially a French speaking town with language facilities for the German speaking minority there. I promise this will be the last time I bother you with the Belgian situation. ;-) Great blog, by the way. Cordially, Ivo Swinnen, As , Belgium Ivo, please don't apologise. All this helps explain why Belgium hasn't been able to form a government for nearly six months. And this path took me to some wonderful graphics connected to Henri Pousseur. That's where my header image comes from, it's part of a portrait of Henri Pousseur by Maxime Godard . Thank you for helping us explore the labyrinth of serial music . Any copyrighted material on these pages is ...

Keith has left a new comment on your post " Music and chance ": Another B composer, York Bowen . On Sunday 18th Nov, I got up early and went to the newly re-furbished Birmingham Town Hall complete with lighting gantry with perspex sound diffusers and a restored organ for a Sunday Morning Coffee Concert . I heard the Trio Chausson , a French trio, performing Haydn, Brahms and a trio by York Bowen (left). The piano player in the trio, Boris De Larochelambert, had seen some of Bowen's music, and had researched and found the manuscript of the Piano Trio in E minor, Op118 in an archive in London. He has produced a performing score, and we heard it played during this morning concert. I'm not musically trained, and what I heard that morning left a strong feeling of expressive music with a wide dynamic range, with the piano leading and the violin and cello floating above and often playing against each other. There were plenty of rhythmic changes, light and shade, but I can...

My Future Radio programme at 5.00pm UK time on Sunday November 25 has an all American theme for the Thanksgiving Holiday, but with an East Anglian twist. Aaron Copland’s first set of Old American Songs was commissioned by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears for the 1951 Aldeburgh Festival here in East Anglia. There are five songs in the set, and the fourth is the traditional Shaker tune Simple Gifts, and that melody appears in different guises in all the works in the programme. I am playing Susan Chilcott's performance of the Old American Songs accompanied pianist Iain Burnside . Tragically Susan Chilcott died of cancer at the age of 40 just a year after this recording was made. Simple Gifts has appeared in many different versions over the years, including one by Wilson Picket . But for the central sequence of the programme I'm going back to the song in its original version. It is sung by the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake in Maine augmented by the Schola Cantorum, Boston in a ...

Kyle has left a new comment on your post " New music from the old world ": I see that Belgian serialist Henri Pousseur is not mentioned. Or, perhaps, he has already been forgotten. Not forgotten Kyle. Just wating for someone to fill in the details. Henri Pousseur was born in Malmédy in French speaking Wallonia in 1929. In the 1950s he was active in the international avant-garde music scene (dodecaphonic, serial, electronic, aleatoric music), together with Boulez , Stockhausen, Berio, and others, and like Boulez he was heavily influenced by Webern. The image above is a page from Pousseur's score for Electre (credit Universal Editions, Vienna). After 1960 Pousseur rejected the narrow viewpoint of the avant-garde, and, in collabaration with the French writer Michel Butor , he adopted an inclusive approach which embraced a range of styles and viewpoints. Their 1962 opera Votre Faust forged a connection between contemporary music and history by casting the audience as per...

Today is the big one. America is celebrating Thanksgiving, and we are all remembering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. And in the musical world not only is today the nameday of St. Cecilia , the patron saint of musicians. It is also the day when Jacob Obrecht was born in 1450, Wilhelm Friedmann Bach in 1710, Joaquin Rodrigo in 1901, and Benjamin Britten in 1913. Follow the links for related articles. Now playing - Gerald Finzi's For St. Cecilia on the 1979 Argo LP ZRG 896 seen above. Finzi's Ode for tenor, chorus and orchestra also has a birthday today. It was first performed exactly sixty years ago, on November 22, 1947, by René Soames, the Luton Choral Society and BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult . Another fine choral work that deserves to be heard more often. Do you mind if I leave you now with these birthday links ? You see, I'm off to celebrate my own birthday. Header image (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. R...

Nice to see On An Overgrown Path , and several other fine music blogs, mentioned in the Gramophone's November e-newsletter . This is written by the magazine's editor James Jolly, who is also a BBC Radio 3 presenter . A warm welcome to new readers arriving at this "provocative and informed" blog from the Gramophone. You can check today's top stories in the right side-bar. See the rest of my header photo here, and take a look at the Chinese equivalent of the Gramophone here. Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Mention music and chance and John Cage comes to mind. But there are some other interesting examples of music and chance. If, like me, you arrange your CDs (or LPs even) in alphabetical order you will have experienced another example of music and chance. Why do so many composers' surnames begin with the letter B? Only last week my heart sunk when I ordered a CD by another composer involved with music and chance, Gavin Bryars' Oi Me Lasso . How would I find space on the shelf for the CD when it arrived? This week brings yet another example of music and chance. Why do so many composer anniversaries fall within a few days? Tomorrow, November 22, is the big one. But yesterday I marked the death of Wilhelm Stenhammar, and today, among other anniversaries, we note the deaths of Henry Purcell (1695), Frank Martin (1974) and Robert Simpson ( 1997). Henry Purcell should need no introduction; although the anniversary of his death falling the day before Benjamin Britten's birthday i...

Serendipitous reporting in today's Guardian . The story is about mass hysteria. It happened at the William Byrd high school in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Mass of hysteria ? 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

The 32-year-old French-Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin (above) has been appointed principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In a press release Timothy Walker, chief executive of the LPO, says - 'Taking outstanding musicality, knowledge and technique as a given Yannick's brilliance lies in his ability to move players to exceptional performance and to communicate a strength and vitality of vision to the listener that is totally engrossing'. Reports elsewhere suggest Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a promising young conductor. Health warning - test spins can end in tears. Photo of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Bryn Terfel from NewsConcordia . 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

Portrait of Erik Satie by Santiago Rusiñol 'There is also one curiosity on this CD: a short quotation from Vexations - its "motif", made up of a theme and two variations - which Satie required to be played 840 times in a row; depending on the tempo chosen, this would take between twelve and twenty-four hours. Without entirely playing the composer's game, for obvious reasons, Jean-Yves Thibaudet here simply reveals the different elements of the task, by playing the theme alternately with the two variations, as requested by the composer, then the theme again, this time followed by the two variations, one after the other.' That is how Jean-Yves Thibaudet avoids the Vexations issue on his 5 CD set Satie - The Complete Solo Piano Music , and his performance of the work lasts for just 3 minutes 38 seconds. But at Cambridge University the pianists of Sidney Sussex College Musical Society are made of tougher stuff. On Saturday November 24th at 7.00pm UK time they a...

Wilhelm Stenhammar died eighty years ago today, on November 20, 1927. At the beginning of the twentieth century Swedish born Stenhammar was the pre-eminent Scandinavian composer and pianist. He played his own First Piano Concerto with the Berlin Opera Orchestra conducted by Richard Strauss and with the Hallé conducted by Hans Richter, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch performed his concert overture Excelsior! which is on the LP shown above. From 1907 to 1922 Stenhammar was artistic leader of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra . As well as playing his own works Stenhammar performed new compositions by Strauss, Reger , Debussy, Sibelius, and Mahler in Gothenburg, and became a close friend of Carl Nielsen after programming his music. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra has continued to perform Stenhammar's music, and in the 1980s they recorded his two symphonies and Excelsior! under their, then, principal conductor Neeme Järvi . The recordings were made in the Gothenburg...

Hello -- You wrote a nice review in August of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Frankfurt (now called the HR Symphonie Orchester [HR = Hessischer Rundfunk ]) recording of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in the Alte Oper , Frankfurt (above). As it happens, Detlev Kittler, the engineer for the recording lives at the other end of our five-house row here in Frankfurt Praunheim . He's 75 now, and long retired from HR, but was delighted to receive a copy of your article. He also volunteered that he had previously recorded the RSO Frankfurt in the Gurrelieder under Erich Leinsdorf . It's a concert recording, not a studio recording, but Hr. Kittler said that he preferred the recording by "the Austrian". (I can imagine that Leinsdorf captures the Wiener Espressivo elements well.) He has promised to share a copy of that recording with me, and I"ll let you know about it, if you're interested. Perhaps HR could be persuaded to re-release it in some format? Best regards, Dani...

Important article about the Bauhaus design school in yesterday's Guardian . The Bauhaus in Dessau was closed by the Nazis in 1932. Four years earlier the architect Walter Gropius had resigned, choosing to work outside Germany. In 1935 Gropius designed the building in East Anglia seen in my header photo. It is Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire, which was a design collabaration between Gropius and Maxwell Fry . It was Gropius' only major UK commission, and the Village College is still in use today . Gropius married Alma Mahler , widow of Gustav Mahler, in 1915. Their daughter Manon died of polio aged eighteen, and composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her. Gropius and Alma Mahler were divorced in 1920. The Bauhaus zeitgeist also found refuge in Dartington in Devon. Here the headmaster's house for the progrssive Dartington Hall School , seen in the lower photo, was designed by William Lescaze in the Bauhaus style, and the Ballets Joos from E...

Thoughtfully planned and beautifully sung concert by the Cathedral Consort directed by David McKee in Norwich Cathedral last night. Here is the programme: Kontakion of the Dead - Traditional Kiev Hymn Crossing the bar - Hubert Parry A Prayer of St Thomas Aquinas - David McKee Elegy (organ solo) - George Thomas Thalben-Ball The Souls of the Righteous - Geraint Lewis For the Fallen - Mark Blatchley Greater Love - John Ireland *** Requiem - Herbert Howells Sleep - Eric Whitacre Photo taken by me in Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. See more of that wonderful church, and read about Russian Orthodox music here. 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

Many interesting recommendations added to my Requiem article this week. But we all overlooked one that is worth remembering - Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 4 "Requiem" (in memory of my beloved father) . This 1943 orchestral work is in four movements, each of which are referenced to the Liturgy for the Dead . My article about Howard Hanson a while back also mentioned Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and he currently has a festival in his honour in London. Header photo shows Hanson standing with John LaMontaine . (Credit Fredonia Press). Now playing - Howard Hanson Symphony No. 4 with the composer conducting the Eastman Rochester Orchestra on Mercury LP SRI75107. The coupling is Walter Piston's Symphony No. 3. I also have the Arte Nova CD of Hanson's Fourth with David Montgomery conducting. But the composer captured on vinyl in inimitable Mercury sound wins on every count. Now read how precious this human life is. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as...

I'm playing John Sheppard's beautiful Western Wind Mass in my Future Radio programme this Sunday, November 18. The CD was recorded by the Tallis Scholars in Salle Church here in Norfolk, and my header photo shows the interior of the magnificent Anglican church. The music in this Sunday's programme is a catholic selection. Sheppard's Western Wind Mass was probably composed in the reign of Queen Mary who briefly returned England to Catholicism. Edmund Rubbra , whose Fifth Symphony is the second work in the programme, was a mid-life Catholic convert. Like Thomas Merton , he went to explore Buddhism , but unlike Merton he also became interested in Taoism . My catholic selection is on Future Radio at 5.00pm this Sunday, November 18. And remember, you can help shape the future of internet radio later that evening. * Listen via the audio stream on Sunday Nov 18 at 5.00pm UK time. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link . Window...

After Harry Potter comes this. My header photo is from Brain Music . Or you could try Britten's musical mind map . Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk