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Showing posts from June, 2012

Now here comes the Simon Bolivar bestseller

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PR material arrives promoting Candace Allen's new book Soul Music about "the power classical music has over those from a non-white culture, particularly disadvantaged ones". Candace Allen is an African-American writer who was married to Simon Rattle, and in the course of the book she "visits Palestine, Venezuela, Scotland, the streets of London and Kinshasa". Independent endorsements of the new book come from Marshal Marcus, head of the Southbank Centre's El Sistema programme , from Martin Campbell White, ceo of agent Askonas Holt which represents the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela , Daniel Barenboim, the West Eastern Divan Orchestra and Simon Rattle, and from Simon Hewitt-Jones who plays in Barenboim's West Eastern Divan Orchestra . To add to the independent advocacy, a glowing New Statesman  critique of Soul Music by Guy Dammann is quoted; you may remember that Dammann's  Guardian review of a Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra B

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

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'It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless'. Israeli artist Dani Karavan created this memorial to the German-Jewish philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin in the Spanish town of Portbou. Titled Passages , the memorial is a sculptural installation that is integrated into the landscape. Visitors enter a passage that slopes down through the cliff face before it falls vertically into the sea below. Progress is blocked at the point that the passage falls away by a glass screen on which the quotation above by Walter Benjamin is etched in five languages. As a German-Jew Benjamin had been stripped of his nationality by the Nazis and was living in exile in Paris. When Germany defeated France in June 1940 Benjamin fled south; he had been issued with a visa for the US and planned to travel there via Spain and Portugal. Like many refugees including Alma Mahler and her husband Franz

Fiddling while Britain burns

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Barclays' chairman Marcus Agius, whose job is on the line over today's interest rate scandal , is also senior independent director of the BBC . After a recent shareholder revolt over executive pay,  Agius promised  Barclays would be "engaging differently and more purposefully". Good to know the BBC is in safe hands . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Header photo was taken at Gigny sur Saône and is © On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

A tweet from beyond the grave

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Decode that tweet here . Truly, now we rise and are everywhere ... Also on Facebook and Twitter . With thanks to reader Ian for the heads up. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Has classical music finally found its contact high?

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Mutterings are coming from both sides of the Atlantic about the reluctance of Aldeburgh Festival artistic director Pierre-Laurent Aimard to engage with Britten's music . It is quite right that those mutterings are voiced, but it is also important they do not drown out some of the notably adventurous things that Aimard is doing at Aldeburgh, just one example being his  Piano Colours project with kinetic artist Norman Perryman . Last week's Piano Colours performance at the Aldeburgh Festival was a revelatory experience, and much of the credit for that must go to the Festival's artistic director. My assumption had been that this fusion of visual art and music was the result of Norman Perryman persuading Pierre-Laurent Aimard to experiment with a multi-media recital. But it turns out the collaboration came about the other way round - Aimard saw Perryman's work when their paths crossed at a Concertgebouw concert in Amsterdam, at which the artist was creating graphics

Dune soundtrack

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Most of yesterday was spent at the coast near where the composer E.J. Moeran grew up. Moeran said his Sibelius influenced Symphony in G minor "was conceived around the sand dunes and marshes of East Norfolk", which is where my header photo was taken. Samples of the symphony can be heard on Youtube, but as the music is coupled with typically tacky graphics I am linking rather than embedding. And talking of Sibelius... Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path  2012 Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Classical music was big business back in 1951

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In 1950 Pablo Casals presented the first Prades Festival in the town's church of St Pierre to celebrate the Bach bicentenary. For the following year's Festival the Bishop of Perpignan declined to make the church available, arguing that the Bach anniversary had been a special case. So the 1951 Prades Festival was held in the Palace of the Kings of Majorca ( Palais des Rois de Majorque ) in nearby Perpignan, see the photo above. Columbia Records had exclusive recording rights for the early Prades Festival and classical music was big business even then - the 1951 Festival was bankrolled by Columbia to the tune of $25,000 via an advance against royalties. This was a very considerable sum in those days, but Columbia's investment paid handsome dividends as their recordings made at this and other Prades Festivals remain in the catalogue more than half a century later. Classic Casals performances captured at the 1951 Festival include his accounts of Beethoven's Archduke Trio

Aldeburgh feels the 'Olympic effect'

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Long-standing Olympic Games sponsor McDonald's has a monopoly on all catering outlets within the Olympic park in east London ; there are four McDonald's on the main Olympic site and the flagship is a 1500 seater restaurant which has the dubious distinction of being the world's biggest burger outlet. French writer Marc Perelman takes up the theme of the malign influence of major sporting events in his newly published book  Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague  in which he deplores the "de-intellectualising" effect of sport and identifies how events such as the Olympics have "become the sole project of a society without projects". Writing in a perceptive Guardian review of Perelman's book, Nicholas Lezard describes how the toxic combination of global brands and sport "is a kind of nightmare capitalism, where, in pseudo-Darwinian fashion, ultimately only one brand survives. The grey monoculture of state communism, once the west's great fear, has

What harbour shelters peace?

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In a celebrated 2011 April Fools' post I exclusively broke the news that the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth in 2013 would be marked by a cycle of the composer's operas given in staged productions at Olympic venues - a cycle culminating in a gala performance of Peter Grimes at Lee Valley White Water Centre. Which should be read in conjunction with the recent non-April Fools' news that the culmination of the 2013 Britten celebrations will be three staged performances of Peter Grimes  on Aldeburgh beach - seen in my header photo. All I can say to Aldeburgh's Jonathan Reekie is he should  bewaret of that white water . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Reformation symphony

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An email arrives inviting me "to take a look" - ie angling for a link - at a new classical music website that is "funded by Universal Music, but editorially independent from them". As these angling emails usually do, it cites one of my posts which the sender found "especially enjoyable". A couple of minutes research tells me that the writer of the email, who is chief honcho of the new site, was editor of the now defunct Classic FM Magazine for ten years. The "especially enjoyable" post is titled 'Is dumbing up classical music's next big thing?' Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo taken in Portbou, Spain is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The dead moose on the Simon Bolivar stage

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Elsewhere there is much well deserved praise for yesterday's Big Noise concert in Stirling featuring Gustavo Dudamel, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the young musicians from the Raploch estate, and anyone who knows that deprived neighbourhood will have been deeply moved by the impact that the Venezuelan music education movement is having there. Which still fails to explain why everyone connected with the event managed, once again , to ignore the large, dead and malodorous moose in the centre of the Raploch stage. El Sistema was founded by José Abreu in 1975, which is twenty-four years before Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuelan. But El Sistema and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela (note the full title) have close links with Chávez, and, as  the New York Times reports , the Chávez administration funds almost all of El Sistema's $29 million annual budget. Funding that also pays for the prominent Venezuelan national colours worn around the mu

Gershwin - clean, rhythmic yet free as a bird

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Hello Bob, your asserting of the "middle way" is brilliant! If you don't mind, I'd like to use that term when I address audiences (with credit given to you for coining it). This is a perfect way to refer to the Glière, which is a piece I've known and loved for years. Indeed it is neither easy nor difficult. However, it is exceedingly difficult to write such music, and among all composers Glière is one of those who gets least credit for such an estimable accomplishment. Your post brought back a memory: toward the end of my tenure with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra , I went to film composer John Williams with a composition of mine (a large concert overture written in a style most unpopular with the academic composers teaching at my school and many others). Williams was very complimentary and offered this perspective upon it and, I think, what he was and is doing as a composer. He said "People don't realize how difficult it is to write in a populi

You read it there last

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Amusing to see the self-styled "UK's most influential music site" finally spotting that the London Philharmonic Orchestra is sponsored by Japan Tobacco International . In seven months time I expect the same über-influential blogger to be exclusively breaking the news that British American Tobacco funds the Royal Opera House and oil-spiller extraordinaire BP is a premier partner of the currently trending London 2012 Festival . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Header image is from a 2006 post . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The rain of King Gustavo

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Elsewhere Alex Ross reports "The good news is that there seems to be no chance of rain in New York tomorrow, as Make Music NY takes hold of the city". However the forecast above is not so good for this evening's outdoor concert by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in Stirling, Scotland. Which is sad but not surprising; because when we lived in that delightful city the locals used to say "If you can see the hills, rain is on its way, and if you can't see the hills, the rain has arrived". I eagerly await tonight's live BBC 4 TV broadcast of the concert from Raploch, my thoughts on this important event appeared here a few months ago in ' Classical music has many saviours '. 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, mi

Music that is neither easy nor difficult

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Dependent arising takes me from a red poppy flowering in our front garden to Reinhold Glière's ballet of the same name . As I write Glière's Third Symphony Il'ya Muromets plays in the Naxos recording seen above. Glière lived in Russia from 1875 and 1956 and wrote well crafted music that is neither easy nor difficult to listen to. Classical music is making many mistakes in its desperation to connect with new audiences , and one of these is to concentrate exclusively on just two marketing categories - difficult' music, Shostakovich, Mahler etc, for the enlightened listener, and 'easy' music,  butchered Gershwin ,  musicals  etc, for the lay listener. Such dualism ignores the middle way, a wealth of music that is neither easy nor difficult to listen to, and which is perfectly capable of winning new audiences. Glière is just one example, Howard Hanson is another, and I am sure readers can add other names to the list. Naxos has a particular flair for spotting &

Music beyond the concept of nation

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Between 1887 and 1895 Eric Satie earned his living playing piano in Montmartre cabarets, notably at the Le Chat Noir where the other patrons included Claude Debussy and Paul Verlaine . On my iPod during a  visit to Paris last December  was Satie in the Orient performed by the transcultural Ensemble Sarband . This presents Satie's music in performances by Eastern instruments judiciously augmented by Western forces. Satie's scores are respected almost to the letter, with the objective of creating not a fashionable musical fusion , but what an illuminating sleeve note describes as music that is "neither East nor West". Le Chat Noir is on the hill in the north of Paris called La Butte Montmartre, and at the foot is Les Bouffes du Nord , the home of Peter Brooks' transcultural theatre group. In his essential biography of the director Michael Kustow describes how Brooks' theatre group is "not a swap-shop of skills and techniques, but... a culture like y

Bad call Your Holiness

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Tibetan Buddhism has received a lot of support On An Overgrown Path  over the years, but I am afraid the Dalai Lama earns multiple demerits for choosing Russell Brand to front his appearance yesterday in Manchester. As part of a mutual admiration routine the senior figure of Tibetan Buddhism described TV comedian Brand as "a strange, wonderful man" . Which contrasts somewhat with the words used by the UK media regulator Ofcom in 2009 to describe a phone call made by Brand to a young woman during a BBC radio programme - "gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning". In recent years there has been criticism of the Dalai Lama's decreasing political engagement and increasing celebrity engagement, a viewpoint I now have some sympathy with. Header photo was taken by me at the Dashang Kagyu Ling - Temple of a Thousand Buddhas in La Boulaye, France and featured in a 2009 post about Jonathan Harvey's String Quartets . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo i

Where would you file this CD?

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Harmonia Mundi's retail stores in France are veritable Aladdin's Caves for hardcore CD collectors, and it is difficult to visit one without parting with some serious cash. During a recent visit to their Perpignan store I scored the very rewarding The Sufi Spirit, the Spirit of Love by Nassima Chabane, an Algerian singer who specialises in the Arab-Andalusian repertoire. But that music will have to wait for another day, because it is the disc that caught my eye as I left the store that is the starting point for today's post. Quite a lot of time had been spent cruising the shelves for chance finds, and the prospect of lunch in the form of a  marmite de poisson in the Place Arago beckoned. But as I left a CD in the store's window caught my eye -, Requiem For A Pink Moon: An Elizabethan Tribute to Nick Drake , by Joel Fredericksen and his Ensemble Phoenix Munich . Now even a marmite de poisson can wait for a Nick Drake discovery, so I headed back into the store and as

Secret agents behind royal command performance

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In the Telegraph article above James Rhodes  asks "Why was there no British pianist at the Jubilee concert?" Well, the answer is quite simple. American Keith Lockhart, who conducted the Jubilee concert,  is managed by Columbia Artists Management Inc , who also manage Jubilee pianist Lang Lang  and handle US representation  of the band that played at the royal bash, the BBC Concert Orchestra. And staying on this path, Columbia Artists Management featured here recently in a blast from the past . 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

Thoughts on a tweet-sized Verdi Requiem

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Yesterday I switched on BBC Radio 3 and found myself listening to an extract from Verdi's Requiem . To my astonishment the back announcement at the end of the Libera Me told me the extract was part of a concert , not a record programme. The concert was  billed as "Music to Die For - a heavenly mix of devilishly popular classics"  and performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, with extracts from the Mozart and Fauré Requiems and from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde  also featuring in it. Single movement extracts have become the norm on Radio 3 record programmes, but this is the first time I have come across a concert of single movement excerpts from the mainstream repertoire. Which set me thinking about the following passage from Peter Mayne's A Year in Marrakesh , a book, incidentally, which dates from 1953. '...it is also the way the Qu'ran is learnt, the 'perspicuous book' of Islam. Muslim children sit swaying back and forth in their tiny windowle

Pierre-Laurent Aimard sees the light

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George Benjamin’s Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm is captured as kinetic art above. I make no apologies for returning to the path of seeing the music, which now takes us from Janis Joplin's Porsche , via a photo-choreographed Mà Vlast , to the current Aldeburgh Festival. On June 22nd Pierre-Laurent Aimard is giving a Piano Colours recital at Snape  with kinetic artist Norman Perryman; here is the Festival brochure's preview of this classical 'happening' - "'Perryman describes his art as ‘kinetic painting’ – painted on glass and projected on to big screens by overhead projectors, his continuously shifting semiabstract expressionist visuals are a synchronised commentary on the evocative imagery of Liszt, Scriabin’s extraordinarily rich harmonic palette, and George Benjamin’s rhythmic transformations. Binding these together and left unadorned are Debussy’s Preludes – songs without words, canvases of the imagination". The screen grab above is from a rehearsal

Music journalism is now a redundant concept

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Recent re-reading has included Jajouka Rolling Stone by Stephen Davis , a music journalist whose credits also include biographies of Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and Michael Jackson. After only a few pages of re-reading Stephen's book I was struck by the quality of the writing. Now, good though Jajouka Rolling Stone is, it would be presumptuous to claim it is great literature; however, what struck me is that by comparison with much current music journalism, the writing is refreshingly competent and readable. Elsewhere there has been discussion about the future of classical music journalism , during which Oliver Condy, editor of BBC Music Magazine,  is quoted as saying that "music journalism must be recognised as the skilled profession it is, and should be respected and remunerated accordingly". Which implies that music journalism is no longer recognised as a skilled profession, a proposition that merits further consideration. Music journalism, as practiced by Harold

Headed for a new life in the stars

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Truly shocking news has come of the death from cancer of Arkansas born, New Orleans educated and London domiciled trumpeter, educator and composer Abram Wilson, seen above, at the age of just 39. I came into contact with Abram through our shared passion for the music of Philippa Schuyler . Last October I wrote here about Abram's critically acclaimed jazz suite Philippa and he had recently received an Arts Council grant to develop this project into a theatrical production. Only recently Abram had discussed with me researching scores of Philippa's compositions held at Syracuse University as well as other documents held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. What a loss..... Here is the statement from Abram's website . It is with great sadness that we have to tell you that yesterday afternoon Abram left this earth for a new life in the stars. It was where he was always aiming and where he now belongs. He was an inspiring and wonderful man, on

Music that is utterly new, yet timeless

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Classical music is reassuringly resistant to mass marketing techniques such as TV advertising. But there is one notable exception - Gregorian chant, which is tailor-made for the mind, body and spirit market , and as a result responds well to promotion. Plainsong has a long history of charting, starting with Angel records 1993 recording made in the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain, an album that reached number three in the Billboard pop chart and which has now sold more than four million copies worldwide. Over the years major labels have repeatedly returned to what has been termed "monk rock" to generate classical album sales; Decca's CD with the nuns of L'Abbaye Notre-Dame de l'Annonciation at Le Barroux just failed to reach number one in the UK Christmas 2011 classical chart , and in the last few months Sony Masterworks have given Gregorian a trans-Atlantic flavour with a new album cut at The Monastery of Christ in the Desert near Santa Fe.

Classical music loses one million listeners

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Audience data for UK radio stations for the first quarter 2012 was published while I was travelling. This quarter includes the nine days during which BBC Radio 3’s much-hyped Schubert Experience was broadcast, but the BBC-centric UK media and blogs that did  the hyping  and hyping   still failed to report that the data records a distinctly bad experience. In Q1 2012 the audience for Radio 3 fell to 1.902 million listeners, a drop of 15.8% from the same quarter the previous year. Hours per listener did increase, but total listening hours (audience x hours per listener) – the key measure of a radio station’s health – plummeted by 13.6%. Writing on the Radio 3 blog network controller Roger Wright, who has implemented an unprecedented series of audience chasing initiatives including a classical chart , disingenuously declares that "audience figures are only one measure of our success". Radio 3’s dismal Q1 performance follows an established trend that is the result of two fu