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Showing posts from November, 2008

Their incredible screaming vitality ...

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We went to Glyndebourne's controversial new Hänsel und Gretel on Friday. I can understand why this Hansel in a supermarket (above) and cardboard box (below) from French director Laurent Pelly may not be to everyone's tastes. But, we thought this one of the most uplifting and life-affirming evening's we have spent in the theatre for years. Special mentions for Elizabeth DeShong as Hänsel, Bernarda Bobro as Gretel (both above), conductor Robin Ticciati , and the Glyndebourne Touring orchestra. They did full justice to Engelbert Humperdink's ravishing score despite the Theatre Royal, Norwich's dry as as a bone acoustics. The rapturous reception of the Norwich audience to this wonderful evening of live music reminded me of Steve Hagen's words in his 1997 book Buddhism: Plain and Simple : ... As the millenium draws to a close, we've become jaded about great art and music simply because, with our technology, we've made it all too commonplace. When we

People no longer seem to value listening

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It's not a genius prize. But I can reblog this post from Classical-Iconoclast without too much embarassment as I did not write the Gergive article; the author was another prickly music lover . Please read this article "Why I am sorely disillusioned by Gergiev" on the blog On An Overgrown Path . Now this is intelligent, analytical, well reasoned writing by someone who knows what he is talking about. Personally I couldn't care less about Gergiev's politics but they are symptomatic of G's approach to music. I love a lot of Gergiev's work, even when he's crass. But the scary thing is that his new popularity demonstrates something even more scary in this superficial soundbite era of "instant" thrills. People no longer seem to value listening, learning, thinking. Read Overgrown Path , it is what seriously good blogging can be. I wish I could write as well as that. If the LSO want the full score it is here . Song credit Mark A. Mandel . Any copyri

Is this a record?

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Is this a CD, a book, or a multi-media package? Is this early music, archive recording or new music? Is this classical, sacred, ethnic, or world music ? Is this entertainment or scholarship? Is this Eastern or Western music? Is this classical music helping to change the world ? Is this digital content or a visual feast? Is this my CD of the year ? Is the music really spanning one thousand years ? Is this a great humanitarian statement or a coffee table book? Is this music for a virtuoso audience ? Is there really no MP3 download option? Is this music for innocent ears ? Is this the perfect Christmas present? Is this 435 page full colour volume a statement that small is no longer beautiful? Is this a record? Is this the future of recorded music ? The answer on all counts is yes. Or, in other words, this is Jordi Savall's latest project. Jerusalem originated as a concert series commissioned by the Cité de la Musique in Paris to celebrate the three major monotheistic religions, Ch

War Requiem - the movie

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Adding images to a masterpiece by Benjamin Britten is a high risk venture. But director Derek Jarman was never one to shirk a challenge, and his 1988 film War Requiem has just been re-released in a twentieth anniversary edition DVD. Jarman's dramatic visual realisation is set to, and fully respects, Britten's music. The only addition is a superb opening cameo appearance by Laurence Olivier reciting the Wilfrid Owen poem, Strange Meeting , which Britten set for Peter Pears in the Requiem's Libera me . This was Olivier's final performance, and the 82 year old actor died the following year. Derek Jarman , who died of Aids in 1994, jokingly referred to this film as 'The Three Queers' Requiem. This is a reference to his own role as director, Britten's as composer, and Wilfrid Owen as the homoerotic poet whose texts are combined with the Latin Requiem Mass in Britten's masterpiece. The stunning and shocking film has Jarman's signature homosexual overt

What we need are virtuoso audiences

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Both of these types of pieces are essentially contrapuntal and can be very demanding on the members of the audience requiring them to become at times 'virtuoso listeners' as they penetrate the interaction and winding ways of the musical lines. So writes lutenist Hopkinson Smith about Francesco da Milano's Fantasias and Recercari which feature on the superb new Naïve CD seen above. And how right Hopkinson Smith is about the need for virtuoso listeners. So much futile effort is being extended today on trying to reach non-existent new audiences for classical music when, what is really needed, is to develop, extend and challenge existing audiences. For an example of a virtuoso audience look no further than any Britten Sinfonia concert. This ensemble refused to play the celebrity music director game and instead poured their considerable talents into developing a virtuoso audience that fills concert halls for everything from the Tunisian oud to Handel's Messiah . When

Copyright or copywrong?

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Copyright hit a nerve in my recent posts on the Naxos Hansel and Gretel and the Modern Jazz Quartet re-releases . So today's story that musicians are pressing for an extension of mechanical copyright in the EEC from 50 to 95 years makes interesting reading. In the United States the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright on mechanical recordings to 2067. As a result, no sound recording can be considered, definitively, to be in the public domain in the US before that date, even if the recording was made before 1923 and even if it was recorded in another country where it has already entered the public domain. This disparity between US and EEC copyright law allows recordings such as the 1953 EMI Hansel and Gretel to be copied by Naxos and others for resale in the EEC but not in the US. But the record companies are using technology to keep recordings in copyright . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpos

Why I am sorely disillusioned by Gergiev

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Dear Pliable, Recent postings have prompted me to return to my original story about Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra. Jfl posted a valuable article from the New York Times (8th November 2008), in which Gergiev is reported as remaining ‘unrepentant, even proud, of his role’ in the Kirov’s victory concert for Russia in Ossetia: ‘Morally, I am 100 percent sure I did the right thing.’ And as for Western criticism? ‘So what? I am Ossetian.’ Well, that’s fine, then. It appears extraordinarily disingenous of Gergiev to accept Western patronage while dismissing his paymasters as politically irrelevant. Even more pertinent to the LSO, however, is Michael McManus’s piece ‘Podium Politics’ in November’s Gramophone . McManus, a one-time parliamentary candidate, reports that during a concert break in one of the LSO’s recent Edinburgh performances he was quizzed by orchestra members and asked: ‘What’s the truth about Ossetia then?’ McManus’s conclusion is: ‘Evidently their pr

Richard Hickox - contemporary music's loss

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There was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour This quotation from Luke 23:44 stands at the head of the score of Edmund Rubbra's crowning achievement, his Symphony No. 9 'Sinfonia Sacra'. The superlative world premiere recording of that work is seen below. The conductor of the 1993 Chandos CD was Richard Hickox conducting his beloved BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales. Today, the music world is reeling at the truly shocking news of Richard Hickox's sudden death on Sunday at the age of 60. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music before becoming organ scholar at Queen's College, Cambridge. His repertoire was wide, and his first performances included the premiers of The Three Kings and A Dance on the Hill by Peter Maxwell Davies. A successful international career meant Richard worked with many leading orchestras and opera companies, but the sense of loss is so great because of his unique contribution championing lesser-known twentieth century mus

Why I hate cool and ironic

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The infuriating thing is that the BBC can be both so good and so bad within a very short space of time. On Saturday's CD Review on Radio 3 Jonathan Swain reminded us just how good the BBC can be. His review of the available recordings of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Job - A Masque For Dancing was a textbook example of informed and intelligent radio. His advocacy of the work was so powerful that I listened again to Tod Handley's 1984 LP of this overlooked masterpiece as soon as the programme finished. The bad thing is that Jonathan Swain, and several other excellent presenters, have been sidelined to specialist review and overnight programmes as Radio 3 continues to trade excellence for access . Clearly BBC director general Mark Thompson never listened to Russell Brand on Radio 2 . I also suspect that Radio 3 controller Roger Wright doesn't spend enough time listening to his own station's output. Jonathan Swain's passionate case for Job was a million miles from

At home with Benjamin Britten

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Benjamin Britten was born in the house seen in these photos on November 22nd, 1913. The house is 21, Kirkley Cliff Road, Lowestoft in Suffolk. It was Britten's home until 1934, by which time he had composed his Simple Symphony op. 4 , based on music written in the house between the ages of nine and twelve. The two photos above shows the attic room that was Britten's bedroom for twenty-one years, and it is here that he composed much of his early music. The top photo shows the room today; the lower one was taken by Britten himself in late 1934. On the writing desk, where he composed, can be seen a small bust of Beethoven. The North Sea, with its many moods, is a leitmotif that runs through all Britten's music. The breakers can be heard from his bedroom, and the photo was taken by me looking out to the shore on a typically grey and murky autumn day. This is the same view photographed by Britten himself in December 1934. The view to the sea is the same, but progres

A scam by a venal London merchant

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There is a version of Hamlet called the bad quarto, which was the first to be printed, in 1603. It is a pirated edition, designed by an unknown bookseller to cheat Shakespeare of his royalties. To make it, the pirate hired one of the minor actors, the man who played Marcellus, to write out what he could remember of the play. In the Globe Theatre , where Shakespeare's plays were first performed, the actors were only given pieces of paper holding their own lines. They never possessed a complete copy of the script. As a consequence Marcellus's largely irrelevant words are perfectly rendered, the speeches of other characters he shares scenes with are competent, and the rest of the play when he was not on stage is a garbled mess. It is a pointless jumble, the work of the finest mind in English literature filtered through the memory of a bit-part player, catching snatches in the wings, then scribbling them down months later in a scam by a venal London merchant. His ineptitude is fun

A hero's life overshadowed

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The premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw at the Teatro la Fenice , Venice in 1954 was one of the events that changed the direction of twentieth century music. The photograph above was taken in Venice at the time of the premiere and shows Britten with some of those who helped reshape post-war music. Directly across from the composer is Peter Diamand , who was a co-founder and general manager of the Holland Festival , director of the Edinburgh Festival , director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and artistic adviser to the Orchestre de Paris . On Diamand's right is an exceptional musician whose reputation, like their face in this photo, has been overshadowed by the brilliant circle in which they moved. For the moment let's just call that person our incognito hero, or IH for short. Our incognito hero came from a musical family and studied at a leading music conservatory. In 1930 a scholarship allowed the adventurous IH to travel and study music in th

This is the future of classical music

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A classical chamber orchestra on the opening night of the London Jazz Festival with a Tunisian oud player? Purists on every side must have been steaming from all orifices. But this is the future of music. And it works, as this exhilarating fusion showed. Nothing demonstrated that better than Arvo Pärt's 1977 minimalist classic, Fratres . It opened the concert, played “straight” by the excellent strings of the Britten Sinfonia under Joanna MacGregor's (below) direction, with its elegiac refrain rising and falling over a drone like a sombre ritual. Then, at the end, it was repeated as an encore - but with a difference. This time the great Dhafer Youssef (above) and the virtuoso percussionist Satoshi Takeishi added a subtle, shadowy patina of Arabic cries and whispers. It was as if the ancestral Estonian modes summoned by Pärt in Northern Europe had stirred strange, kindred echoes in North Africa. Pure musical magic. And it wasn't the only heartstoppingly beautiful mom

Classical music community 1 - Philistines 0

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A news story, which has just broken in Holland , makes very sweet reading indeed. Here is a free translation: Dutch Culture Minister halts Concertzender closure DEN HAAG 17 NOV 17.35h - Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk has approached the Board of Directors of the Dutch Public Broadcasting System (NPO) to insist that classical internet station Concertzender remain on-air. This promise was made by the Minister in response to questions posed to him by Parliament Member Boris van der Ham (party D66). Concertzender heard last week that the NPO would terminate its financial support as of January 1st. "I am ready to enter into discussion with the Board of Directors to figure out how the valuable contributions of Concertzender to the Dutch music culture can be given an appropriate place in a new structure," says Plasterk. Van der Ham had asked Plasterk for clarification regarding the situation in the middle of October. According to Van der Ham the Concertzender makes a positive c

Classical music roller coaster

Here is the Zurich Chamber Orchestra putting the usual YouTube offerings to shame. The full screen version is even better . Zurich Chamber Orchestra : Roller Coaster by mikropikol More innovative classical music marketing from Switzerland 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

A global classical music community?

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My site traffic analysis shows that the enforced closure of Dutch classical music webcaster Concertzender was the big music news story over the weekend . As American expatriate composer Vanessa Lann lamented, the station closure is 'very, very bad for Holland (and the rest of the international listening public)' and as Dutch blogger Rolf Otterhouse wrote , the internet broadcaster is 'an innovative and enthusiast team... with a passion for classical, contemporary, jazz and world music'. Despite this there has been little interest in the fate of Concertzender outside Europe, and, to date, I haven't seen one US music blog run the story. I wonder if the coverage would have been different had an American classical music station been axed? Update 17/11 - Dutch Culture Minister halts Concertzender closure. More music beyond borders here. Header image is geographic plot of all Overgrown Path readers as I write the story at 3.30pm UK time - Californians are in bed, l

Does the sound matter anymore?

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A visit to the Norwegian website Hifiisentralen prompts me to ask, does the sound matter any more? Hifiisentralen linked to my recent Radka Toneff post , and I noticed that many of the comments on the Norwegian site included details of the member's audio system. Blogs today are full of mentions of MP3s, iTunes, SACD, 5.1 and other miraculous acronyms. But when did you last see any discussion of the other links in the audio chain - the amplifier and loudspeakers? A while back hi-fi brands such as Quad and Acoustic Research were mentioned as frequently as record labels and recording artists. It could be that audio systems are so good today that we don't need to talk about them anymore. Or, it could be that we are so obsessed with storage and transmission media that we have forgotten the other vitally important components. Personally, I tend to the latter explanation. It is a simple law of physics that you need large speakers to reproduce extended bass. And I'm not only ta

Save the alternative classical music station

Rolf Otterhouse is not taking the enforced closure of Concertzender in Holland lying down. More power to Rolf. Check out his website here , listen to Concertzender , while you can, here. Update 17/11 - Dutch Culture Minister halts Concertzender closure. 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