BBC Radio 3 - how do you spell schadenfreude?

'According to official listening figures released yesterday ... BBC Radio 3, controversially overhauled last year to loud complaints from some listeners, saw its share of listening slump to a record low. The classical music, arts and culture station sank to its lowest share of listening, 0.9%, and saw weekly reach fall to 1.795m, a drop of 155,000 on the previous quarter and just above its all-time worst figure of 1.78m.

The shakeup in November 2006 saw Performance on 3 moved to 7pm, Late Junction moved to a late night slot and controller Roger Wright having to deny charges that he had reduced the amount of live music. Wright, who also took charge of the Proms last year, argued at the time that while there was less "live as live" performance, there was more "as live" recorded pieces and that listeners tended not to differentiate. A Radio 3 spokesman said it was "disappointing to see that classical music listening figures are down generally".'

There can be little surprise about today's Guardian report on RAJAR audience data for quarter ending March 2008 from which the quote above is taken. And it is typically disingeneous of the BBC to use the excuse that "classical music listening figures are down generally." Time and time again I have reported here how intelligent, imaginative and challenging programmes - the very qualities dumbed-out of today's Radio 3 - have boosted classical music audiences.

On Sunday May 4 you can listen to In Memory of the Six Million on Future Radio at 5.00pm (repeat at 00.50am on May 5) featuring this music:

Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen, realisation for string septet played by supplemented Brandis Quartet

Benjamin Frankel - Violin Concerto ‘In Memory of the Six Million’ played by Ulf Hoelscher with Queensland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Werner Andreas Albert.

Or listen to BBC 'Radio 2.5's' week long Composer of the Week featuring music by Noel Coward and Warsaw Concerto composer Richard Addinsell.

On May 17-18 you can wallow in Radio 3's wall-to-wall Chopin Experience, or reflect on Future Radio's Inner Cities webcast and anticipate their upcoming complete webcasts of Kaikhosru Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum and of a lilas, an authentic Morrocan gnawa trance ritual in a world premiere broadcast.

BBC Radio 3 has a lot in common with today's big banks. They both blame market conditions for problems that are, in fact, caused by their own incompetence. And like banks the management rewards for failure at the BBC are not very different to those for success.
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Proud to be a music anorak

Nice to see classical vinyl generating excitement in today's Guardian, but not sure about the headline - 'A music anorak's treasure trove' which suggests classical music is some kind of nasty habit. Also it appears from the piece that the Guardian (and BBC's) Tom Service doesn't have a record deck. I'll let you into a secret. I don't have an iPod, but I do have a Thorens TD125, which I guess also makes me a turntable anorak.

Elsewhere in the Guardian a late tribute to Herbert von Karajan adds little original but is good for a laugh with my old EMI colleague Peter Alward describing Karajan as 'very shy, a simple man with simple tastes'. Which is the best description of a very large yacht and Falcon 10 executive jet I've ever come across.
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Market forces and music collide - again

Canada’s oldest national orchestra is being axed by CBC Radio. Since 1938, the CBC Radio Orchestra, which is the last radio orchestra in North America, has been an invaluable part of Canada’s music scene. The axing is driven by cost savings which have also resulted in the mass culling of classical broadcasts.

Sign the online petition to sign the orchestra here. I hope that the fine CBC musicians will take strength from the story of how, when market forces and music collided in the past at the BBC, the threatened musicians fought back successfully.
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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

Few musicians have generated such a mixture of respect and revulsion as Herbert von Karajan. It takes Richard Osborne 851 pages in his masterly biography to capture the essence of this extraordinary conductor, entrepreneur and opportunist, and it would be impertinent to even attempt to cover the same ground here. So instead, with the centenary of Karajan's birth falling on April 5, I offer this personal vignette from my time at EMI, which I hope in some small way illustrates the conundrum that was this extraordinary man.

During the late 1970s the Machiavellian Karajan had carefully nurtured a deadly rivalry between EMI and his other contract company, Deutsche Grammophon. This meant that EMI had, at very considerable expense, outbid DG for the four act version of Verdi's Don Carlos with José Carreras and Mirella Freni, and Debussy's Pelléas et Méliande with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell. Pélleas was a personal passion of Karajan, and because of this he agreed to make a very rare personal appearance to promote the release of the recording when he was in London in 1979 on a Berlin Philharmonic tour.

It fell to a small team headed by me to organise a 'money no object' Karajan event to prove that anything Deutsche Grammophon could do EMI could do better. At this point I have to confess that several of us were slightly ambivalent about Karajan's personality if not his music making, so we decided that the event should mirror the maestro and be just a little bit over the top. Karajan and his Berlin band were rehearsing in the Royal Festival Hall with one of their 'drive-thru' programmes, including Ein Heldenleben if my memory serves me right. So we booked the Abraham Lincoln Room (yes really) in the outrageously expensive Savoy Hotel directly across the Thames from the hall.

The whole event was organised like a military operation, my plan of action is reproduced at the foot of the article. EMI's Abbey Road Studios provided copy masters of the Don Carlos and Pelléas recordings and tape machines to play them on while KEF supplied monitor speakers. Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell also agreed to attend, and eighty leading music journalists accepted the personalised invitation seen below

Our over the top plans included equipping all my team with personal radios (this was decades before cell phones) and communicating with each other military style, with HvK code-named The Eagle. Staff were stationed at the stage door of the Festival Hall to brief us when Karajan was en route, and the company's limo with vanity plates EMI 1 was used to transport the conductor. (Those were the days of company limos, I bet everyone in EMI today has a Tata except Guy Hands). We were explicitly told that the maestro did not eat in public, so the journos were fed the most expensive buffet in company history while Karjan enjoyed a hero's life across the river.

Bang on time the Eagle appeared at the Savoy and Peter Andry, director of EMI's International Classical Division, who was also my boss and a Karajan confidant, chaired a flawless presentation which included the conductor talking passionately about Pélleas, a stunning playback of the love duet from the opera, and questions from the journalists. The header photo was taken at the end of the presentation and Peter Andry is with Karajan; it is from my personal files and may not have been published before.

As the presentation ended Andry thanked Karajan and the conductor left the platform to lively applause. Then came the pièce de résistance. My indefatigable secretary was stationed to the side with a bouquet of the Savoy's finest flowers which probably cost the equivalent of half EMI's current classical recording budget. Only one problem; nobody had told us that as well as not eating in public the maestro did not accept flowers in public. Karajan rudely brushed Rosemary aside and fled for the door leaving a very red-faced secretary clutching a huge bunch of flowers watched by eighty highly amused journalists.

So there we have Herbert von Karajan. Inspired music maker and totally self-serving personality. Even after almost thirty years I can't hear the love duet from Pelléas without thinking of the cost of those flowers.

Happy birthday maestro, wherever you are.


* I will be celebrating the Contemporary Karajan on Future Radio at 5.00pm on April 6 and 12.50am on April 7 with a programme of twentieth-century classics conducted by him. The music is:
~ Alban Berg – Three pieces from the “Lyric Suite”
~ Arthur Honegger – Symphony No 3

Lots more Karajan links here. Peter Andry, who is seen in my header photo with Karajan, master-minded many great EMI recordings including one of my personal favourites, Karajan's 1970 Dresden Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Before joining EMI Andry was a Decca producer and his recording of the Ernest Bloch String Quartets should be in every CD collection. Read more about it here.

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Know the score?

Which work, composed in the first decade of the twentieth-century and still in the repertoire today, has a score that calls for chorus, soloists, organ and a large orchestra including small and large gongs, antique cymbals, glockenspiel, tambourine, triangle and an ancient Jewish instrument with religous connections?
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Investors on the fiddle

Today's Guardian reports - 'One of London's most successful violin restorers and traders, Florian Leonhard, is hoping to attract investors to his alternative investment syndicate as more conventional assets look increasingly vulnerable to an economic slowdown.

The Fine Violins Fund, which counts cellist Julian Lloyd Webber among its directors, has so far raised €16m (£12.5m) towards what it hopes will be a €60m syndicate investing in the most precious pre-19th-century violins, mainly from Italy.

Leonhard intends to invest in 50 violins valued at about $1.5m each - many of them beyond the means of the musicians who play them. The instruments will not be locked away in a bank vault; they are to be loaned out, without charge, to promising musicians, 30 of whom have already been identified.

The syndicate claims to benefit not only because the instruments' quality is maintained by regular use, but also because violins that are linked to the early career of performers who grow in reputation can soar in value'.

More fiddlers here.
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Classical music's most exciting thing today?

Today's Guardian asks 'is this the most exciting thing to have happened to classical music this century?' - Thomas Adès? Osvaldo Golijov? or even Gustavo Dudamel? - er .. no.

They were demanding jazz and rock and roll way back.
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Is live classical music price elastic?

Amid all the debate about the benefits of free recorded music shouldn't we be asking if live music has the same price elasticity? Would cutting the cost of concert tickets attract new listeners and boost audiences?

One case study suggests it would. I have already written here about the success achieved by Aldeburgh Music in building audiences for adventurous repertoire. Aldeburgh has an established policy of half-price tickets for anyone under 27, no other qualification such as student status are required although Aldeburgh also runs its own student card.

Extending discounts beyond students is a smart move. Student concessions have an image of uncomfortable seats way up in the 'gods'. There are a lot of high disposable income under 27s who are not students and who haven't yet 'got' classical music. They buy designer brands, drive nice cars, and leverage price elasticity through websites such as Lastminute.com. They want decent seats at a concert, and if they like the experience they will return. They are from the other long tails I wrote about recently, and they are an untapped new market for live classical music.

The half-price concessions at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival translate to £11 for a top seat for Yannis Kyriakides' new opera, and just £5 for either Stimmung or for the Faster Than Sound experimental music event. Judging by the attendances and age range at Snape it works, and Aldeburgh Music will be extending the scheme in the near future to strengthen their links with younger audiences.

Of course there is a cost in any price reduction. But a lot of money is being thrown at more fashionable and less effective schemes aimed at attracting younger audiences. These include advertising with 'attitude', e-cards, Second Life gigs, commissioning concertos for tap dancers and promoting music for babies, not to mention signing wunderkind.

I suspect the problem is that simple old-fashioned price reductions don't earn fees for the many advertising agencies, artists' agents, marketing consultants, digital production agencies and other middle-men who feed off classical music today. But if live music really is price elastic the simple solution may be the most effective.

Stimmung for a fiver is a no-brainer (which would have been my headline if it wasn't a no-no for the search engines). But now read about a Stockhausen concert where ticket prices were a problem.
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F stands for ....

Falla, Farnaby, Fauré, Feldman, Finzi, Frankel, Frank, Froberger, Frescobaldi and more. But don't file between Boulez and Boyce.
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Dialogue of a great twentieth century composer

Francis Poulenc (above) died in Paris on January 30th, 1963. Read about his masterpiece, Dialogue of the Carmelites, here.
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What exactly is live music?

"Way more than 50% of our output is live music ..." claims BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright in a revealing article about a new jazz radio station in today's Guardian.

But Radio 3's definition of live is slightly different to yours and mine. As I reported here in February 2007 virtually all evening concerts on Radio 3, except the Proms, are pre-recorded. But the BBC counts these recordings as 'live' performances, and the text streamed with their FM broadcasts describes them as 'live concert recordings'.

In a wonderful example of BBC corporate-crapola Radio 3 defines 'live' as any music recorded with an audience present. Which has important implications both for musicians who earn their living from live music making, as these recorded 'live' performances can be repeated, and for audiences, who may find real concerts with living breathing musicians disappearing.

If Roger Wright turned up at a concert hall for a 'live concert', and found a pre-recorded performance being played through speakers wouldn't he feel cheated? It's not a stupid question - that's what is actually happening in my header photo. Read about it here.
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In Memoriam Klaus Tennstedt

+ Klaus Tennstedt, born June 6, 1926, died January 11, 1998. Biography here, discography here.
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Hip hop rhythms through sound proof glass

The background rumble of trains on the London Underground passing beneath the hall can be heard on several of the great classical recordings made in the Kingsway Hall in the 1960s and 70s. I was reminded of this when recording the interview for my recent David Munrow on the record programme as I could hear the 21st century equivalent of Underground trains in the form of low frequency hip hop rhythms coming through the 'soundproof' window from the adjacent studio at Future Radio. I decided to ignore the breakthrough as it was not too obtrusive, and I was also mindful of the numerous potentially degrading links in the distribution chain that the programme would go through before reaching the final listener.

But I was still thinking analogue, and had seriously underestimated the resilience of programme content in the digital domain. When I listened to the broadcast of the interview live from the audio stream on KEF monitor quality speakers at home the breakthrough could be heard, although it certainly didn't detract from a very interesting programme. More surprisingly the hip hop rhythms can also be heard on the podcast of the interview, despite a multi-stage distribution chain and the file using the 'intermediate' iTunes encoding sampling rate of 44kHz and mp3 bit rate of 256kbps to contain download time.

That distant hip hop beat highlights the new challenges posed by digital distribution. I have already written here about the difficulties associated with webcasting classical recordings with wide dynamic ranges. This problem was brought home again while working on this Sunday's Elisabeth Lutyens programme with James Weeks. When Lutyens specifies ppp Exaudi directed by James Weeks sing ppp, and NMC's recording engineer Andrew Post digitised that ppp. Exactly as it should be, until listeners switch off when the broadcast/webcast programme content is submerged under background noise. The same problem was experienced when testing the audio stream for the complete Inner Cities webcast. I mentioned this to pianist Daan Vandewalle who replied that the reason why some passages were very quiet on his recording was because he played them very quietly!

In rock music compression is increasingly being applied to reduce the dynamic range of recordings, despite the wide signal to noise ratio made available by digital technologies. Compression gives recordings more impact by making them sound louder, and that sells product as the marketing men say. But a backlash against the excessive use of compression has begun with the creation of the website Turn Me Up who summarise their aims as follows:

Turn Me Up!™ is a non-profit music industry organization campaigning to give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records. To be clear, it's not our goal to discourage loud records; they are, of course, a valid choice for many artists. We simply want to make the choice for a more dynamic record an option for artists.

Today, artists generally feel they have to master their records to be as loud as everybody else's. This certainly works for many artists. However, there are many other artists who feel their music would be better served by a more dynamic record, but who don't feel like that option is available to them.

This all comes down to the moment a consumer hears a record, and the fear that if the record is more dynamic, the consumer won't know to just turn up the volume. This is an understandable concern, and one Turn Me Up! is working to resolve.

You can hear (or perhaps not hear) Lutyens' ppp writing on Future Radio this Sunday Jan 13. There is no hip hop background but listeners with high quality speakers may hear the door of the adjacent studio closing a couple of times. The following Sunday the opening of the 1995 recording of Luigi Dallapiccola's Canti di prigionia performed by Ensemble InterContemporain and the New London Chamber Choir will also test the signal to noise ratio of the whole digital distribution chain.

Hip hop accompaniment and doors slamming regardless, I am very grateful to Future Radio for allowing me to use programme time as a sonic sandbox. They have also been extraordinarily helpful in tweaking the audio stream quality to accomodate the extremes of dynamic range found in contemporary music, and the dreaded silence detector is currently off. Norfolk, UK is becoming something of a hotspot in the recording world, and a state of the art rock studio has just opened a few miles from where I live in rural Norfolk. Leeders Farm recording studios are close to where Sir Malcolm Arnold spent the last years of his life. Which allows me to back link to a relevant post which brings together the different worlds of rock and classical music.

Header photo is NOT the Future Radio studio! It is Castle Sound in Scotland, which, I am sure, doesn't suffer from sonic breakthrough, although those speakers may cause the engineer to go deaf instead. 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.

If I were predicting the future ...

On July 28, 2007 Overgrown Path ran a story saying 'The BBC is launching “Proms Idol ... the winner of the BBC2 show will take charge of an orchestra during the Last Night Of The Proms at the Royal Albert Hall next year.

Today's Guardian reveals 'The BBC has just commissioned a new reality TV series called Maestro, in which seven celebrity would-be conductors will go head-to-head on the podium before orchestras and choirs. The winner of the series, expected to air on BBC2 this summer, will step up to conduct an orchestra during the Last Night of the Proms at London's Royal Albert Hall in September'.

On February 1, 2006 Overgrown Path ran a story predicting Classical music nightclubs are the way to go, and followed it up on June 9, 2007 with a report about live classical music in nightclub.

Today's Guardian runs a double page spread on how Cool young clubbers in Berlin are flocking to a night with a twist: all the music is classical, and orchestras play live.

On January 7, 2008 Overgrown Path ran a story saying 'If early music is the surprise of 2008 perhaps EMI's new owners will make their acquired assets work for them by releasing a box of the complete David Munrow recordings with decent documentation instead of sub-licensing them for peanuts to other companies while also giving them away piecemeal on their own budget label?

Today's Guardian runs a story headlined Artists' ally makes his exit from EMI.

On January 14, 2007 Overgrown Path ran a story about Taser stun guns headlined The zeitgeist of the YouTube generation.

Today's Guardian runs a full page story headlined 'For those who like a little music with their personal protection: the Taser that plays MP3s'.

As Norman Lebrecht wrote in the Evening Standard on 8 November, 2006 'Until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town.'

If I were predicting the future ...
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The rumour about Aids was swelling ...

Around forty million people are living with HIV around the world, and that number increases every day, with ignorance and prejudice fuelling the spread of a preventable disease. Since HIV was first identified a quarter of a century ago, it has been a stigmatised disease, resulting in silence and denial. Stigma discourages people from testing for HIV or disclosing their status to their partner, and this fuels the spread of the disease. Today is World Aids Day, an event committed to breaking down the stigma and silence.

Classical music, and the other creative arts, have suffered terribly from the impact of Aids. I have already written in these pages about the magnificent recording by Scott Ross (left) of the complete Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas. Here, as a small contribution to World Aids Day, is Michel Proulx’s account of Scott’s last years. The idiomatic translation is Michel’s own from his biography of Ross.

From then on, he did nothing but tour and record, and from records to concerts, rapidly becoming the most media covered harpsichordist, to the point of attracting to the instrument, thanks to his performance, a variegated public of which a good part should never have got interested in the harpsichord but for him.

But already there was an urgency. When Catherine Perrin saw him in 1984, at a time when the rumour about AIDS was swelling in a terrifying rumble, he confided with her of his fears. He actually had had bronchitis, the winter before, which had degenerated in pneumonia, and knowing that this was one of the associated diseases, he said he was “mort de trouille” (he got the wind up). And he added that he didn’t want to do the test because he was sure to get confirmation of his fears. There may lie part of the reason for the intense activity which he spread during his last years.

In April 1989, he went to Rome, at the Villa Médicis, where he gave a masterclass for the French Television. One can see him very thinned down and weakened by the attacks of the disease. As he had no Social Security (Medicare), he did not take care of himself well, and it is also possible that he saw no good reason for looking after himself correctly. I have been told that he took whatever he could find as medicine, and one might speculate that (but what is it that couldn’t be done with ‘ifs’) maybe he would have survived, with good medical care.

Actually, he was an illegal alien for the French administration who wanted to have him expelled, and would have, had it not been for the intervention of some friends of him, of which some influent members of the Regional Council for Culture, who represented the Prefect how silly he would have looked for the media, if this happened.

In the course of his last months, he was looked after by his friends, especially David Ley, harpsichord maker, who had built his second double manual instrument, and Monique Davos, who had been an assistant director for the first Festival de Radio-France et de Montpelier, in 1983. According to testimonials, there was a sort of competition between both these persons for the care of Scott, and Mrs Davos was an advocate of the use of intensive medication. It seems that this was the cause of a Homeric struggle between her and those who wished him to die in peace. It was James Ross Jr. who finally brought Scott back to Assas, by the end of May.

On the following June 13, he passed away in his little house in Assas. His brother James, who had insisted upon coming to see him, assisted him right at the end. As, obviously, Scott had prepared nothing for the circumstances, it is James who took care of everything and it is he who asked for the rights of his records to be paid to the profit of an organization devised to help young harpsichordists. Unfortunately, I could find no trace of that organization, if ever it existed, nor could I trace back Scott’s brother who seems to have vanished in the haze.

After the cremation at the Grammont Funeral Center in Montpelier, Scott’s ashes were dispersed over the village of Assas from a small aircraft, according to his last wishes.

The recording of Scarlatti's 555 sonatas was started by Scott Ross on 16th June 1984. Ninety-eight sessions were required, and the last take was completed on 10th September 1985. In all, there had been eight thousand takes.
Scott Ross died of an Aids related illness on 13th June 1989, he was 38

Follow this link for more Scott Ross resources.
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The music blogs go round and round

Nice to see On An Overgrown Path, and several other fine music blogs, mentioned in the Gramophone's November e-newsletter. This is written by the magazine's editor James Jolly, who is also a BBC Radio 3 presenter. A warm welcome to new readers arriving at this "provocative and informed" blog from the Gramophone. You can check today's top stories in the right side-bar.

See the rest of my header photo here, and take a look at the Chinese equivalent of the Gramophone here.
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Mass hysteria in four parts

Serendipitous reporting in today's Guardian. The story is about mass hysteria. It happened at the William Byrd high school in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Mass of hysteria?
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Music and politics collide in France

'I've lit shows at the Bastille opera house (above) for 17 years. Paris Opera's special pension deal dates back to Louis XIV in 1698. It was put in place for the king's dancers - it's a historical monument. So why change it? We're only around 1,500 backstage employees. Our salaries are low, between €1,500 and €2,000 a month for stagehands and lighting technicians. Sarkozy's catchphrase is "work more to earn more". But he's asking us to work for an extra two and a half years and lose up to 25% of our pensions. Already Paris Opera has had to cancel 10 shows due to strikes, including Wednesday night's opening of the Nutcracker. That's never a pleasure. But the mood is tense and it will worsen if the government doesn't agree to full negotiations' - Gilles Cortesi, 49, striking lighting operator, Paris Opera in today's Guardian.

And here is presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy speaking in April 2007 - 'The music we call 'classical' is the most popular since it has transcended time, fashion, and society to become contemporary. The music of Mozart and Beethoven was perhaps revolutionary, even elitist at the time, but how we can claim it's not popular?'

Read about another time when music and market forces collided. Could this mean the disappearance of classical music in Paris?
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BBC TV's Classical Star condemned as 'sick'

'A society that revels in others' public distress or humiliation, filmed in intrusive close-up, is a pretty sick society. Classical Star harks back to the worst excesses of the Roman arena. The children are exhibits in a human circus. The judges use the thumbs up/thumbs down technique of the Roman emperor; they offer us pretension, patronage and a deep sense of self-importance. We are all being coarsened by this continual diet of exploitation. '

That's just one paragraph from Hilary Davan Wetton's attack on BBC TV's Classical Star in today's Guardian. He hits the nail right on the head, he says it is bad for classical music. And Hilary isn't just a grumpy old blogger. He is a musician, teacher and conductor. And his new CD of Vaughan William's seasonal Hodie is out on Naxos this week.

Now, on the day of Ursula Vaughan William's memorial service let's remember a pilgrim's final progress.
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Youth - a time of life

There was only one small problem - the music.

Later. No sorry - make that two.

Now read about youth, a state of mind
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