On An Overgrown Path

Writing about Stockhausen et al being performed in the redundant Tempelhof Flugplatz in Berlin brought back memories of flying into that most extraordinary of airports. The first time I flew into Berlin was in 1973 and I was fortunate to be the only passenger in an executive jet. The views approaching Tempelhof was very similar to those seen in the two photos reproduced here. During final approach over the cemetery the plane was at the same height as the apartment blocks on the right, and I remember an early morning flight when eye contact was made with bleary eyed Berliners at their breakfast tables. By a quirk of fate I was in Berlin on 1 September 1975 when British Airways switched its flights to the new Tegel airport in the suburbs. This meant I arrived at Tempelhof and departed from Tegel. The glamour has certainly gone from flying. My first flight into Berlin was by executive jet into Tempelhof. My most recent visit, documented in I am a camera - Berlin , was by unglamorous R...

Furtwängler collage created from press cuttings from Nov 3, 1946. Now read about Furtwängler's forgotten new music . Graphic (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. 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

Tens of thousands of students are expected to march through Caracas and other cities today in protest at Hugo Chávez's move to amend Venezuela's constitution, despite violence which has injured at least eight students. Masked gunmen opened fire on a university campus in clashes between pro- and anti-Chávez groups in Caracas on Wednesday. The university said the government used thugs to intimidate protesters but Mr Chávez blamed the marchers. "They generally take the path of fascist violence and confront the laws and the people, and they are always looking to the Pentagon, high-ranking generals," he told a summit in Chile yesterday. Campuses are the focus of opposition to Mr Chávez's referendum on December 2 to permit him to run indefinitely and accelerate what he terms a socialist revolution. Raul Isaias Baduel, a retired army commander and long-time Chávez ally, has joined the opposition to the draft constitution, saying it amounts to a coup. Today's Guardian...

Today, November 9, is the Hindu festival of Diwali . This is the "Festival of Light," when lamps are used to signify the victory of good over evil. At midnight on November 9 1989 good was victorious over evil in Europe, and East Germany's communist rulers opened the gates along the Berlin Wall after hundreds of people converged on crossing points. The header photo was taken by me outside the Nicolai Church in Leipzig. It was here that a candle-lit vigil on October 9 1989 precipitated Die Wende. This was the peaceful revolution that brought down the East German communist regime, breached the Berlin Wall and redrew the political map of Europe. The Nicolai Church was also the venue for another great triumph of good over evil, the first performance of Bach's St John Passion in 1723. Now playing - Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony (Chailly, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca 4366262) . Light was important to Messiaen (left), and he described his Catholic f...

A thought provoking week. Lunch on Thursday with an old friend who had a very successful career in classical music. He was complaining about the inane chatter of the current BBC Radio 3 presenters, and said he now listens to talk based Radio 4 most of the time, and heard there the Rudolph Dunbar documentary I wrote about recently. That made me realise that the last two BBC radio programmes I have praised here were both talks on Radio 4 about musicians, about David Munrow and Rudolph Dunbar to be precise. The next day my wife and I presented our first Community Chest programme on Future Radio here in Norwich, UK. (Photo above shows us trying to work out how we can slip 70 seconds of Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 2B into the station's computer driven MOR playlist to mark the tenth anniversary of the composer's death ). The two hour programme was 80% talk with live guests in the studio discussing public art commissions , farm shops versus supermarkets, the Baha...

The death of Kurt Vonnegut (left) has brought many new readers here. Vonnegut's novels include Slaughterhouse-Five based on his experience of the 1945 bombing of Dresden. Here is a summary of Dresden resources on the Path: * Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong ~ self-explanatory * I am a camera - Dresden ~ inspirational pictures * Dead, dead, dead everywhere ~ accounts of the bombing * Dresden Requiem ~ contemporary music tribute * The act of killing from 20,000 feet ~ a new book * Intoxicating Heinichen from Dresden ~ happier times 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Nazi numbers were down to 1,600 – among them extremists from Hungary, the UK, Austria and France – for the 2007 annual fascist commemoration of the Allied air raids on Dresden in February 1945. For several years the event has been a key date in the German and international nazi calendar. Two years ago more than 7,000 fascists attended. As usual the nazis marched with the slogan “No bombing Holocaust ever again”, ridiculing the victims of the real Holocaust, Hitler’s industrialised mass murder of Jews , Roma and Sinti. This year the demonstration was accompanied by an “action week” organised by an alliance of all Dresden’s rightwing extremists outside the National Democratic Party (NPD) under the leadership of “Free Nationalist”. The NPD’s leaders attended the march. The nazis were faced with a strong protest from 1,000 mostly young anti-fascists who repeatedly blocked their path, delaying them and finally forcing them to shorten their demonstration. Some of the more militant nazis ...

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (from Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, 1939) The remarkable photo above was developed, carefully printed, and fixed in the 1970s, but has never before been published. It shows two of the feared East German Vopos ( Volkspolizei ) whose job it was to guard the Berlin Wall . The photograph was taken across death-strip from the West side of the Wall using a powerful telephoto lens. The original print was passed to me recently, and I scanned it to create the image above. The photographer tells me it has never been seen in public before. For long periods both sides in the Cold War stand-off exchanged nothing more than shots from cameras across the Wall. But for short periods the shots came from guns. Estimates vary as to how m...

Gypsies are the forgotten victims of the Holocaust , and it is estimated that half a million perished under the Nazi regime. But in recent years the reshaping of political boundaries and new migrations have increased the number of Sinti and Roma living in Germany to around 70,000, though this number is only an estimate as the German government does not keep records of ethnicity. The situation is further complicated as many Roma who arrived in the 1990s from former Yugoslavia do not hold German citizenship, and hence are classified as immigrants or refugees. The powerful photograph above of a Roma family near Stuttgart comes from an excellent photo essay in Catalyst magazine , which is published by the UK Commission for Racial Equality . Now join the Roma as they Celebrate with Saint Sarah Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Rep...

Listen. Benedict deliberately chose this word as the beginning of his Rule . It also is the first word that strikes us when the Rule is read on January 1; and it stands as a kind of theme for every year. Benedict starts without preliminaries and addresses the person directly. The last word of this sentence forms an inclusion together with the first word: 'Listen - fulfil!' The entire verse describes this listening with its fullest sense. Aquinata Böckmann OSB quoted in The Monastic Way , Canterbury Press ISBN 1853117579. Now follow the monastic way to Columns of plainsong soaring upwards. Aquinata Böckmann is a member of the Benedictine Missionary Sisters of Tutzing , Germany. Image of Saint Benedict (detail of Crucifixion) by Fra Angelico , 1441-42, from Convento di San Marco, Florence. 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 owne...

I don't think there are any boys for whom the singing is a deep religious experience. My mother says I was born three weeks late and that it was typical of me. Talking one's way out of fights is a very useful skill . Once a mugger said, 'Give me your iPod' and I said, 'I'd rather not' , and he said, 'Well, I'd rather not hit you' , and I said, 'Oh come on' , and he was a bit confused by that and then said, 'How much money have you got? ', and I said 'Oh, only a couple of quid' , so he thought a bit more and then walked off. Another time a chav on crutches tried to mug me. I have a weird feeling when I look at myself or my reflection. 'How can that work?' That I exist and am conscious of myself and things move when I want them to move. It's pretty weird. My parents could have created countless different people. Yet they created me, Maud and Tolly. The biggest cheque I've received from Westminster Abbey i...

This is the perfect guilt-free Christmas CD . Don’t worry about dumbing down - it has shed-loads of scholarship and musicianship. But don’t worry about muesli and sandals – it delivers demonstration quality sound, has all the favourite Christmas tunes you will ever need, and finishes with one of the great moments of recorded music, the recessional carol In dulci jubilo complete with organ, instrumental ensemble and a very large choir in a 12th century cathedral. A Mass for Christmas Morning presents a selection of Michael Praetorius’ music arranged as it might have been heard in one the large churches in central Germany in the early 17th century. Praetorius was born into a strict Lutheran family, and his compositions became the musical core of the liturgy of Protestant churches in northern Germany. The Lutheran Mass uses the basic structure of the Roman mass, but with more congregational participation – which gives a great opportunity to produce a sonic spectacular. The versatile Pa...

Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...

Creative home of Bach, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner, the setting for a scene of Goethe's Faust , birthplace of GDR dictator Walter Ulbricht and home to the dreaded Stasi secret police, victim of Allied bombing and Communist urban planning, a thriving university city with a dynamic arts scene ..... that is Leipzig. I was a camera there last weekend, here are my snapshots ... 4th March - 5.00pm Grosser Saal, Gewandhaus Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) Praeludium in F BuxWV 144 Cantata 'O wie sellig sind, die zu dem Abendmahl des Lammes berufen sind' BuxWV 90 Chorale Prelude 'Nun lob mein Seel und Wohl' BuxWV 213 Cantata 'Wie schmeckt es so lieblich und wohl' BuxWV 108 Chorale Prelude 'Nun lob mein Seel und Wohl' BuxWV 215 Chorale Prelude 'Nun lob mein Seel und Wohl' BuxWV 214 Cantata 'Lauda Sion Salvatorem' BuxWV 68 Chorale Prelude 'Vater unser im Mimmelriech' BuxWV 219 Cantata 'Pange lingua gloriosi' BuxWV 9...