Posts

Showing posts from February, 2011

Louis Andriessen in the sky with diamonds

Image
Ecstatic illumination is the goal, the paths to it may include the spiritual, physical, chemical or, as at Snape on Friday, the musical. The video installation seen above inspired by Matthew Welton's poem Virtual Airports was the vehicle for an open session by Aldeburgh Young Musicians (8-18 year olds) curated and conducted by cellist extraordinaire Oliver Coates . Two semi-improvised works created by the young musicians framed a performance of Louis Andriessen's Workers Union . Except it was more ecstatic illumination than performance, with Andriessen's twenty minute exercise in interpretative freedom constrained by ensemble discipline played with a commitment, precision and sheer slam that totally belied the age of the musicians. Such was the clalibre of the playing that everyone I spoke to in the audience after the concert reported the same Louis in the sky with diamonds experience. Friday's ecstatic illumination was the culmination of a week's intensive w

Disintegrate the divisive - integrate the diverse

Image
That heading is the strapline of the Charming Transport Band . Led by sometime Loose Tubes and London Philharmonic tuba player Oren Marshall the cosmopolitan band play a syncretic mix of jazz, Afro-beat, traditional Ghanaian, Sephardic and European free-improvised music on tuba, reads, guitar, piano, keyboards, atenteben bamboo flute, djembe, congas and gome drum. They have just mentored a week long Snape workshop with Aldeburgh Young Musicians ; this culminated in an hour long open session that truly integrated the diverse and proved that music education is alive and kicking in Britain if the experts would but leave London to find it . * Featured CD is the Charming Transport Band's divisiveness disintegrating Family Connections. Released on the F-IRE Collective label it is available from the usual sources with tuba and percussion providing bass to die for . Also on Facebook and Twitter . CD and tickets for the Snape open session were purchsed. Report broken links, missing i

Music that sets one or two things straight

Image
'Time, tide, and the accident of what the statisticians call birth have conspired to provide us with a tradition barely ours and hardly its own. Music, if it has a mind to, can sing about things like that, and maybe set one or two of them straight, yes?' from Richard Fariña's notes for Celebrations for a Grey Day From Phil Ochs the path leads to a little known treasure from 1965. Richard Fariña married Joan Baez's sister Mimi in 1963 and Celebrations for a Grey Day was their first album. The vocal tracks are Dylan-lite, which is not a problem, but the real beauty of the album lies in its six instrumental tracks scored for autoharp, dulcimer and guitar. Richard Fariña died in a motorcycle accident a year after Celebrations for a Grey Day was released. Read about his novel It Looks Like Up to Me here , and more on Richard, Mimi and Dylan here . The autoharp and dulcimer are members of the zither family as is the kithara and there is new music for the kithara on ano

Found in transcription

Image
A recent mention of Dmitry Sitkovetsky's transcription of the Goldberg Variations leads us down the path of unusual takes on Bach. Jennifer Micallef and Nigerian born Glen Inanga , seen above, are the pianists on Hyperion's recording of Robin Holloway's endlessly entertaining thirty new variations known as the Gilded Goldbergs after J.S. Bach . Staying with the keyboard, György Kurtág's Bach transcriptions interleaved with his own piano miniatures Játékok on ECM are not to be missed. Finally from miniature to muscular Bach. Pascal Vigneron uses organ, brass and woodwind to realise Jacques Chailley's Gnostic re-ordering of the Art of Fugue which sequences the fugues using a digitally correct binary progression. My 2006 post about what was then a new release generated a lot of interest in the double CD which is seen below and the article is well worth reading for its background on this little known but very rewarding example of 'found in transcription'

Classical music needs a touch of genius

Image
PR spin has devalued the word genius to mean no more than a hashtag attached to the latest musical wunderkind . It was not always so, as a remarkable DVD of harpsichordist Scott Ross reminds us. Newly released by Harmonia Mundi , the video was recorded in Rome in the late 1980s when Scott Ross was terminally ill . The screen grab above comes from the DVD and an extraordinarily moving three minute extract can be seen below, double left click to make it full screen. Scott Ross resources On An Overgrown Path include a profile centred on his masterly Scarlatti recordings, a review of a suitably quirky biography , a pilgrimage to the French church where he recorded the two Couperin organ Masses, an account of his final Aids-related illness , and his contribution to pushing the classical music envelope . All timely reminders that genius refreshes the parts Facebook and Twitter cannot reach . With thanks to reader TMcC . My copy of the Scott Ross DVD was purchased from Prelude Records . An

A voice and message so beautiful

Image
Phil Ochs - a voice and message so beautiful that the CIA couldn't let it continue . Comment left by Jonathan Holloway on my Facebook link to Protest Music . While on this thread it is worth remembering that Elliott Carter’s music was championed in Europe in the 1950s by the CIA funded American Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA was also heavily involved in the development of LSD with André Previn among the experimenters . And staying with unlikely alliances, if Benjamin Britten and Pete Seeger sounds improbable follow this path . Double left clicking on the video image makes it full screen. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Classical music needs new tipping points

Image
Bernard Haitink's LP of Mahler's First Symphony was repackaged in 1972 by Philips to tie in with a prime time BBC TV profile of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. As a result a substantial new audience was created for the music of Mahler, Haintink and the Concertgebouw. Other classical music tipping points have included Ken Russel's Elgar film , Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey which did for Richard Strauss and György Ligeti what Amadeus did for Mozart, and Leonard Bernstein's TV broadcasts in the States and David Munrow's radio programmes in Britain . Writing my recent post about the Mahler tipping point created by Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice took me down the path of music marketing. Today's classical music marketeers have only two tools in their kit, namely celebrity and social media , and neither have not been particularly successful at hitting the all important tipping points. L.P. Hartley may have told us "The past is a forei

Protest music

Image
'In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty' - Phil Ochs More on Orient-Occident here . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter .

The three greatest composers who ever lived

Image
'The three greatest composer who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington' - Percy Grainger at a New York University lecture in 1932 . Four of Percy Grainger's Bach transcriptions, including the mighty Toccata and Fugue in D minor, feature on Pier Lane's CD of Bach transcriptions seen above. Angela Hewitt has also recorded a disc of Bach transcriptions for Hyperion which is seen below, although this does not include any of Grainger's. Angela Hewitt is directing the Britten Sinfonia from the keyboard in Bach's Keyboard Concerto No.5 in F minor BWV 1056 in concerts in Cambridge, London and Norwich on April 1, 3 and 4. Also in the programme is Dmitry Sitkovetsky's rarely heard transcription for chamber orchestra of the Goldberg Variations , with Tom Gould leading and directing the Britten Sinfonia. Before the Norwich concert on April 4 I will be asking Angela Hewitt and Tom Gould the save 64 million dollars a year question - who needs a music directo

Sadomasochism in an English country garden

Image
At no time in his life after the age of about fifteen did Grainger abandon his sadistic and masochistic pleasure-seeking. Blood-letting was often part of his activities and he nearly always laundered his own shirts because of the telltale bloodstains. With the possible exception of Mimi Kwast, all his girlfriends were to be drawn into his particular form of lovemaking and there is ample photographic evidence of this. Several photographs exist which he took himself after one of his bouts of auto-flagellation. An indication of his extraordinary mentality can be detected from the fact that as he stood before the camera lens with bleeding wounds he also held up a notice which gave details not only of the exact time of day, location of session and number of lashes with what kind of whip, but also the type of film used in the camera and the exposure and aperture. Whenever he went on tour he took a selection of several dozen whips with him. From Percy Grainger by John Bird (ISBN 0571117171

I am a virtual camera

Image
Compelling real time tracking of a nascent pro-democracy movement here . Listen to the soundtrack here . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2011. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Grammy winner's surprising monastic past

Image
Kora master Toumani Diabaté won a Grammy for his new album recorded with the late Malian blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure and there is a surprising link between the photo above and his award winning Ali and Toumani CD . I took all the photos accompanying this article at the Dominican Monastery of Notre-Dame de Beaufort in Brittany, France and in the centre of the photo above is a kora. But the kora is not there for a concert, it is an integral part of the liturgy celebrated at Beaufort by the Dominican Sisters. There is a tradition of the kora accompanying the Holy Offices of the Catholic Church which dates back to 1963. In that year the Abbey of Solesmes in France, which is a centre of Gregorian chant scholarship , founded the sister Benedictine monastery of Keur Moussa in Sénégal in west Africa. In the absence of the usual organ and in the light of Vatican II's contemporaneous exhortation to embrace the vernacular, the kora was introduced to accompany the liturgy at Keur Moussa

Does the Devil have the best tunes?

Image
'The history of the church is the history of cruelties and horror... Every church with its doctrines of redemption and salvation, above all the Orthodox Faith with its idolatory, excludes the doctrine of Christ' - from Leo Tolstoy's classic of Christian Anarchism The Kingdom of God is Within You If Tolstoy was right and the Eastern Orthodox Church is the Devil reincarnate then the Devil definitely has the best tunes. Sergei Rachmaninov's 1915 setting of the All-Night Vigil is justly celebrated but that of Alexander Grechaninov , composed three years before Rachmaninov's, is unjustly neglected. But perhaps that will change, Grechaninov's All-Night Vigil featured here in a 2006 post about a Brilliant Classics recording and Hyperion has now re-released an interpretation by the Holst Singers directed by Stephen Layton on a budget CD . Among other important works by Grechaninov (1864-1956) is his Missa oecumenica (Universal Mass) which was written in 1936 and a

Classical music station turns the clock back

Image
Just three days after BBC Radio 3's hidden audience loss was exposed the station has announced a U-turn in its music programming policy . So what's new ? Also on Facebook and Twitter . 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

That's the way God planned it

Image
Another much needed move towards equality in classical music comes with the appointment of African-American Thomas Wilkins (above) to the post of Youth and Family Concerts Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra . A few nights back we saw Genius Within: The Inner life of Glenn Gould , aka 'the Foss family movie'. Glenn Gould's " we could be looking at thousands of dollars " radio documentary about Petula Clark gets a mention in the movie but her groundbreaking pressing the flesh with Harry Belafonte on prime time American TV in 1968 does not, so here is the link . Photo of Thomas Wilkins with San Diego Symphony at the Salk Institute credited to PeteOnline.net Thanks for heads up to Antoine Leboyer . 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

New music nourished by the forgotten past

Image
Political epochs have dates, but cultural change is less tidy. Animist, Buddhist and Hindu elements persisted into Muslim times, not merely as leftovers but as ways of thinking, handy symbolic forms. Each civilisation was built over the last, layer upon layer, but the old ways remained too useful to discarded - like the Hindu-style split-gates of the first mosques; so the past, even the forgotten past, continued to nourish the present. Village feasts still used a colour symbolism in their offerings that mimics the iconography of fifteenth-century Hindu Java (though the villagers do not know it); mystical practices blend Sufism with tantric yoga; the ancestors whisper through Muslim rites Andrew Beatty writes in his story of encroaching Islamist orthodoxy A Shadow Falls in the Heart of Java . The island of Java is Islam's eastern frontier, and it looks across the Pacific towards the west coast of America. Although Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation i

The Snape Mistake

Image
Spot the mistake in the first sentence of this Independent story and judge for yourself if it affects the thrust of the first paragraph. The other day, public booking opened for this year's Aldeburgh Festival. Helen Hayes, who runs a recording studio at the nearby Potton Hall with her husband, dashed to her phone, hoping to book seats to take their small son to hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. It wasn't to be. "I've just tried to book for the CBSO Rattle concert and it is sold out – before public booking opens!" she declared on Facebook, adding: "Talk about access to music... and they get most of the public funding for music in this area. Elitist? Classical Music?" To help you spot the mistake here are two clues. The first is that the story ran on 11 February. The second is this copy, which was one click away from the story's author and the Independent sub-editor on the Aldeburgh Festival website . We a

Meetings with remarkable musicians

Image
Do not miss a rare opportunity to add several of the classics of syncretic music to your collection. Collaborations is a 3 CD + 1 DVD set paying tribute to the musical partnership of Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. It opens with the 1967 Chants of India which has been out of the catalogue for five years and comes with a 64 page book containing original sleeve notes plus a foreword by Philip Glass . It appears Collaborations is a 10,000 unit limited edition exclusive to Amazon and is available from both the UK and US sites and also as an MP3 download . Interesting in the week that Jordi Savall's lavish Dinastia Borja 3 CD set wins a Grammy to see the physical CD fighting back and proving that there is more to the listening experience than a computer file . Also on Facebook and Twitter . With many thanks to reader TEMcC for the heads up. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Grammy Savall and friends

Image
Congratulations on their Grammy awards go to Overgrown Path regulars Jordi Savall , John McLaughlin Williams and Lady Gaga . Also on Facebook and Twitter . 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

Do the arts need wide or deep audiences?

Image
The latest UK radio audience figures provide food for thought far beyond the British Isles. At a superficial level the trend for BBC Radio 3 seems to be good news for classical music. Using the headline measure of total number of listeners, which measures the width of the audience, BBC Radio 3 has increased its listeners from Q4 2008 to Q4 2010 by 11.9%. But this increase, which prompted the BBC press office to spin a typically disingenuous "Radio 3 continues strong performance" story , masks a more important underlying trend. Over the same period, which is when many of the popularising measures were introduced at the station, the average hours per listener declined by 14.1%. The average hours per listener figure is a measure of the depth of the audience and is a significant indicator of audience engagement and loyalty. The answer to the question does classical music need wide or deep audiences? is, of course, it needs both. What matters is the total mass of the audience w

I ask whether there can be any hesitation?

Image
There are two positions available to us - either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which renders us unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Thérèse , and where will your little mind find an argument to combat that one? - D.A.F. Sade : Justine That is the epigraph from the first of Lawrence Durrell's tetralogy of novels The Alexandria Quartet which presents four perspectives on a single set of events in Alexandria, Egypt, at the time of World War II. Moroccan-born composer Maurice Ohana's Signes for flute, piano, percussion and two zithers (one tuned chromatically, one tuned in micro intervals) played by Ensemble "Ars Nova" de l'ORTF directed by Marius Constant is the soundtrack for this post. More on Lawrence Durrell here and more on that Erato recording and Maurice Ohana here . Background image of Maurice Ohana is from the unofficial blog of the Analog Arts Ensemble . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "

Is syncretic music the future?

Image
Western classical music's search for a new more inclusive paradigm has led it to world music. Many, including Philip Glass , leading critics and this blog , have said the world music is the future. But so many east meets west project sound like awkward forced marriages . Yet beyond world music the path leads onwards towards a destination which may be a mirage or may be the future. Syncretism is the process of reconciling contrary beliefs and involves melding practices of differing schools of thought. Syncretic music has been around for many centuries, notably in the blend of the three monotheistic religions in Moorish Spain, as captured by Jordi Savall and many others . The Middle East is also home to musical syncreticism and the recent budget re-release of Sister Marie Keyrouz and L'Ensemble de la Paix performing Hymns from Lebanon , which sets Christian texts in Arabic using early Eastern music scales is an excellent example. More recently French gypsy musician Titi Robin

On hearing the first Bruckner of spring

Image
At these concerts I also first listened to a symphony of Bruckner. Beyond its "heavenly length" I can remember nothing of it except its conclusion. The finale was cast in the shape of a formidably dull fugue, and as it showed signs of reaching its peroration I thought to myself that seldom or never had I heard any orchestra pile up such a prodigous volume of sound. It was at this precise moment that an army corps of brass instruments, which must have been crouching furtively behind the percussion, arose in their might and weighed in over the top with a chorale, probably intended as an invocation to " Der alte Deutsche Gott ." The crash of silence at the sudden cessation of this din was as shattering upon the ears as the blow of a sandbag. Arnold Bax writing of musical life in Dresden in 1906. It is surprising that given Mahler's current media profile we are not hearing more Bruckner. And talking of Mahler, the use of the Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony by

Herr Mahler has been forced to withdraw

Image
Alex Ross has quite rightly highlighted the absence of any women composers in the New York Philharmonic's 2011/12 season. That programming faux pas is a reminder that Nicholas Kenyon famously created an entire BBC Proms season without any music by women , for which he received a knighthood three months later. Elsewhere there has been some , but not enough , progress towards gender equality in classical music. But, with a few notable exceptions, the symphony has remained an all male preserve. One of those notable exceptions is the muscular Second Symphony of the Welsh composer Grace Williams. This was recorded by Vernon Handley , who never received a knighthood for championing women composers, and the (then) BBC Welsh Orchestra for the long defunct BBC Artium label and the recording was issued on the 1980 LP seen above. This important 20th century symphony has proved its enduring merit by living on in recorded form under license to the Lyrita label where it is available on the

Meetings with remarkable women

Image
Musical celebrations are now everyday events, but musical concelebrations are still rare enough be be newsworthy. Last night saw a noteworthy premiere in Norwich Cathedral with two remarkable women and a collective force of more than three hundred young musicians as the concelebrants . Composer June Boyce-Tillman , who is seen in my header photo conducting last night's premiere, was one of the women celebrants. She has pioneered the introduction of composing and improvisation into school classrooms, she is an authority on Hildegard of Bingen , is active in promoting the role of women in music and leads composing workshops for women. The link between music and theology is another of her special interests and for some years she has used music to encourage interfaith dialogue. Her community music making focuses on spirituality and music, and she is the founder of the Hildegard Network which brings together healing, the arts and theology. Julian of Norwich , one of the greatest Englis

Behind the backs of the music style police

Image
Yes, the music style police are definitely hibernating . First Edmund Rubbra slipped past them , now it is Gerald Finzi . Photo is from I am in an even larger prison and is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2011. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Music and malice in Britten's shadow

Image
...the only ever time I ever heard [Sir Arthur] Bliss really angry was when he was talking about Bill [William Alwyn], who at that time had not yet received a single performance at Aldeburgh in spite of living so near. I have been told that Britten was personally responsible for having the careers of possible rivals ruined if he could; those who suffered from his jealousy (all of course normal married men) included Walton, Finzi, Howells, Berkeley and a number of other genuine composers. With his works framed in nothing but avant-garde Britten was able to shine - and went to his death a millionaire, complaining that he didn't get enough performances. That is the pugnacious Ruth Gipps writing to Doreen Carwithen , widow of the composer William Alwyn and a fine composer in her own right. Ruth Gipps (1921-99), seen above, was a concert standard pianist and oboeist and her output as a composer included five symphonies. Early in her career she was a victim of gender discrimination and