On An Overgrown Path

Classical music is an infinite multi-dimensional labyrinth. The accompanying photos taken from Overgrown Path posts show just three examples of that labyrinth. Seen above are players from L'Orchestre Philharmonique du Maroc performing al fresco in the medina at Essaouira, Morocco as part of the town's 2016 Printemps Musical Des Alizés festival. My second photo shows members of the Britten Sinfonia using classical music to bring positive change to the lives of young people at Larkman Primary School in Norfolk. While in the third photo, senior Tibetan Buddhist monk Kenrap-la is introduced to Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala for the first time, listening via my iPod as we approach his monastery at Thiksay in the disputed Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir in 2014.  Sub-atomic physics tells us that all phenomena consist of multi-dimensional energy waves that defy our conventional understanding of space and time. At the heart of quantum theory are the concepts of non-local...

Beethoven is fortunate. His anniversary falls in December this year: which means, hopefully, it can be celebrated when a degree of normality has returned. Ravi Shankar is less fortunate. The centenary of his birth fell on April 7th, when the world had more important things to worry about. Which meant the anniversary passed almost unnoticed; with the major celebration at London's South Bank Centre postponed until April 2021 . But it is important that Ravi Shankar's centenary is not lost to lockdown. Not only because he was a master of the sitar, but also because he was a great humanitarian who broke down the barriers dividing music of different cultures. One example is his collaboration with Philip Glass. In 1965 the neophyte American composer was studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and he was hired to notate the film score for Chappaqua composed by Ravi Shankar. In 1989 the head of independent label Private Music Ron Goldstein brought Pandit Shankar and Philip Glass ...

Very good to see new music in the form of the above CD making the Gramophone Concerto Award shortlist alongside hardy perennials form Bruch, Beethoven et al . At the time of the 2010 premiere of James MacMillan's Oboe Concerto I interviewed soloist Nicholas Daniel together with James MacMillan who conducted the Britten Sinfonia in both the premiere performances and the recording. That interview can be heard on SoundCloud via this link . As well as discussing the music, the interview touches on some familiar Overgrown Path themes including the links between music and spirituality. Nick Daniel plays a mean oboe, but he is also worth listening to talking about Tibetan Buddhism. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

We are told accessibility is the key to attracting classical music audiences. But is it really? As part of the admirable Ouverture Spirituelle thread within the 2015 Salzburg Summer Festival there is a performance in the Kollegienkirche by Hindustani and Carnartic musicians of ragas to greet the dawn and sunrise. The ragas start at six o'clock in the morning and the concert on July 26th is already sold out . However, tickets for Daniel Barenboim conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler's Ninth Symphony at a more conventional hour, are, as I write, still available . Perhaps the key to attracting audiences is not accessible music but different music . Photo of tabla player Kuljit Bhamra playing with Britten Sinfonia musicians in 2012 was taken by me in the Country & Eastern emporium in Norwich, read the story here . Also on Facebook and Twitter .

The wrong note played with gusto always sounds better than the right note played timidly. Today's wisdom comes from Tommy Jordan , co-founder of the alternative rock band Geggy Tah . I took the photo of notes being played with gusto in 2012 at a school in Norwich during an In Harmony session. However, as members of the Britten Sinfonia were working with the young musicians, the notes played with gusto were also right. As part of the In Harmony project I was privileged to present a performance by the youngsters that preceded a Britten Sinfonia concert with Pekka Kuusisto playing Thomas Adès' Violin Concerto. More on that story in Music on the other side of the great celebrity divide . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Dependent arising means that while travelling I have been spending much time with Egyptian Sufi music, particularly with the CD seen above from the master of the munshidin - sacred song - Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tûni . This disc is living proof of the unfashionable view that music is humanity's most direct expression of its better self, and I recommend that readers intrigued, or indeed puzzled, by my preoccupation with the esoteric tradition of Islam should exit their comfort zones and enter its force field. My heavy rotation of the sultan of munshidin is evidence of how far I have strayed from today's " it's 2014, so it must be Richard Strauss " monoculture. Audience data and social media trends show that many others are being disenfranchised in the same way. Fortunately the quaint notion that classical music is more than entertainment lives on, and this week the Britten Sinfonia present Bach's St John Passion in Cambridge, Amsterdam, London, Saffron Walde...

Reaching a wider audience is seen, quite rightly, as classical music's number one priority. Yet the strategies for reaching that wider audience are, with a few notable exceptions , based on ill-founded hunches imported from the entertainment industry , while actionable data on what might actually appeal to a wider audience is resolutely ignored. One such example of actionable but ignored is a new survey by think tank Theos which reports that 52% of people believe that spiritual forces in some way influence their lives, while 77% believe that some phenomena cannot be explained by science. These findings resonate with the views expressed by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks in an interview that accompanies the recently released and highly recommended recording of his piano trio Canto Perpetuo by the Boulanger Trio seen above. In the interview Vasks explains that: ...people go to the concert hall because they are looking for answers. Above all for a way out of their difficult, u...

One thing I can’t understand is why people have such trouble with modern music. It seems to me to be perfectly intelligible. When I hear one of my pieces again, or listen to the record, I don’t see why people could find this perplexing in any way. Yet audiences can’t make head or tail of it... I finally said the hell with that whole point of view and decided to write what I really always hoped to write, and what I thought was most important for me. I’ve taken that point of view ever since. That quote comes from Elliott Carter who has died aged 103 . I used it in a discussion preceding a concert of his music by the Britten Sinfonia in 2009. The text of my introduction, titled A Radical Traditionalist is here , and the discussion of Carter’s music with the concert's soloists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich can be heard here . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo shows Elliott Carter, centre, with Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland above.Any copyrighted material o...

...western musical works, whether symphony or opera, have beginnings and middles, and they leave you in no doubt about when the end has come: a crashing finale. indian music starts as if from nowhere (as the casual tuning of a sitar), rises to unpredictable heights (of anguish, joy, or meditation), descends again, and trickles off to nowhere. (you know it all has ended when the last note is sounded and nothing, nothing follows.) it has solved no problems: it has given no lasting insights. it is not likely, even, ever to be played again. the instruments will be played again; the musicians, too, may play again (molecules in both of them having changed): something abides; but not a frowning score. That extract from a 1970 journal entry by the American poet Robert Lax (1915-2000) resonates with several Overgrown Paths . Lax, a friend of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton , lived as a semi-hermit on the Greek island of Patmos for many years, and in a recent post I wrote about the ...

My co-presenter at this evening's Britten Sinfonia pre-concert event in Norwich is violinist Pekka Kuusisto - seen above. While researching the talk I came across this in a 2007 Guardian profile : Not that he's in sympathy with anything that might be described as crossover. Perish the thought. A few years ago, one of Kuusisto's UK visits coincided with the Classical Brit awards, and he found himself watching them on TV, agog for all the wrong reasons. "Andrea Bocelli got some kind of lifetime achievement award, and then the Opera Babes performed, and the Planets - and so the whole country is being taught to believe that this is what classical music is! It's really grim, you know? I was shocked". Less grim is the news that the first four New York performances of Missy Mazzoli's new multi-media opera ' Song from the 'Uproar: the Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt ', which presumably will not feature in the Classical Brits, have sold out - m...

This path leads from music education in Norfolk England to Thomas Adès in New York. Members of the Britten Sinfonia are seen here working as part of the In Harmony project which uses music to bring positive change to the lives of young people in some of the most deprived areas of England. I took the photos this morning at Larkman Primary School and the young musicians seen in them will be joining violinist Pekka Kuusisto and me for a pre-concert event in Norwich on February 25th at which they will play Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Pachelbel. After their performance Thomas Adès conducts his Concerto for Violin, felicitously subtitled Concentric Paths , with Pekka Kuusisto as soloist, and music by Couperin, Ravel and Stravinsky. The Norwich concert is part of a Concentric Paths tour by the Britten Sinfonia, Thomas Adès and Pekka Kuusisto; the other venues are Dijon (Feb 11), Cambridge (Feb 20), Lincoln Center, New York (Feb 22), London, Queen Elizabeth Hall (Feb 27), and Dublin (Fe...

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...

First the bad news about this evening's BBC Radio 3 live broadcast of the Britten Sinfonia's concert. On the Radio 3 programme schedule page the final work is perversely attributed to Schubert alone , whereas it is in fact Schubert arranged by the infinitely more mediagenic Mahler; while elsewhere on the programme listing page inverted priorities prevail and the presenter receives solus billing ahead of the musicians and composers. Now for the good news. Based on last Sunday's Norwich concert the Britten Sinfonia's white-hot performance is likely to melt the interconnects of your audio system. Stand out in a consistently outstanding evening was Berio's rarely heard Duets for Two Violins . But the new Piers Tattersall work justifies its place among much bigger names, the neglected Mahler arrangement is a "must hear", while Henning Kraggerud's Mozart persuasively argues that authentic performances are a silly convention . * BBC Radio 3 are broadcas...

Art disconnected from suffering is thought by some impoverished on account of its apparent failure to face up to the genuinely tragic episodes of life. Yet there remains a serious risk that in the name of a dubious artistic authenticity we may inhumanly reject all harking back, and, in so doing, cut ourselves off from important facets of art's joyfulness - some of it not unconnected with cosiness. Good art, it is undeniable, ought to engage in due measure with the more painful aspects of life, but it cannot, without denaturing itself, wholly ignore what is joyful and comfortable, even if such an engagement be achieved via indulgence of nostalgia. From Piers Tattersall's programme note for the world premiere of his Kreisler, l'entre deux guerres which is being given by Henning Kraggerud and the Britten Sinfonia . Header image is from the London Children's Ballet production of Piers Tattersall's Rumpelstiltskin . Philippa Schuyler's 1946 debut as composer and ...

While Gustav Mahler was composing his Third Symphony, the longest work in the mainstream symphonic repertoire, he was also working on an arrangement for string orchestra of Schubert's Second Quartet, Death and the Maiden . In 1894 Mahler gave a performance of his re-orchestration of the second movement of the Quartet in Hamburg where he was chief conductor at the Stadttheater. But he did not complete the arrangement and it was only published in 1984 after the manuscript was discovered by the composer's daughter Anna. The performing edition is the work of Mahler authorities Donald Mitchell and David Matthews who produced it from the composer's annotated score. What motivated Mahler to arrange a string quartet while composing his Third Symphony and leading a major opera company? Was the Death and the Maiden project simply the composer's way of destressing or was there another motivation? As classical music struggles to reach new audiences, is there something we can lea...

Sir John Tavener's reputation is currently passing through the obligatory lacanu between youthful marketability and mature authority . His new website , which is being developed ahead of his 70th birthday celebrations in 2014 , is a timely reminder that a composer can be relevant without being fashionable . The music of Sir John Tavener, Michael Tippett and Sofia Gubaidulina can be heard in a BBC Prom given by the Britten Sinfoni a and BBC Singers on September 3. Pity though that this bold piece of programming is consigned to the off-peak Proms new music ghetto . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

An article in the Telegraph questions whether Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the right man to run the Aldeburgh Festival . Michael White's thrust that we should "leave running English music festivals to English music-lovers" is plainly wrong, but the underlying question as to whether all is well at Aldeburgh is valid. Regular readers will know Snape Maltings is my local hall . I spend more time there than in any other venue and have written more about music at Aldeburgh than any subject over the last seven years. My experience is that truly exciting and innovative things are happening at Aldeburgh; but increasingly they are happening outside the Festival period. Over the last twelve months three of my most intense musical experiences have been at Snape, the Aldeburgh Young Musicians performance of Louis Andriessen's Workers Union , John Cage's Song Books with Exaudi (see photo above), and the Suffolk Youth Orchestra's interpretation of Rachmaninov's Second Sym...

The violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky made his string-trio arrangement of the variations in 1985, the tercentenary of Bach's birth, dedicating his efforts to the memory of Glenn Gould, who had died three years earlier. But why anyone who has heard either of Gould's dazzling recordings of the Goldberg should need to bother with this arrangement is beyond me... Sitkovetsky's arrangement succeeds only in blunting the edge of Bach's extraordinarily fertile invention, depriving the music of its frisson of virtuosity and failing to conjure the kind of muscularity that is a vital ingredient in every great keyboard performance of the Goldbergs... Instead of broadening the appeal of this sublime work, this disc only diminishes it. That is Andrew Clements reviewing a CD of Dmitry Sitkovetsky's transcription for string trio of the Goldberg Variations in the Guardian in 2007 . Britten Sinfonia co-leader and Glenn's namesake Thomas Gould takes the opposite view saying: Sitkove...