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Showing posts from December, 2011

Shostakovich and Bartok tempo accelerando

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'Phil Hill, on the other hand, was just as happy to retire to his hotel room after dinner and soothe his nerves with Bártok's string quartets or Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony played on a Concertone reel-to-reel stereo that he travelled with.' Those are 1961 Formula One world champion Phil Hill's tastes in music described in Michael Cannell's newly published The Limit . A fascinating glimpse of a celebrity's pre-iPod playlist - or is it? New Yorker contributor Michael Cannell candidly acknowledges his book's debt to what is known in publishing as "novelistic nonfiction", a genre famously pioneered by Norman Lebrecht . Which means Cannell sometimes plays fast and loose with his motor racing facts, if not with his celebrity playlists. Header image is Phil Hill in a Ferrari Dino 246 at Monaco in 1959. Footer photo shows a car that I saw Phil Hill racing against a few years later, Jim Clark's Lotus 25. And no prizes for identifying who is w

How classical music ignored the breaking news

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While researching donors to the Royal Opera House for a recent post I was reminded of John Cage's observation that "The opera in society, is an ornament of the lives of the people who have". In his New Yorker review of 2011 Alex Ross picks up on my fiscal theme and eloquently describes the funding sources of major classical institutions as resembling "a rogues’ gallery of international financial malfeasance". Impending global economic meltdown and the Arab Spring dominated the news in 2011, yet classical music's response was an introspective debate on how to support its serious money habit . Despite this, like Alex, I continued to be moved and inspired by music. My header photo shows troubadour éthique Titi Robin who premiered his River Banks project in Paris in November and proved that outstanding music making and alternative business models are not mutually exclusive. If I may be excused one solipsism, John McLaughlin Williams' advocacy of Phil

No crack in a fortress can be accounted small

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Baroque runs riot in the chapel of the Penitent Blacks ( Chapelle des Pénitents Noirs ) in Avignon, as seen in my photos. Dating from the 18th century, the chapel was built by the co-fraternity of the Black Penitents of Mercy who tended to the material and spiritual welfare of prisoners in the city. Recently renovated by Avignon city council, the chapel is now the home of a contemporary co-fraternity of the Black Penitents. This was formed in 1983 to "pray for the souls of Purgatory and to be guardians of the traditional Catholic liturgy". Posters and flyers from the Fraternité Saint Pie X are prominently displayed in the chapel, promoting among other events a retreat to study "The spirituality of Monsignor Lefebvre". The Fraternité Saint Pie X (Society of Saint Pius X) was founded in 1970 by the right-wing cleric Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council and among its aims is the retention of the traditional Catho

Major opera house and singers take tobacco money

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Tosca trends on Twitter as a result of BBC TV's Christmas Eve screening from the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. But the Royal Opera's funding from a cigarette company does not trend. As well as receiving £26 million in public funding from the Arts Council, the Royal Opera takes money from "Gold Patron" British American Tobacco . With brands including Dunhill, Kent, Lucky Strike and Pall Mall, British American Tobacco is the world’s second largest quoted tobacco company . Cigarette sponsorship is alive and well in opera and an earlier post revealed that Japan Tobacco International, which is the third largest tobacco company in the world, is a corporate sponsor of Glyndebourne, the Mariinsky Theatre and Salzburg Whitsun Festival, while tobacco money also goes to the London Philharmonic and Ulster Orchestras. Even more surprising is the number of individual singers jointly sponsored by British American Tobacco and the Friends of Covent Garden. These include bass Ji

Suicide is painless...

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...when committed to the sublime sounds of Tomás Luis de Victoria. Ninety of Victoria's sacred works in acclaimed recordings by Ensemble Plus Ultra directed by Michael Noone can currently be bought in a 10 CD Archiv box for the suicidal price of £27 in beleaguered HMV stores in the UK. Suicide is Painless aka Song from M*A*S*H is a personal favourite on Bill Evan's album You Must Believe in Spring . And that mention of Bill Evans takes us from Tomás Luis de Victoria to György Ligeti . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

A very happy Christmas to all my readers

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This is the Christmas Eve scene at the Syriac Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Qaraqosh in northern Iraq. Many Iraqi Christians have taken refuge in Qaraqosh from Islamic fundamentalists in the south of the country and the Church of the Immaculate Conception is the largest church in Iraq. Since Saddam Hussein's arrest in 2003 the population of Qaraqosh has doubled and the town is now home to more than 10,000 refugees. My music for Christmas was recorded in Qaraqosh and comes from a newly released CD from French independent label Ad Vitam . On the disc denominations including Catholic and Orthodox Syriacs and Chaldaeans celebrate the Christian liturgy in the Arabic, Chaldaean, Syriac and Soureth languages, the latter being derived from the Aramaic that Christ spoke. A beautiful and deeply moving disc that bears witness to the healing power of music . There is an Aramaic Passion here and more on Ad Vitam , the label that build bridges of hope and trust, here . * 4

Technology must be imbued with the human spirit

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'From 1976 to 1980 my son Dominic was a chorister at Winchester Cathedral. During that period and ever since, I have written a number of works associated with that wonderful building and choir. Listening to the choir rehearse, as I often did, with the bells simultaneously ringing above, was one of the mingled impressions which started me on this work: it is entirely based on the boy's voice and that of the largest bell... In 1980 the sounds were recorded and then taken to IRCAM, the sound research institute in Paris who commissioned the work. Then they were manipulated by computer and cross-bred with synthetic simulations of the same sounds. These latter, being purely digital creations, could be internally transformed to an amazing degree. One could, for instance, move seamlessly from a vowel sung by the boy to the complex bell spectrum consisting of thirty-three partials. The entire pitch structure is based on these partials with their curious, haunting intervals: the harmoni

Try some tasty free range Mozart this Christmas

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Classical music is becoming more and more like factory farming . An intensive and industrialised process financed by global corporations rears consumer friendly products in confined spaces with the sole intention of bringing the bland results to market as quickly as possible . But there are alternatives, such as Bruno Walter's deliciously tasty Mozart. I paid just 14 euros (18 US dollars) in FNAC in Avignon for the new 6CD Sony set seen above which re-issues recordings made in perfectly acceptable sound between 1954 and 1960. Current pricing on Amazon UK is £13.50 , which makes this almost free range Mozart . Thoroughly recommended despite the cost of the bargain price being no documentation at all other than recording venues and dates. Which means no mention that Bruno Walter was a disciple of the Austrian philosopher and educationist Rudolf Steiner . Steiner was a founding figure in the Theosophy movement who influenced a diverse group of musicians including Alexander Scr

Who needs a tune?

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Toynbee deconstructionist David Derrick has a noteworthy post developing the idea that, in David's own words -"there were two great ages of the tune. The first was in the sixteenth century. It produced the greatest and most elemental tunes. Think of the Old 100th (sixteenth-century French and still sung every year at Concord, Massachusetts), Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (German, circa 1600), Vom Himmel hoch (Luther), many others... The second age was after 1800, and especially after 1850, and it produced a kind of apotheosis of the tune, especially in Tchaikovsky and Puccini. In the great age of counterpoint and in the classical era that followed it the tune was, relatively speaking, in abeyance". All of which chimes with a disc that has been a frequent visitor to my CD player recently. Ochion Jewell's new CD First Suite for Quartet is an iconoclastic essay in what Free Jazz magazine describes as "melody free" music. Ochion is a tenor saxophonist and

Is concert programming too monochrome?

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My pre-concert talk with conductor David Hill before last Sunday's scintillating Britten Sinfonia Messiah wandered off down a diverting overgrown path. In response to one of my questions David recounted how he recently conducted a concert in Liverpool with the following programme : Elgar - Wand of Youth Suite No. 2 Coleridge-Taylor - The Song of Hiawatha, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast Fauré - Requiem At first this programme, which David Hill described as "one wedding and a funeral", seems bizarre. But is it? Dwindling and ageing audiences suggest classical musical took a wrong turning somewhere down the line. Now spend a few minutes browsing the programmes for the 1896 season of Henry Wood Proms on the invaluable Proms archive . Look at the sheer variety of music in each concert and contrast it with today's austere diet of single Mahler symphonies. Is contemporary concert programming too monochrome and is that one of the reasons why classical music is failing to att

Classical music makes the visual connection

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Still on a high from last night's Messiah with the Britten Sinfonia and David Hill in Norwich. Readers in Holland can catch a repeat performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam tomorrow (Dec 20) evening; but hurry as a quick check of the Concertgebouw's website indicates that, hardly suprisingly, the performance is almost sold out. At a time when classical music is desperately short of smart moves the Britten Sinfonia has scored yet another home run by forming a new professional choir, the Britten Sinfonia Voices, that matches their instrumental ensemble for sheer élan and virtuosity. But don't take my word, read Edward Seckerson's 5 star Independent review for their recent L'enfance du Christ . A lot of very special things were happening in the Theatre Royal Norwich yesterday. One of them was the visual signing for the Messiah by Paul Whittaker - that is Paul signing for The Sixteen in my header image. Paul Whittaker's miraculous facility for turning

Where have all the Requiems gone?

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While I was away in November Jessica Duchen lamented the lack of post-9/11 Requiems in an article for the Independent . John Tavener's Requiem did not make the cut for Jessica's piece but instead gets the consolation prize of a post here. Commissioned for Liverpool's 2008 tenure as European City of Culture, Tavener's Requiem is a truly syncretic work . It uses texts from sources including the Catholic Mass, the Qur'an, Sufi poetry and the Hindu epics to extol the gnostic viewpoint that, to quote the composer, although "the different religious traditions are often in conflict with each other... inwardly every religion is the doctrine of the self and its earthly manifestations". The final movement Ananda , which is a pulsating arch built around the words "I am that - I am God" sung in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic, is a thing of both great beauty and truth. EMI's release of John Tavener's Requiem was one of the more memorable achie

Paz, Salam and Shalom for Montserrat

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In Marseille last week I stumbled across an intriguing new CD in a store. Paz, Salam & Shalom is, as the title suggests, an exploration of medieval songs from the Sephardic, Muslim and Christian traditions. Part of the appeal of the new release is the accompaniment that subscribes to the view that authentic performances are a somewhat silly tradition by including Tibetan bowls and seed pods from the flamboyant among the percussion. Compellingly performed by Canticum Novum and directed by Emmanuel Bardon , the CD is beautifully recorded in the church of Pommiers in France and released on the small independent label Ambronay . It is a delightful disc which I thoroughly recommend to readers, but that is not the reason for writing today. When I was in Paris two weeks before travelling south, news had come of the death of Montserrat Figueras . She was, of course, the wife of Jordi Savall and the star of so many great recordings. But Montserrat Figueras, who is seen above, was so mu

Symphony orchestra's king size connections

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Continuing my tobacco sponsorship thread James Curran points out in a message via Facebook that in the past Naxos recordings of the Ulster Orchestra have been cigarette sponsored. This indeed was the case and my 1997 Naxos CD of James MacMillan's Veni Veni Emmanuel has a sizeable text block explaining that it is part of the Gallaher Group PLC twentieth century music series. As James also points out Gallaher , who are now part of Japan Tobacco International, are a major employer in Northern Ireland. The header image is a scan of the back of the sleeve of my 1982 Chandos recording of Bax Tone Poems which was one of many LPs carrying the legend "Produced by Chandos Records in association with Gallaher Ltd". James Curran explains he complained to Klaus Heymann about the tobacco sponsorship and was assured this would not be continued. There is no evidence that Naxos or Chandos now receive any cigarette money although the MacMillan sleeve artwork still carries the Gallaher

Whose bread I eat, his song I sing

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Yesterday's post started out investigating classical music's dependancy on funding from the banking and financial services industries. But it uncovered the for me surprising fact that sponsorship by tobacco companies is still widespread in classical music. In the post I identified the London Philharmonic and Ulster Orchestras and Salzburg Whitsun Festivals as receiving money from Japan Tobacco International, who are the world's third largest cigarette company . Now I have found that the legendary Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg has been a long-term recipient of Japan Tobacco International money. In their 2009 annual report (page 54) the cigarette company explains: 'Our financial commitment has enabled the complete [Mariinsky] orchestra and soloists to travel to the UK to perform concerts at the Barbican theatre, enabling the world-renowned performances to reach an international audience.' Content remaining on the Barbican website relating to the 2009 perform

Classical music's ethically compromised funders

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Despite the economic turmoil classical music remains financially dependant on the banking and financial services sector. Exclusive Overgrown Path research shows that 45% of corporate sponsorship for ten leading orchestras in Europe and North America comes from the banking and financial services sector. This is more than five times greater than from any other corporate funding source. A second funding tier comprises companies from the automotive and media industries, with each sector accounting for around 8% of sponsorship. Below that a third tier is made up of companies from the aerospace & defence, pharmaceutical, retail, utility and law sectors. As the research analyses source rather than revenue (see explanatory note below) it is likely that the fiscal contribution of the banking and financial services corporations is considerably greater than 50%. A number of the corporate funders, both in the banking sector and elsewhere, have been linked to ethical issues, some of which are

Classical music's own version of assisted suicide

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Next spring the flood of Mahler releases and re-releases is joined by a new symphony cycle from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. I am sure the Concertgebouw has done its own market research, but my own survey reveals that the cheapest price on Amazon UK for an 11 CD Maher symphony cycle is £16.99 for Gary Bertini's well reviewed interpretations on EMI. Has it occured to anyone else that the death of classical music may in fact be a case of assisted suicide ? * Header image features my original 1972 vinyl release of Georg Solti conducting Mahler's Sympony No 8 as the sleeve design of the new Concertgebouw cycle is simply too ghastly to feature here. Solti's definitive Mahler 8 is, incidentally, currently selling for £5.24 . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Simon Rattle to leave EMI for Alia Vox?

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Over the years I have both worked for and despaired at EMI, and have also praised the work of French independent label Zig-Zag Territoires . In classical music what goes around comes around and now comes the news that high profile EMI artists the Belcea Quartet are leaving the label to return to Zig-Zag Territoires where they cut their first CD . My prediction is that the next EMI departure will be Simon Rattle who will move to Alia Vox . Header image is the Zig-Zag Territoires Bach meets Coltrane disc which in 2008 I featured under the currently topical headline of Recommended for Coltrane loving Democrats . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

World music - cultural exploration or exploitation?

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The old concierge in an apartment building where an American writer and his wife lived had said it best. "That type, they want everything, men and women from the common people, young ones, healthy, preferably from the countryside, who can't read or write, serving them all day, then servicing them at night. A package deal, and between two pokes, tokes on a nicely packed pipe of kif to help the American write! Tell me your story, he says to them. I'll make a novel out of it, you'll even have your name on the cover: you won't be able to read it but no matter, you're a writer like me, except that you're an illiterate writer, that's exotic - what I mean is, unusual, my friend! That's what he tells them, without ever mentioning money, because you don't talk about that, not when you're working for a writer, after all! They aren't obliged to accept, but I know that poverty - our friend poverty - can lead us to some very sad places..." That

The message of the symphonies of Beethoven

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'The most tweeted event of the year was Beyoncé's pregnancy announcement at the MTV awards, which generated 8,868 tweets per second (TPS)' - from yesterday's Independent 'Man lives and evolves by 'eating' significance, as a child eats food. The deeper his sense of wonder, the wider his curiosity, the stronger his vitality becomes, and the more powerful his grip on his existence' - from Colin Wison's The Occult 'The message of the symphonies of Beethoven could be summarised: 'Man is not small; he is just bloody lazy' ' - also from Colin Wison's The Occult . No Beyoncé, but more wonder, vitality and Beethoven here . 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 u