Pierre Boulez - I'm not a shy man

He says little has changed in the music world since he started out, in that "20% are very interested in new things, 50% can be persuaded and 30% are in their coffins before their time. It is not a matter of good times or bad times. You always have to make an effort and you always need a strong personality to get things done. If you are timid and unadventurous, no matter how good your ideas, nothing happens. Me, I'm not a shy man. I am willing to have a go. Then it is for others to judge its worth" - unmissable, and original, Pierre Boulez in today's Guardian. Lots more on the bogeyman of twentieth century music here.

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A contemporary composer's Passion

James MacMillan (left) charts progress on his new Passion in today's Guardian. I am playing his percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel on Future Radio on May 11.

Read about another contemporary Passion here.
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Meredith Monk out of focus

Regular readers will know that monastic orders are one of my interests, so it will come as no surprise that I have been greatly enjoying ECM's new release of music by Meredith Monk. Impermanence is a moving meditation on the transitory nature of life that expands Monk's distinctive vocal writing to embrace a range of instruments including piano, elephant bells, marimba, vibraphone and, my favourite, a bicycle wheel. A beautiful CD that is recommended. But am I the only one that now finds ECM's signature out of focus monochrome cover art an irritating cliché?

More on ECM cover art here.
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What's in a name?

Hip hop, trance, house, dance, techno and electro aren't just categories of rock music. They are fan bases, communities, underground networks, marketing tools and cultural directions. And more importantly they are self-contained markets which combine to form a thriving scene for new rock music.

In classical music we have the tried but dry categories of early, baroque, classical and romantic, but after that things become difficult. Until eight years ago twentieth-century music was a useful fallback, but should Mahler be in the same category as Boulez? Then there is modern music, but that sounds like furniture, and avant-garde which sounds forbidding. How about contemporary and new music? But is John Cage, who died sixteen years ago, contemporary? Is Britten as contemporary as Christina Kubisch? Or is Stimmung, which was composed forty years ago, new music? Then there are experimental, aleatoric, chance, electronic, atonal, serial, minimalist and other technical labels which sound just like what they are, technical labels.

It's not an academic discussion. We want new audiences and knowing what to call something is the first step towards liking it. Which is why BlackBerry, PowerBook and iPod are much more than mere names. Future Radio bills my programme as contemporary classical and on this blog and on air I use the default of contemporary music or new music. But I keep thinking there must be something more compelling and descriptive to stand alongside hip hop trance, house, dance, techno and electro.

Is there? Or doesn't it matter?

Now read about a title given by the gods.
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New music is Europe's hot ticket

The all day John Cage Happening in Bruge, Belgium this Sunday (Feb 17) is a complete sell-out. On An Overgrown Path will be there and also at Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel two days before. Adventurous programming and new music is certainly pulling in the European audiences, and the next hot ticket looks to be the happening previewed below, and we will be there as well:

spnm’s experimental music night The Sound Source returns to Kilburn’s Luminaire (see footer photo) on 12 March with an unusual and creative response to the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Headlining the event are Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle, who will perform Klavierstücke I-IV, and drummer and percussionist Chris Cutler, who will join him for a version of Kontakte. Electronic artist Scanner completes the line-up with some Stockhausen-inspired works. Rounding off the evening, the three will team up to perform a newly commissioned tribute to one of Stockhausen’s hidden gems, Stockhoven/Beethausen.

The event begins with an Open Source slot, in association with Music Orbit, offering emerging British artists the chance to showcase their work. A CD of the results will be given to audience members at the end of the night.

Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. After working in the ‘70s with English avant-garde rock group Henry Cow, he founded Art Bears, News from Babel and Cassiber, and joined the American band Pere Ubu. In addition to special projects for stage, theatre, film and radio he still works consistently with Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Jon Rose, Tim Hodgkinson, David Thomas, Peter Blegvad, Daevid Allen, Hugh Hopper, Daan Vandewalle and Stevan Tickmayer and has toured the world as a soloist with his extended electrified kit. Other recent projects include Out of the Blue Radio - a daily year-long soundscape project for Resonance FM and p53 for Orchestra.

Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle enjoys an international reputation as a new music specialist, with a strong focus on 20th century American piano music. He studied at the Conservatory of Ghent, Belgium with Claude Coppens and at Mills College, California with Alvin Curran. His recitals and projects have become increasingly more diverse and challenging, and his programmes are often highly unusual, both on a technical and intellectual level, often combining the classical repertoire with premieres of new works written especially for him e.g. Frith, Newman, Curran, Rzewski. As an improviser he has collaborated widely with David Moss, Fred Frith, Han Bennink, Chris Cutler and Tom Cora amongst others.

British artist Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner (see header photo), traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways. From his early controversial work using found mobile phone conversations, through to his focus on trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge, his restless explorations of the experimental terrain have won him international admiration from amongst others, Bjork, Aphex Twin and Stockhausen. Scanner has collaborated with artists from every imaginable genre, including Bryan Ferry, Radiohead, The Royal Ballet, Merce Cunningham, Michael Nyman and Luc Ferrari.


Read about other 'hot ticket' new music festivals here and here.
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Contemporary composer paints bigger picture

Ben.H has left a new comment on your post "A great American composer and artist besides": While we're naming names, Gloria Coates is another composer and painter, whose CDs typically use her art for the cover designs.

Ben, thanks for including the eternal feminine.
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New symphony is highly infectious

Leif Segerstam's 151st Symphony (eat your heart out Alan Hovhaness) was premiered last week by the estimable BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with the composer conducting. The single movement symphony lasts for less than half an hour, and Segerstam's programme note cites the recent outbreaks of bird flu as one of the inspirations for the symphony.

Leif Segerstam, seen in my header photo, is one of those musical mavericks who are a dying breed in today's world of 'Mahler cycle before you are 30' agent controlled music making. (And yes, I know he has recorded a Mahler cycle). Segerstram's students include Susanna Mälkki, and he has used aleatoric techniques and has written for conductorless ensembles. He has championed music by contemporary composers including John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse, and fellow Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara.

Rautavaara's music became fashionable in the mid-1990s, and I have several of his works in my CD collection dating from that time. Segerstam's recording of Rautavaara's Seventh Symphony (Angel of Light) plays as I write. I haven't listened to it for ten years, and coming back to it I find it deserving, beautifully crafted but ultimately unremarkable music that lacks any real sense of development - am I missing something?

Judge Leif Segerstam's 151st Symphony for yourself. It is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 this evening (Jan 24) and will be available for a week on demand after broadcast, or so the BBC says. The photo below comes from my February 2007 article about the bird flu outbreak here in East Anglia. I never thought I'd be able to back link to it from a piece on contemporary music. Thank you Leif Segerstam for making it possible.


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Inner Cities just got longer

'A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places' said the Scottish artist Paul Gardner, and it is the same with contemporary music. Back in November I thought I was broadcasting Alvin Curran's Inner Cities complete, but I was wrong. The epic 4 hour 24 minute cycle for solo piano had just stopped at an interesting place called Inner Cities 11.

Pianist Daan Vandewalle tells me that two new Inner Cities have been added to the cycle, and another is in the pipeline. This week he recorded IC12 in Paris, he has performed IC13 in Italy, and is finalising a commission for Alvin Curran for IC14. I wonder what would have happened if Daan had been around when Wagner was composing the Ring?

My next project is a marathon broadcast of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum for solo piano which also lasts for hour hours. Read about it here.
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BBC's Weir and wonderful programming.

Yesterday afternoon BBC Radio 3 had three clear hours to programme music Towards Judith Weir. They played Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique complete, they played the (inevitable) Shostakovich Piano Concerto No 2 complete, and they played just the finale of Ligeti's Romanian Concerto. What is wrong with the other three movements of the Ligeti - do they bite listeners?

That's György Ligeti in my photo, and you can read his Private Passions complete and unexpurgated here.
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Found - thousands of happy new ears

In only six weeks more than a thousand people have visited the Overgrown Path podcast page on iTunes, and this week James Weeks talking about the music of Elisabeth Lutyens has been added to my David Munrow and Alvin Curran podcasts. Doesn't that level of interest in music from the long tail tell us something?

Elsewhere there has been some good humoured discussion of Angela Hewitt world Bach tour T-shirts, with one defender of the Bach world tour marketing machine writing - 'I think you are missing the point here, which is trying to get new people interested in her, giving her profile in the press and recognition ... every interview, every talk show appearance is promotion.'

Every talk show appearance may be promotion. But all promotion is not good promotion. And promoting serious music to mass markets is a risky business. There are very few examples of large, and loyal, new audiences being created by mass marketing. But there are numerous examples that ended in tears, where mass marketing failed to attract a new audiences, but instead drove away the core audience. The most obvious example is BBC Radio 3, where going mass market has failed to attract Classic FM listeners, but has instead, literally, switched-off the network's core audience and resulted in a net loss of listeners.

New audiences are essential for the health of serious music, but so is being realistic. We live in an age of instant gratification, and today's arts administrators and broadcasters want immediate access to new mass audiences. This is not only unrealistic, it also often achieves the opposite result to that intended. New audiences can be reached, but we need to be less greedy and more adventurous to reach them.

As always on this blog these are my personal views. But they are based on real world experience. Yes, the sample size may be small, but, as I have pointed out before, the samples are larger than the focus groups used by the BBC and others. And before the cynics sniff at a few thousand listeners for David Munrow and Alvin Curran they should remember that it was revealed recently that Rupert Murdoch's new satellite Fox Business Network is attracting an average of only 6,000 daytime viewers.

The new audience for serious music is in the receptive long tail, not in the mass market short head. The long tail of classical music has received much attention recently. But there are many other long tails - for literature, for the visual arts, for the cinema, for techno and electronic music, and others. There is overlap, but there is also a sizeable new audience for serious music waiting in those other long tails. These are people who have been driven away from classical music by BBC TV's Classical Star and Classic FM's music for dinner parties. They see serious music today as being unexciting. They don't want to be talked down to by chummy radio presenters. They want the adventurousness of Boulez in the 1970s at the Round House and Proms in London, and at the Rug Concerts in New York. But, with a few notable exceptions, we are not giving them what they want.

I have talked to some of the new audience that my internet radio programmes and blog have reached. They told me they bought CDs and downloads of music by Guillaume Connesson, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and others after discovering them On An Overgrown Path. These new listeners are well educated, have disposable incomes, are interested in the media, travel extensively, have expensive stereo systems, watch art films, and read contemporary fiction. But they listen to non-classical music because they find it more exciting and challenging. They are the long-tail dwellers, they are a receptive new audience for serious classical music, but we need to be a lot more adventurous to reach them.

Sir Brian McMaster arrives at the same conclusion in his controversial and brave report on funding in the UK arts which was published last week. In the report he recommends 'that cultural organisations stop exploiting the tendency of many audiences to accept a superficial experience and foster a relationship founded on innovative, exciting and challenging work'. Or, as that great arts administrator and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond wrote "the arts are as much about controversy as about achievement".

We need to be more adventurous and controversial. We already have the exciting music. We should stop apologising for it.

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New music - but Weir is BBC's chief conductor?

"While I thought Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio were all great composers - especially Berio, who had melodic poetry and eloquence that stood out for me - there was a sense that the postwar serial tradition was starting to fray at the edges. It was ripe for change, and for people to cock a snook a bit" - says 53 year old Judith Weir in a Guardian interview previewing the forthcoming BBC Symphony Orchestra composer weekend featuring her music. My header photo shows Judith Weir on the set of her 'A Night at the Chinese Opera'.

It's great to see some much needed adventurous programming from the BBC in the Judith Weir festival from January 17th to 20th. As well as talks and films there are seven concerts featuring many of her works, and all are to be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Full concert details here, broadcast details here, and a Judith Weir feature On An Overgrown Path here.

With the BBC Proms handed over to reality show winners these annual composers weekends are now the showpiece contemporary music event for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and they are playing in three of the concerts. Two are conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and one by André de Ridder. None are being conducted by the orchestra's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek. So where is the BBC's peripatetic maestro? Recording an unadventurous CD of Brahms with the BBCSO, and last seen on the podium in Amsterdam with the Concergebouw Orchestra conducting Dvorak.

Another contemporary opera composer from Scotland here.
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Radio has to be an adventurous experience

My article last year about Elisabeth Lutyens created a lot of interest. In it I recommended the new CD of Lutyens' choral music sung by Exaudi directed by James Weeks, and on my Future Radio programme this Sunday (Jan 13) James Weeks (above) joins me to talk about Lutyens and introduce some of the music from the disc, including her 1953 masterpiece the Motet (Excerpta Tractati Logico-Philosophici) which is usually known by the more memorable title of the Wittgenstein Motet. The interview will be available as An Overgrown Path podcast after the broadcast.

James Weeks is also active as a composer and we will be playing one of his choral compositions on the programme. James is a champion of contemporary music, and he has just been appointed music director of the New London Chamber Choir. Pierre Boulez is patron of the NLCC, which has a reputation for pushing the new music envelope just about as far as it will go, and sometimes beyond. The choir was founded by James Wood, and together they stirred things up with a new work which I featured in an early post here. The week following the Lutyens programme I will be playing the NLCC's recording of Luigi Dallapiccola's moving Canti di prigionia in a programme of Italian choral music.

If any confirmation is needed that radio has to be an adventurous experience it comes from non-music blogs such as Threading thoughts, which recently wrote:

I am intrigued, transported, and mind-moved by music. Like visual art and literature I respond to a wide selection: classical, pop, folk, jazz, and contemporary classical (which I always think is a dull title). However, I know next to nothing - well, nothing - about music. I just know what I like! I was delighted last Sunday in the Observer newspaper Review section to find a list of contemporary music blogs to try out. As I type this I am listening to Future Radio which I found through the On An Overgrown Path blog. Also I like the Zen saying on the header of the Overgrown Path blog.

Now read about another contemporary composer who said music has to be an adventurous experience.
Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday, January 13th in real time here (convert to local time zones here). An Overgrown Path podcast will follow. 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. Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

4.5 hours of new music - it was incredible

When did a listener last describe a piece of new music to you as incredible? I've been filing away responses to my overnight broadcast on Future Radio of Alvin Curran's Inner Cities and thought this typical message was worth posting. Shows that there is an audience for contemporary music - if you can reach it.

Hi, I was listening to the show last night (around 12-1am maybe) and I heard a piece of music which lasted 4.5 hours long, preceded by an on-air phone call with the pianist from Belgium I believe. Could you please give me more information about this piece of music? I thought it was incredible.
Many thanks, TL

Proof that the music hasn't died on every radio station.
The score in my photo of the Future Radio studio isn't by Alvin Curran. But it is by another contemporary composer. Can any reader with supernatural powers tell me who the composer is? Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Brian Eno adds ambience to adolescent angst

Nick Clegg, the new leader of the UK's Liberal Democrat party, has recruited Brian Eno (above) as an adviser on youth problems to help him fix Britain's "broken politics". Good news; because not only is Eno a respected contemporary musician, he is also 59. I can now look forward both to the Liberal Democrats winning the next general election, and to Brian Eno conducting the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Day concert in 2031.

More on politician's musical tastes here and here.
Header photo is, appropriately, from Brian Eno's first appearance on Second Life, and is by Rik Panganiban. 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

Musical stocking fillers from Overgrown Paths

* Walter Braunfels' Te Deum from Furtwängler and the forgotten new music. A major successs in the lifetime of this now forgotten composer, Braunfels' Wagner influenced Te Deum is a response to the horrors of the First World War - on CD from Orfeo.
* Philippe Boesmans Julie from New music from the old world. Video release of the opera's 1995 premiere production at the Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie in Brussels - on DVD from BelAir.
* Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Simplicius Simplicissimus from The Well-Tempered Concert. This video captures the Stuttgart production of Hartmann's only opera. Written in 1935 it uses the Thirty Years' War as a metaphor for Nazi oppression - on DVD from Arthaus Musik.
* Francisco Guerrero's Missa Super flumina from Size does matter. Rising early music star Michael Noone and his Ensemble Plus Ultra presents the premiere recording of a Guerrero Mass - on CD from Glossa.

More simple gifts for Christmas here.
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Belgium bags Alvin Curran premiere

New music is alive and well in Belgium. Tomorrow (Dec 15) sees an Alvin Curran (photo above) premiere in Ghent played by pianist Daan Vandewalle (who featured in my Inner Cities webcast) and cellist Arne Deforce. The new Alvin Curran work is called Malapromptus. This is the programme, and more details here:

Anton Webern - Sonate 1914 (2')
Anton Webern - Drei Stucke opus 11, 1914 (2')
Morton Feldman - Durations II 1960 (5')
Edison Denisov - Drei Stücke 1967 (6')
Galina Ustvolskaya - Grand Duett 1959 (22')
Alvin Curran - Malapromtus 2007

Hear Daan Vandewalle talking to me about Alvin Curran's music here. And a double bill of new Belgian music here and here.
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John Cage and chance spelling

Swapping from William Schuman to Robert Schumann in recent posts has presented a spelling challenge, and, quite rightly, a reader corrected me a while back when I fused the American composer's Christian name with the German composer's surname.

So I was reassured to read the following in David Revill's book The Roaring Silence - John Cage: A Life - 'Cage continued to spend many hours preparing letters seeking support for a center for experimental music. On the back of his inventory of percussion instruments he scribbled one night, "Composers interested in electrical: Jacob Weinberg, Henry Brant, Paul Bowles, William Schumann (sic)"'.

John Cage Christmas gift suggestion here.
Cage collage taken at Les Gargoris, France (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Olivier Messiaen in Bryce Canyon

Henry Holland has left a new comment on your post On the path of Stockhausen's teachers - "It's actually Bryce Canyon in the photo used for the poster, the rock formation that looks like a cup above the 'h' in Southbank is the giveaway; Messiaen, of course, visited Bryce Canyon, which is mentioned in the 7th part of Des Canyons aux Etoiles."

My photo above is also from the Southbank Centre's Messiaen festival brochure, and shows the composer in Bryce Canyon.
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On the path of Stockhausen's teachers

In 1950 Karlheinz Stockhausen was accepted into Frank Martin's composition class at the Cologne Musikhochschule. The relationship was not a success, Stockhausen had only a few hours of tuition with Martin, and most of this was spent analysing his teacher's own compositions. More Frank Martin down this path.

Two years later Stockhausen started studying composition with Darius Milhaud in Paris. But once again Stockhausen was dissatisfied with his teacher, and after a few weeks he stopped attending Milhaud's classes. My photo above shows the house that Milhaud was born in at 4, Bd de la République, Aix-en-Provence. His birthplace, which I visited in September, is now the Hotel Artea and not a museum. There is a discount if you check-in after 8.00pm, which cannot be said for many composer's birthplaces.

Milhaud's other pupils at various times included Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Burt Bacharach. Alvin Curran was not among them, but there are connections. Aix-en-Provence supplied my recent Inner Cities photos, and from 1991 to 2006 Curran was Milhaud Professor of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. This Chair was endowed in memory of Milhaud who taught there after being forced to leave France in 1940 because of his Jewish backgound. Milhaud's Jewish ancestors had lived in the ghetto in Cavaillon. This town is close to Avignon, sometime home of the Popes, which is where Stockhausen's third teacher, the devout Catholic Olivier Messiaen was born.

Stockhausen's relationship with Messiaen more than made up for his failures with Martin and Milhaud. Stockhausen and Messiean shared the Catholic faith, and the young composer attended Messiaen's course in aesthetics and analysis in Paris twice a week for a year. Stockhausen later said: 'In many respects Messiaen did the opposite of what I wanted. He never tried to convince me. That made him a good teacher. He did not give instruction in composition, but showed me how he understood the music of others and how he worked himself.'

Olivier Messiaen was born on December 10, 1908. His birthplace Avignon is only a short distance from Milhaud's in Aix-en-Provence. In fact all my paths converge in Avignon as the city also has connections with Pierre Boulez, who was another pupil of Messiaen and a colleague of Stockhausen.

The work of Messiaen, Stockhausen and Boulez also converge in London in one of the highlights of 2008, which is, of course, Messiaen's centenary year. The event is the Southbank Centre's festival The Music of Olivier Messiaen - From The Canyons to the Stars. If anything was to tempt me to move back to London it would be this year long feast of twentieth-century music. Full details here, and below are some of my personal 'must attends'.

* Opening concert February 2 - Messiaen Des canyons aux étoiles played by Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Susanna Mälkki
* February 7 - Southbank Gamelan Players followed by Messiaen Turangalîla-Symphonie with Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
* February 13 - Messiaen Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus played by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
* February 15 - concert by Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble including Stockhausen Kontra-Punkte and Xenakis Jalons.
* February 17 - must be THE concert of 2008. Boulez Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna and Messiaen Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum with London Sinfonietta conducted by Peter Eötvös (who is one of the conductors of Gruppen in my Future Radio webcast this Sunday Dec 16).
* May 1 - Ascension Day service in Westminster Abbey including the organ version of Messiaen's L'Ascension.
* May 11 - Pentecost Mass including movements from Messiaen's Pentecost Mass for organ, Gregorian chant and Victoria's Missa Dum complerentur.
* October 20 - organ recital in the London Oratory that includes a rare chance to hear the Kyrie from Satie's Messa des Pauvres, and movements from Tournemire's L'Orgue Mystique. The Satie fragment was composed for the church that the composer founded, and at which he was the only worshiper, the Eglise métropolitaine d'Art.
* Centenary concert Dec 10 - Messiaen Couleurs de la cité céleste and Sept Haïkaï, Boulez sur Incises with Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez.

I'm just adding up how much a ticket for every concert will cost ...


Now playing - Messiaen's Des canyons aux étoile (From the canyons to the stars) on the double Apex CD with Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, and Ensemble Ars Nova. The couplings are Messiaen's Hymne au Saint-Sacrement and Les offrandes oubliées, the sound is excellent, and there are decent sleeve notes. You can buy it from Amazon resellers for not much more than a Starbucks latte. What can I say, other than ask that seasonal roast chestnut? - is recorded classical music too cheap?

Header photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. 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

Wagner Dream comes true

'In terms of new music, 2007 was less special, save for Magnus Lindberg's fine violin concerto, Heiner Goebbels's indefinably moving Songs from Wars I Have Seen, and Jonathan Harvey's adroit chamber opera Wagner Dream. There were no premieres worth mentioning at the Proms, save Esa-Pekka Salonen's Piano Concerto, quite the worst new piece to come my way all year' - writes Andrew Clements in today's Guardian.

Read more about Jonathan Harvey's Wagner Dream in Malcolm Miller's review, which is where the production shot from the 2007 Holland Festival in Amsterdam came from. (Photo credit Clärchen and Matthias Baus). More on Jonathan Harvey here.
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