skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Mutual friend Johnnie Warrack went with Julian Bream to the Royal Academy one year and they went into one room dominated by a large nude. Julian exclaims in loud astonishment, 'Christ, I know 'er!' Silence in that room and the bystanders wait for more. 'What a smashing pair of plonkers!'
Julian once lent his flat to the South American singer Ana Raquel while he was out of the country. She said she found eighteen pairs of evening shoes under the bed, all worn right down at the heels, likewise a cupboard containing forty-seven dirty evening shirts and a whole room full of unopened letters and telegrams.
His Dartington masterclasses were instructive and fun. On the first day one year he tried to correct one lad, playing the same passage on his own guitar and saying, 'Go on, more like that. See wot I mean?' At which the lad replied, ''S all very well for you. You've got a good box to play on. Mine's a soap box.' Julian conceded he had a point. He hadn't thought of that, so he went round the whole circle of students, playing on every instrument, and, incidentally, making almost as lovely sound on the first lad's box as he had on his own custom-built job.
Julian Bream celebrates his 75th birthday today, and those stories about him come from John Amis' autobiographical Amiscellany which also supplied the header photo for the full tribute I posted yesterday.
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
Another contribution to the Glock centenary - Sir William with Peter Maxwell Davies at Dartington Summer School in 1979. Glock is often criticised for ignoring the music of certain British composers. So it is interesting to note that there is not a single note of Max's music in the 2008 BBC Proms Season. But, don't worry, there's lots here, and a new CD 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
Free music is all the rage and a long-running series of free concerts is being used to boost audiences for contemporary music in London. Music of Today is an innovative eight concert series given by the Philharmonia Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall before regular evening concerts of mainstream repertoire. The deal is you turn up for the free concert at 6.00pm which features an introductory talk by series director Julian Anderson plus a free programme (is the UK alone in having outrageously over-priced programme books?) before paying normal prices for the main concert at 8.00pm. You don't need to buy tickets for the main concert to attend the free one, you can simply enjoy the contemporary music and go home if you choose.
The 6.00pm concerts are not 'bolt-ons', but are meaty and challenging programmes with a different conductor specially booked for the event. Last Thursday we were in London to hear Diego Masson conduct Iannis Xenakis' Anaktoria and Thalleïn in the free Music of Today concert, an event that drew a gratifyingly large audience. The 73 year old Masson is one of the great champions of contemporary music with an incisive stick technique that is rarely seen today and which really fired-up the group of players from the Philharmonia. He is also a great speaker and worked with Xenakis and many other composers, he told how Xenakis struggled for performances in the 1950s, adding that Boulez didn't like his music. A quick cross-reference to Joan Peyser's biography of Boulez confirms this, there is not one mention of Xenakis in it.
In the days when Pierre Boulez was at the BBC the 8.00pm concert would have been Thalleïn in the first half with a Mahler symphony to follow, and the hall would probably have been full. But those days have gone and it was film music all the way with Mozart K467 in the first half and Mahler's Fifth Symphony after the interval. In the Mozart François-Frédéric Guy played very non-Elvira Madigan cadenzas by Marc Monnet - the CV says it all. One of today's hot 'box ticking' young conductors was on the podium. 33 year old Swiss born Philippe Jordan has ticked quite a few boxes already; he has conducted at Covent Garden, the Met and Glyndebourne, has ticked Parsifal in Munich, is signed with leading agency IMG Artists and has a Ring in Zurich and the directorship of the Paris Opera soon to be ticked. Thursday was London and the Mahler 5 box, and it was duly ticked with a performance as mannered and uninvolving as any I can remember.
But congratulations to the Philharmonia for programming contemporary music without tears. But just a couple of questions. Why didn't the 73 year old Diego Masson conduct the Mahler and Mozart, and the 33 year old Philippe Jordan the Xenakis? Could it be that there is no Xenakis box to be ticked on a hot young conductor's CV these days?
My header photo was taken a couple of weeks ago and shows Henry Moore's Reclining Figure in the grounds of Dartington Hall where Diego Masson will follow in the footsteps of Boulez, Stravinsky, Elliott Carter, Bruno Maderna and many other great musicians when he teaches there at this year's Summer School. See Stravinsky in another Dartington header photo here.
* I'm playing Xenakis' Komboi for harpsichord and percussion on Future Radio on April 13. Also in the programme are Scene 3 from Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Vitutum and John Mclaughlin Williams' Grammy winning recording of Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques.
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
Important article about the Bauhaus design school in yesterday's Guardian . The Bauhaus in Dessau was closed by the Nazis in 1932. Four years earlier the architect Walter Gropius had resigned, choosing to work outside Germany. In 1935 Gropius designed the building in East Anglia seen in my header photo. It is Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire, which was a design collabaration between Gropius and Maxwell Fry. It was Gropius' only major UK commission, and the Village College is still in use today. Gropius married Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, in 1915. Their daughter Manon died of polio aged eighteen, and composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her. Gropius and Alma Mahler were divorced in 1920.
The Bauhaus zeitgeist also found refuge in Dartington in Devon. Here the headmaster's house for the progrssive Dartington Hall School, seen in the lower photo, was designed by William Lescaze in the Bauhaus style, and the Ballets Joos from Essen performed in Dartington after they were banished from Germany in 1934. The Bauhaus vision of a creative community working for the greater good lived on in Dartington after the Second World War. The music summer school at Dartington was run by William Glock in the 1950s and attracted great creative spirits ranging from Igor Stravinsky, through Bruno Maderna to Elisabeth Lutyens. The header photo in my recent article Walking with Stravinky, shows Lutyens and Stravinsky together at Dartington.
First performances in the UK, and sometimes in the world, given at Dartington included Elliott Carter's First and Second String Quartets, Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître, Sonatina for flute and piano, and Improvisation on 'Une dentelle s'abolit', Peter Maxwell Davies' Sextet, Luigi Nono's Polifonica-monodia-ritmica, Stefan Wolfe's Quartet for oboe, cello, percussion and piano, and Stockhausen's Zeitmasse and Kontapunkte. And those last works remind us that Dartington ran parallel to that other great music summer school, Darmstadt.
Wliiliam Glock's policy of embracing, rather than fearing, the new continued when he became Controller of Music at the BBC in 1959. His work with Pierre Boulez and others proved that new music has as much to say to audiences as the music of Beethoven et al. This thinking was continued at the BBC by Sir Robert Ponsonby. But, alas, in the years after Ponsonby reactionary forces came to the fore in musical Britain, just as they did in Dessau in 1932.
More unlikely cultural migration here.
The exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1933 is at Mima, Middlesborough to Feb 17 2007. Header photo credit Cambridge2000, but the non-Bauhaus rubbish bin was removed by me. Lower photo from HughPearman.com. 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
