Stockhausen chaotic music and communism

'Dr. Trey notes that music has lost its way since the nineteenth century. It has changed from earlier eras—the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic epochs (1600-1900)—to trends starting in early 1900's. These earlier eras spanning 300 years represent the pinnacle of classical music in the West and are based on higher principles and values. Composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen composed music from a listener's perspective as if experimenting with noise.

When this chaotic music appeared, atomic bombs, communism and cold war also surfaced. He believes this chaotic music in no small way contributes to the chaos in modern times. Destructive political movements, such as communism, thrived by killing people in its own society.

Europe boasted excellent philosophers and scholars when classical principles were followed. When music lost its classical values, chaos developed in societies and so for 100 years, music has been struggling to find direction' - from an Epoch Times interview with Dr. Torsten Trey, German medical practioner and oboeist with the New York based Divine Arts Performing Orchestra.

Now read about music, acid and the collapse of communism.
Header photo is of a performance of Stockhausen's suitably chaotic Hymnen at St John's Smith Square, London in 1971. The composer is in the centre. The Epoch Times is a New York based independent free newspaper specialising in reporting on China. 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 great American composer and artist besides

Email received - Bob, I found your post about artists who also paint fascinating. As you have pointed out, there are many more than we previously thought. Schoenberg comes to mind. I thought you would be interested in another. Nicolas Flagello was really something, one of the great American composers and an artist besides. I attach these CD covers not to attract publicity for myself, but because these are the only examples of his art in my possession. Though the cover pics are details, I've seen the large originals at Flagello's wife's residence, and they are remarkable.

A day without OAOP wouldn't be a day at all.
Best, JMW


See Arnold Schoenberg's paintings and drawings here, and read about more eye-music here.
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Schoenberg and Wiener Espressivo

Hello -- You wrote a nice review in August of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Frankfurt (now called the HR Symphonie Orchester [HR = Hessischer Rundfunk]) recording of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in the Alte Oper, Frankfurt (above).

As it happens, Detlev Kittler, the engineer for the recording lives at the other end of our five-house row here in Frankfurt Praunheim. He's 75 now, and long retired from HR, but was delighted to receive a copy of your article. He also volunteered that he had previously recorded the RSO Frankfurt in the Gurrelieder under Erich Leinsdorf. It's a concert recording, not a studio recording, but Hr. Kittler said that he preferred the recording by "the Austrian". (I can imagine that Leinsdorf captures the Wiener Espressivo elements well.)

He has promised to share a copy of that recording with me, and I"ll let you know about it, if you're interested. Perhaps HR could be persuaded to re-release it in some format?

Best regards,
Daniel Wolf Frankfurt

I notice that among many fine recordings, Detlev Kittler engineered one close to Daniel's heart -Ensemble Modern's 1991 sessions for Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett. And more on recordings of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School here.
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Karl Amadeus Hartmann on demand

Much interest in the recent Britten Sinfonia concerts directed by Alina Ibragimova which I wrote about here and here. The programme included the first performance of a Tansy Davies Bach orchestration, Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Concerto Funèbre, and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. Hartmann is seen in my header photo (credit Wikipedia).

Listen to the concert on demand on BBC Radio 3 until Nov 9 via this link, including a short interview with Alina Ibragimova.

And some thoughts on recording Schoenberg here.
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Serial music - exploring the labyrinth

Several interesting points came out of my 'In Conversation' event with Alina Ibragimova before last night's Britten Sinfonia concert. One of them was that, following her CD of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's music, Alina's next recording will be the two violin concertos of Mykola Roslavets. In his excellent A Concise History of Western Music (CUP ISBN 0521842948) Paul Griffiths writes that 'The past is not a path we and our predecessor's have travelled but a labyrinth, and a labyrinth forever in flux', and Mykola Roslavets is an excellent example of how we are still exploring the labyrinth that is serial music.

Received wisdom tells us that Arnold Schoenberg originated serial composition, but did he? Mykola (Nikolai) Roslavets (left) was born in Ukraine in 1881. Although he was influential in the early years of the USSR as a champion of progressive Western composers, his music was politically suppressed at the end of the 1920s. Due to this he spent most of the remainder of his career as a ‘non-person’, and died in Moscow in 1944. But post-perstroika his music is having something of a renaissance.

Roslavets is of more interest than the many minor Russian composer of the period. He used a form of serial composition, and it may have pre-dated Schoenberg. The two composers approached the new tonal landscape from very different directions. Schoenberg used serial techniques to create a horizontal thread through his compositions, whereas Roslavet aggregated them vertically in a manner influenced by his countryman Alexander Scriabin. Roslavet's output included orchestral. chamber and piano music, as well as the two violin concertos that Alina Ibragimova is recording.

But Nikolai Roslavets is not the only pretender to the serial music crown. The Austrian Josef Matthias Hauer (below) was indisputably working ahead of Schoenberg. In 1919 he devised a proto-serial composition technique using twelve-tone rows with variable tone sequences. Hauer lived from 1883 to 1959, and his compositions were branded 'degenerate art' by the Nazis. In a link to another path Hauer is thought to have been a model for characters in both Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. There is much unpublished music by Josef Mattias Hauer, and all his compositions after 1940 are described by him as Zwölftonspiel or Zwölftonmusik - twelve-tone song, or twelve-tone music. A recording project there perhaps?

Another piece of received wisdom worth revisiting is that serial techniques were the sole preserve Central European. In 1956 the English composer William Alwyn (below) developed his own take on the new tonalities in the Allegro of his Symphony No. 3. This uses an alternation of eight note and four note groups in a pattern suggested to the composer by Indian classical music quite sometime before Philip Glass and others made such fusions fashionable. William Alwyn may not have the cachet of his American and Central European peers, but his music certainly deserves greater recognition.

But in the end it doesn't really matter who invented serial music. As Paul Griffith explains history is not linear, but is a labyrinth where change is constant. Within the labyrinth several composers independently developed their own serial languages, and they are all worth exploring. Alina Ibragimova's CD of Nikolai Roslavets' violin concertos is being recorded with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and will be released by Hyperion in 2008. And there is more on William Alwyn here.

* I am aware that 'serial techniques' and 'twelve-tone music' are terms that may not be familiar to all my readers. Here is a wonderfully lucid explanation from A Pilgrim Soul by Meirion and Susie Harris. Which also gives me an opportunity maintain the gender balance by linking to another English pioneer of serial techniques, Elisabeth Lutyens:

'Serialism, the twelve-tone method was a logical extension of the abandonment of tonality (the key system) which had begun long before the end of the nineteenth century. As music progresses towards dissonance and away from tonality, it became obvious that some other source of coherence would be needed, some alternative means of organising the material as effectively as the key system had done.

The key system gave automatic priority to certain notes in the scale; but to those using the serial method, all twelve notes of the octave, black and white, were equally important, and all were used as the basic material of any composition. In serial music the fundamental idea of the composition was presented in a series of the twelve notes in a characteristic order, with no note repeated until all the others had been used, to ensure that none had precedence. The whole piece was to be evolved from this basic set, by a process of continuous variation and development, so that every part of the work could in some way be related to the original idea.

Both the horizontal and the vertical dimension of the musical 'space' were penetrated by the basic idea, so that not only the melodies but also the harmonies were regulated by the order of notes within the series and the relationship between them. For variety, the series could also be played upside down, back to front, and transposed up or down the scale, as long as the order of the notes was preserved.

Those who used the serial technique felt it vital to explain that it was no more mechanical, no more a formula than the key system with all the rules it possesses. It was not a prescription, but a tool to help different composers express themselves differently, adapting the method to their own ends. 'I do not compose principles,' wrote Schoenberg angrily, 'but music'.'


Main images are, of course, by M C Escher. The header is Convex and Concave, the lower is Day and Night. 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

Kandinsky Klee and all that jazz

Paul Klee took the fugues of Bach as the model for his multi-layered paintings; Wassily Kandinsky's friendship with the avant-garde composer Schönberg encouraged the development of his free, expressive style; and later in the century, jazz became a model for artistic improvisation in the work of František Kupka, Alan Davie and others. The poster above is for the exhibition Eye-Music - Kandinsky, Klee and all that jazz which opened at Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre, here in Norwich, this week.

I'll be talking to Sarah Bacon from the Sainsbury Centre about Eye-Music and other autumn exhibitions on our Community Chest programme on Future Radio tomorrow morning (Oct 5) at 10.00am. It looks to be a very interesting show. Other guests include the CEO of Norfolk's only whisky distillery and the opposing parties in a bitter dispute over plans to build a wind farm near our house on a former USAF airbase that featured here several years ago. We also have an item on last Saturday's Norwich Walk for Peace, plus music from Miles Davis and Joan Baez. (They wouldn't let us play Schoenberg, but read here about the first twelve-tone protest song). Click on the image below to listen in real time. 10.00pm UK time is very transatlantic unfriendly, but we're hoping to have podcasts available without the copyright music.



And that mention of wind farms allow me to ask, again, how green was your concert?
Listen to the Future Radio audio stream here. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. 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

Are words the new music?

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'i Faith, and young people as victims of crime. The whole show was a blast, the guests enjoyed themselves, the time flew, and the station manager seemed well pleased.

Words seem to be becoming my new music. In addition to Britten's Noyes Fludde, with it's central spoken part for The Voice of God, my CD player has been hosting much Stravinsky recently, including Oedipus Rex, The Flood, and A Sermon, and A Narration and a Prayer, all works with narrators. And further proof comes from another CD set that has been sharing the personal playlist with the Britten and the Works Of Stravinsky - it is also a work with a prominent role for a speaker.

Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder is fiendishly difficult to capture on disc with its six soloists, choirs, eight flutes, five oboes, seven clarinets, three basoons, two counter-basoons, ten horns, six trumpets, one bass-trumpet, one alto-trombone, four tenor-bass-trombones, one bass-trombone, one counter-bass trombone, one counter-bass-tuba, much percussion, four harps and a celesta. Too often recordings of these massive forces are marred by thick and muddy textures that seriously diminish the impact of Schoenberg's extraordinary score. The Simon Rattle reccording made with the Berlin Philharmonic in the Philharmonie Hall, Berlin in 2001 is an example of this opaque sound, although it is not surprising as the Philharmonie is not noted for producing flattering recorded sound even with moderate sized forces.

My reference Gurrelieder on disc has long been Pierre Boulez's CBS recording. This was made with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and various choruses, and was superbly engineered by Bob Auger in the capacious West Ham Central Mission in London. I bought it when it was first released on vinyl LP in 1975, although it is now, of course, on CD. (Follow this path for a fascinating article by Bob Auger and producer Paul Myers on recording the Gurrelieder - it was captured in 1974 in both stereo and surround-sound SQ quadraphonic formats). A colleague of mine at EMI sung in the choir for the recording, and recounted how everyone was so mesmerised by Boulez's passion for the work that the combined forces continued recording well beyond the alloted end of the last session when it looked as thought the recording might not be completed in the scheduled sessions.

I didn't hear Eliahu Inbal's Gurrelieder, recorded with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, when it was first issued on Denon in 1993. But its re-release at super-budget price (£7 in the UK) on Dutch independent label Brilliant Classics gave me an opportunity to sample it, and I am very glad I did. The performance is excellent, if not quite up to Boulez's persuasive advocacy. But the recorded sound more than makes up for any minor deficiencies in the performance. This is the best recorded account of the Gurrelieder I have heard by a long way. The sound has space around it, there is a believable sound stage, and real attack and slam. I listen to a lot of CDs, and this Frankfurt Gurrelieder is as good as anything I've heard from disc for a long time.

There are two reasons why it is sonically outstanding. First, Denon engineer Detlev Kittler avoided the temptation of using a large number of 'spot' microphones to capture the huge forces. Instead, fewer judicially placed mics capture a coherent sound picture. The second reason why the sound is so good is that the acoustics of the recording venue are so good.

I worked in Frankfurt for a time in the 1970's, and then the old Frankfurt Opera House (Die Alte Oper) was still a fenced-off ruin after being burnt out in a bombing raid in March 1944. Die Alte Oper re-opened in 1981, but although the original exterior was retained the interior is a completely new multi-purpose complex including the Grosse Saal, a modern 2500 seat concert hall using a lot of old-fashioned wood to give outstanding acoustics (see photo below). It is here that Eliahu Inbal, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and their choirs and soloists recorded the Gurrlelieder, and the results are revelatory.

If you don't have the Gurrelieder in your CD collection this bargain price re-release from Brilliant Classics is unmissable - if you like Wagner and don't know the Gurrelieder you are missing a real treat. Even if you have the excellent Boulez or Ozawa accounts (or any of the other versions in this comprehensive listing) you really should sample Eliahu Inbal and the glorious sound of Die Alte Oper Frankfurt for your local equivalent of around £7. It even comes in classy packaging which makes a change from Naxos' utilitarian graphics, and includes an excellent essay on the Gurrelieder plus full texts.

This meandering path reminds me of a story about Dies Alte Oper which rather nicely captures today's theme of words and music. For a number of years I attended the Frankfurt International Book Fair on business. A few years ago I checked the concert listings when I arrived in the city, and noticed a performance of Mahler's Seventh Symphony in Die Alte Oper. But unfortunately it seemed unlikely that I would make it as I had an important distribution deal to finalise with one of the leading German book distributors.

The large German company I was dealing with was quite switched on to classical music, and had the distribution rights to German retail book stores for Deutsche Grammophon. I met with their young and dynamic CEO in their booth at the book fair, and was fortunate to tie up the deal by the end of the afternoon. As a business courtesy I invited the CEO to dinner that evening. But I was mighty relieved when he pleaded another business commitment - I was free to dash to the Mahler.

Quick sprint back to the hotel, change out of the business suit, and grab a cab ride to Die Alte Oper just in time for the Mahler. As my taxi pulled up outside the concert hall another cab pulled up behind me. Out stepped the CEO of the German book distributor with his wife.


The Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra are at the BBC Proms tomorrow (August 13) with a programme of Weber, Mahler and Brahms orchestrated, appropriately, by Schoenberg. And now follow this path for an interesting take on contemporary composers from Frankfurt based Daniel Wolf.
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Move over iPhone - here comes vinyl

"The format was supposed to have been badly wounded by the introduction of CDs and killed off completely by the ipod-generation that bought music online. But in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels, the latest phenomenon in a notoriously fickle industry is one nobody dared predict: a vinyl revival. Latest figures show a big jump in vinyl sales in the first half of this year, confirming the anecdotal evidence from specialist shops throughout the UK.

"It comes as sales of CD singles continue to slide - and it is not being driven by technophobic middle-aged consumers. Teenagers and students are developing a taste for records and are turning away from the clinical method of downloading music on to an MP3 player.

"The data, released by the UK's industry group BPI, shows that 7in vinyl sales were up 13% in the first half, with the White Stripes' Icky Thump the best seller.Two-thirds of all singles in the UK now come out on in the 7in format, with sales topping 1m. Though still a far cry from vinyl's heyday in 1979, when Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes alone sold that number and the total vinyl singles market was 89m, the latest sales are still up more than fivefold in five years.

"For record stores, the resurgence has meant a move from racks of vintage Rolling Stones and Beatles releases to brand new singles and younger buyers. "The student population seem to be loving the 7in," says Stuart Smith, who runs Seismic Records in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He sells 300-600 records a week and is preparing to launch an online store. "I'm still not sure about the MP3 generation. You can have a full hard drive and nothing to show for it. Record collections are very personal. You can view into a person's soul really," he says.

The extract above is from today's Guardian. And the header photo is a view into my soul. It was taken a few minutes ago and shows an LP from Deutsche Grammophon's 1973 Schoenberg, Berg and Webern orchestral set playing on my Thorens TD125. This Second Viennese School overview was played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan, and, to my knowledge, has never made it onto CD complete, although I have the 'highlights' CD that was compiled from it in 1999. (Listen to brief audio samples here)

Producer of the set for DG was Hans Weber with Tonmeister Günter Hermanns. The Berg Drei Orchesterstücke Op. 6 was recorded in Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin, all the other works were captured in the Philharmonie. The vinyl pressings are out of DG's top drawer. Mine are still pristine, and sound absolutely magnificent. For audiophiles the rest of my replay system is an Audio-Technica AT-F3/OCC moving coil phono cartridge, SME Series lllS tone arm, Arcam Alpha 10 integrated amplifier, Sennheiser HD 580 headphones, and B&W Nautilus 803 speakers.

The lavish booklet that came with the DG set can be seen in my photo. It includes a serious analysis of each work, wonderful full page photos of the composers, and a biography of Karajan that takes hagiography to an Olympic level. Special mention should me made of the cover design by Hartmut Pfeiffer. (Is that the same Hartmut Pfeiffer who is credited as one of the conductors on DG's Stravinsky overview?). The cover graphic becomes a work of art on the 12" by 12" LP box. When reduced to a 4.5" by 4.5" CD liner it becomes as disposable as an MP3 file.

Karajan's lush 1973 interpretations of these Second Viennese School classics, and DG's 'spot-lit' microphone technique, are completely out of step with today's minimalist zeitgeist. But these vinyl LPs provide a window into my musical soul, and they challenged, educated and inspired me when I bought them back in the early 1970s.

As I took the DG LP of Schoenberg's Orchestervariationen Op. 31 off the turntable I switched the Arcam amplifier over to the tuner and saw into the musical soul of BBC Radio 3. Rob Cowan was challenging, educating and inspiring listeners with an orchestral arrangement of April in Paris.

More riches from my Thorens TD125 here.
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Twelve tone tournament

Photo via Larry Hodges' Celebrities playing table tennis, where there are lots more musicians practicing their back hand.

More twelve tone links here.
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I was revolted by Schoenberg

Largely positive reception for John Tavener's new work The Beautiful Names. So here is an interesting aspect of Tavener:

I have always been drawn more to the archetypal levels of human experience and human types, which is why I think I was drawn to Stravinsky and revolted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg (left) was for me the filthy, rotten 'dirt dump' of the twentieth century. I personally could not stand the angst-ridden sound of decay in his music, the vile post-Freudian world. Basically, I do not respond to the so-called 'Germanic Tradition', whose by now rotting corpse - the hideous sound world of its fabricated complexity - smothers archetypal experience that I have always sought. - John Tavener writes in The Music of Silence, A Composer's Testament (Faber ISBN 0571200885).

But Schoenberg could be just as bitchy. Read here what he said about Toscanini.
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Aldeburgh sea interludes

* The photo above was taken before the very fine Aldeburgh Festival concert by Exaudi in Orford Church last weekend. It may be deepest rural Suffolk, but the concert received a glowing review in the New York Times, and is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Early Music Show on September 9th. As well as Gesualdo the concert includes a UK premiere by Salvatore Sciarrino, and works by Niccolo Castiglioni, Monteverdi, Giacinto Scelsi, and Luigi Nono. Don't miss it.

* Nuria Schoenberg Nono, widow of the composer Luigi Nono and daughter of Arnold Schoenberg, gave a moving introduction to a performance of her husband's 'Hay que caminar' soñando' for two solo violins yesterday in the Jubilee Hall. Madame Schoenberg Nono was also pretty impressive with her laptop. Her use of PowerPoint in her talk would have put most record industry chief executives to shame.

* The critical acclaim for Yoshi Oida's new production of Death in Venice at Snape is all the more remarkable when you remember that the Maltings has neither proscenium arch nor scenery flies. Britten insisted on the interior space of the hall being kept uncluttered to provide the best acoustics. He succeeded triumphantly, the reverberation time of the hall is two seconds when filled to its 800 seat capacity. This reverberation is the same as many modern concert halls with twice the audience capacity.

* Praise is due for the Aldeburgh Festival programme, or that should really read book. The 292 page full colour book, edited by Jane Bellingham, has articles from a range of authors including Paul Griffiths and Colin Matthews. The lavish £9 volume is worth getting hold of, even if you didn't attend the Festival. How many programme books can you say that about?

* The new Death in Venice was stunning, both musically (especially Alan Oke's Aschenbach and Paul Daniel's conducting) and visually. The crab and samphire salad in the Snape Maltings restaurant after the performance was also stunning. Samphire is a delicacy found here in East Anglia. The Maltings restaurant sums up the whole Aldeburgh Festival. It serves wonderful local fresh food at reasonable prices. It has the best view of any restaurant in the world across the marshes to Iken Church. And it employs a lot of local young people. The young lady who served us last night was a second-year archeology student from Southampton University. The restaurant also does a very nice Chardonnay.

* Yesterday was one of those days that can only happen at the Aldeburgh Festival. In the morning there was the amuse bouche of Nono's 'Hay que caminar' soñando', followed by a picnic lunch. Picnics at Aldeburgh have not yet become the ostentatious style statements seen at Glyndebourne, and my picture below shows the only meal I have ever eaten on a Cold War airbase. Following our picnic the afternoon brought a truly memorable double-header. At 2.00pm it was Luchino Visconti's film of Death in Venice in the sold-out Aldeburgh Cinema. It finished at 4.15pm, and there was then a fifteen minute drive to Snape for the 5.00pm start of the new production of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, which was also sold-out.

* You can't get more beautiful that two Deaths in Venice in one afternoon. But what happens when beauty grows old? Björn Andrésen became a gay poster boy when he was cast as Tadzio by Visconti in his 1971 film. After that role he lived in Japan, where he appeared in a number of television commercials and also recorded two pop songs. Andrésen now lives with his wife and daughter in Stockholm, and performs regularly with the Sven Erics dance band.


That's just the first few days of the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival, stay tuned for more Aldeburgh sea interludes.
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What exactly is a contemporary classic?

'Peter Sellars doesn't think the age of genius - of great classical music - is dead. At all. When I last met him, wandering the streets of Vienna, he was raving about John Adams's latest opera A Flowering Tree - 'You can put his recent pieces up against anything of Verdi' - and the new Kaija Saariaho oratorio La Passion De Simone, which he called 'breathtaking'.

Sellars could be right. This is the most interesting time in classical music for at least a generation. It's safe to get back in the water after the chilly era of the over-intellectual avant-garde (the legacy of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone technique) or the initially exciting but occasionally facile repetitions of the Philip Glass and Steve Reich generation (cited as an influence by pop acts as different as Giorgio Moroder and Sonic Youth). Some of the most inspiring, moving and challenging - and also some of the most daft and insane - music of this century has been written by contemporary composers.

10 contemporary classics

1. El Nino - John Adams (2000)
2. Tevot - Thomas Ades (2007)
3. St Mark Passion - Osvaldo Golijov (2003)
4. L'Amour de Loin - Kaija Saariaho (2000)
5. 3rd String Quartet - Gorecki (2007)
6. Neruda Songs - Peter Lieberson (2007)
7. You Are (Variations) - Steve Reich (2006)
8. A Flowering Tree- John Adams (2006)
9. Nuevo - Kronos Quartet (2001)
10. The Tempest - Thomas Ades (2003)'

From a major feature in today's Observer Music Monthly. Great to see contemporary music getting the exposure it serves. But the article rather misses the point that there is a lot of exciting new music, and even some contemporary classics, beyond the corporate bandwagons of Adams, Ades, Glass, Gorecki, Golijov, Reich et al.

Now read about inspiring, moving and challenging new music from a host of other contemporary composers.
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Max Reger - more conspicuous than Schoenberg

'In the very early years of the twentieth century Max Reger held a more conspicuous place in Austro-German music than Schoenberg; certainly he was far more productive, especially of instrumental music. Several of his works are sets of variations culminating in a fugue, but contrapuntal energy is almost omnipresent, driving through dense harmonic textures. He acknowledged his source in making piano arrangements of Bach’s music, as indeed did Busoni, a musician of mixed German-Italian background best known at this period as a virtuoso pianist' ~ from A Concise History of Western Music by Paul Griffiths (Cambridge University Press ISBN 139780521842945).

Max Reger, seen in the photo above playing the organ in 1913, died on May 11 1916 aged 43

Now Playing ~ Variations and Fugue on a theme of J S Bach played Marc-André Hamelin piano. This excellent Hyperion disc of Reger’s piano music also includes his Variations and Fugue on a theme of Georg Philipp Telemann, and Five Humoreques. Wonderful sound from the beautiful acoustics of St George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol.

For another view on Reger’s status read music history rewritten.
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Music’s unmerry widows

Recent reports that Sergei Rachmaninov's great-great-grandson is a control freak will come as no surprise to anyone who has read John Drummond's autobiography - it seems to run in the family.

John Culshaw’s first foray into music, not long after leaving the RAF in the late 1940s, had been to write a very short book on Rachmaninov – at that time a deeply unfashionable figure, very little of whose music was played. The book was a triumph over the unavailability of material, and when the typescript was completed Culshaw went to see the composer’s widow in Switzerland. Ferried across Lake Lausanne in a private launch by a liveried servant, he was graciously received and asked to come back a week later, when Madame Rachmaninov would have read the typescript. Limited to twenty-five pounds ($48) in foreign currency, Culshaw had to explain that he could not wait that long. Grudgingly, Madame Rachmaninov agreed to a shorter time.

When he returned, he was told to wait in the hall. Shortly afterwards she appeared holding the typescript in an outstretched hand before dropping it on the floor. ’I have spoken to my lawyers in New York, Paris and London’, was her only comment. Yet the book is entirely favourable. It is one of the many examples of the disastrous influence of some composer’s widows - Die Unlustigen Witwen, as Boulez calls them – ‘The Unmerry Widows’. He has had to cope with Frau Schoenberg, Frau Mahler and worst of all Frau Berg, who for forty years spoke daily with Alban’s spirit and blocked the completion of Lulu.

Now read more about Rachmaninov’s music here.
Extract above from John Drummond's autobiography Tainted by Experience (Faber, ISBN 0571200540). Graphic sampled from an original by Jeff Ostrowski. 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). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The rest is downhill

Good to see fellow blogger Alex Ross' forthcoming book listed on Amazon. Good also to report that my much more modest volume (left) is still selling well on Amazon.com after quite a few years. Yes, it is a cycling book, but one with a difference. I bet it is the only cycling guide that recommends, among other things, a Naxos CD of E.J. Moeran's chamber music.

Moeran grew up here in East Anglia where his father was Rector at the Parish Church in Bacton, a village now overwhelmed by a massive natural gas terminal. The composer's 1937 Symphony in G minor is well worth exploring. Which allows me to turn what could have been been a gratuitous plug for my own somewhat tangentical book into a topical CD recommendation. Just this week Lyrita has re-issued Sir Adrian Boult's classic recording of Moeran's Symphony on CD. I haven't heard the CD release, but as I write my original LP pressing from 1975 plays on the trusty Thorens TD125, and if the remastered CD sounds half as good it would still be a strong recommendation. Pity thought that the gorgeous LP sleeve with Turner's 'Storm Clouds: Sunset' didn't make it onto the CD.

Boult was a true gentleman, and a great conductor. His repertoire was wide-ranging, including the first British performance of Schoenberg's Variations in 1931. He was unflagging in his commitment to new music, but I can't help but end with this description by Constant Lambert of Boult's interpretation of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces - 'played with the touch of embarassment and circumspection shown by a really polite Protestant who has found himself involved in a religous ceremony of some totally different creed.'

Now read why the rest is downhill.
And yes, those are my daughter and son on the book cover. 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

Arnold Schoenberg on YouTube

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Schoenberg on Toscanini

"One of the biggest phenomena in my time was Toscanini. England, for one, certainly went crazy for him - so much so that he was an absolute pest as far as I was concerned. First and foremost, I did not like his conducting. I have to give him credit for the fact that he got an incredible clarity out of the orchestra. But it was absolutely without humanity, even rigid. If Toscanini had been in one hall and Beecham in another I would have gone to see Beecham any day. Toscanini seemed to have a power over people and could do no wrong. On one occasion he snatched the camera from a journalist, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it!

However it was more than ones' life was worth to criticize Toscanini or to say you didn't like him. You would have to defend yourself to a degree that I didn't feel like doing. One summer I was doing a summer school in Santa Barbara, California with Schoenberg. One day I gathered my courage and asked him, "Arnold, what do you think of Toscanini?" And he spat and said, "That bandmaster," with a great deal of derision in his voice. He went on to tell me that Toscanini had received all his musical training in military school, which explained everything."

Now listen to a 15 minute MP3 file of "that bandmaster" conducting Beethoven (after a brief Finnish introduction) "without humanity" and make up your own mind -

The quote above is taken from A Cellists Life by Griller Quartet cellist Colin Hampton. It is a fascinating read which roams across a wide range of composers. About Ernst Bloch he writes: "His string quartet No 1 is to me one of the great works in this world. It was a logical conclusion, as far as I am concerned, to the Beethoven quartets. I would put Bloch in front of Schubert and Brahms anytime."

Ernest Bloch is one of those unfortunate composers branded by a single work, in his case Schelomo (which I have to confess I wouldn't shed a tear if I didn't ever hear again). His string quartets, which inhabit a sound world somewhere between Shostakovich and Schoenberg, are very different, and something of a challenge, with the first lasting for almost an hour. But they are most certainly great works which reward exploration. And the recent re-issue of Colin Hampton and his colleagues in the Griller Quartet playing Bloch's four string quartets gives us a chance to explore and reappraise these neglected works.

The sound from these mono 1954 Decca studio recordings is staggeringly good. The producer is my old boss from my EMI days, Peter Andry, recorded when he was at Decca. I was talking to a violin playing friend about why early recordings such as this have such a good string tone. (The various Artur Grumiaux recordings on Philips are another outstanding example). His view was that it is not the recording technology that has gone backwards (although some would argue that is also the case), but rather that string playing technique has evolved to a leaner, more analytical sound. If that is so it is a shame, and may explain why so-called 'authentic instrument' recordings with their gutsy string tone are so popular (I was liste