Thank you for the music

Another link with a great musical past was severed on January 25th 2008 with the death of Evelyn Barbirolli, a day after her 97th birthday. Born Evelyn Rothwell she established a reputation as an outstanding oboist before marrying Sir John Barbirolli in 1939, the couple are seen in my header photo. She continued her career after her marriage using her maiden name and was a champion of contemporary music. She played in the first performance of Bohuslav Martinů's Oboe Concerto and had works composed for her by Elizabeth Maconchy, Edmund Rubbra, Arnold Cooke, Arthur Benjamin and Gordon Jacob, and Sir John arranged concertos for her arranged concertos for her from music by Corelli and Pergolesi.

My header photo is from a facinating article on MV Daily. There is a full Guardian obituary here, read more about Glorious John in New York here.
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Great music making doesn't need surtitles

"I completely agree with you, but can't say so publicly because I depend on work from the BBC" is a message I am receiving with increasing frequency. And the confidential messages are coming from some surprisingly high profile personalities.

Monday's post about the knighthood for former BBC Radio 3 controller and Proms director Nicholas Kenyon generated a record number of private messages of support. As well as dismay over the knighthood for the creator of BBC Radio 2.5 there was also widespread outrage that there was no similar award for one of the greatest ever champions of British music.

Vernon (Tod) Handley was born in 1930, and has probably recorded more British music than any conductor, living or dead. He is an acclaimed interpreter of Elgar, Bax, Vaughan Williams, Finzi, and many other composers. I can remember a Gerontius with his Guildford orchestra and choir in 1976 that was as good as any I have ever heard.

But Tod isn't just a specialist in the English pastoralists. His cycle of the Robert Simpson symphonies (except No 11) for Hyperion is one of the great achievements of the gramophone. He has recorded Elizabeth Maconchy, and his cycle of the Malcolm Arnold symphonies for Conifer (now re-issued on Decca) is another great recording landmark. Despite these achievements, and despite a proliferation of musical knights, Tod Handley was only given the lower honour of a CBE in 2004, an award usually made to businessmen and local government officials.

But is it really surprising? Robert Simpson's music was famously black-listed by the BBC. And under Sir Nicholas Kenyon there have been no BBC Proms performances of Arnold's symphonies for more than a decade, since the Second in 1994 in fact. And, quite scandalously, the acclaimed Ninth has never been performed at the Proms.

Great music music making doesn't need surtitles. But Tod Handley should receive the award he so richly deserves.

Not surprisingly I didn't get a Christmas card from the BBC this year. But one of their orchestras still loves me. And it is the right one. Now read about another forgotten maestro.
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A year of stories that had to be told

On An Overgrown Path is three years old today, and this is post number 1171. The site has received close to a million hits, and the word count is now not far short of a staggering half a million. That is twice as many words as Alex Ross' new book, and half as many as today's BBC Radio 3 presenters use to introduce a single concert.

The last twelve months gave me the opportunity to explore several new paths. Two of the most rewarding articles to write were those on the black Guyanese conductor Rudolph Dunbar and the Afro-French composer Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Appropriately, yesterday was the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, and I am writing this before we dash off to the radio studio to present a studio discussion on the slave trade.

My radio co-presenter is my wife Sorojini. As usual several different paths intersect here. Sorojini was born in Georgetown, Guyana, as was Rudolph Dunbar. A colonial labour system brought the families of both to that country from different continents. And Guyana has been involved for more than 150 years in a border dispute with Venezuela, a country that has featured frequently on the path, and one that I will return to later

Internet radio is another new path I've been exploring. Future Radio, here in Norwich, has been very generous in giving me carte blanche to present an hour of contemporary music every Sunday at 5.00pm British Summer Time. This has meant that listeners around the world have been able to listen to rarely heard music by Mikis Theodorakis, Alan Hovhaness, William Howard Schuman, Thea Musgrave, Pierre Boulez, Edmund Rubbra and others.

Benjamin Britten has, of course, remained a constant on the path throughout the year. In April I wrote one of the year's saddest posts, and marked the death of Britten's friend and collaborator Mstislav Rostropovich with a small personal appreciation.

On An Overgrown Path's commitment to contemporary music has increased. Posts on Pierre Boulez , Bruno Maderna, Jonathan Harvey and Lou Harrison were particularly well received, and it was fun to see my tribute to Conlon Nancarrow reminding some high profile US sites that it was the tenth anniversary of Nancarrow's death.

Less well received were my posts on the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and Gustavo Dudamel. But I continue to remain uneasy about their volatile mix of musical vision, politics and commercialism, and believe that Venezuelan flags (see above via Deceptively Simple) and union jacks (see below via BBC) are both out of place at the BBC Proms. Youngsters just having fun? Please tell that to the families of the millions of young people who died last century defending freedom of speech. At last the paid-for media, and some other blogs, have also started to question the link between music and politics in Venzuela. And the answers given by Dudamel certainly do not make me change my views.

Of course the Venezuelan music education system is a fantastic way of rejuvenating classical music. But others are also doing great work, and my sequence of reports on the Aldeburgh Festival showed that 'reaching out' and 'selling out' don't always have to rhyme. It was also pleasing to see Aldeburgh Music recognising the importance of music blogs.

In February this year classical music had its 'Diana moment' with the Joyce Hatto 'forgery' revelations, and I tried, without much success, to introduce some balanced reporting. The Joyce Hatto story was, by miles, the year's biggest storm in a teacup.

I received far more satisfaction from writing articles about Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy, while the story of Timothy Brady's opera Edalat Square, about the hanging of two young gay men in Iran, just had to be told. My research for the post on Reginald Goodall was also important, not least because the path led to Rudolph Dunbar.

The year also had a lot of laughs. And I am very grateful to Norman Lebrecht for providing most of them.

It was also pleasing to write that youth is not a time of life, but a state of mind. Particularly as this modestly successful blog is written by a 57 year old.

I must apologise to my many overseas readers for the seemingly endless articles deploring the state of BBC Radio 3 and the Proms. But when an old, trusted and loved friend is in agony you desperately want to change things. And a hat tip to Nicholas Kenyon for sending me the longest, most opaque, and least read article posted On An Overgrown Path in the last twelve months. Thanks Nick, and I look forward to receiving my signed copy of your new history of the Barbican Centre.

On a personal front it was very moving to see my photo feature on the inspirational Taizé Community become such an important web resource via Wikipedia. Father Roger's ecumenical community remains a beacon of light in an often dark world.

Apologies to the many readers who emailed me and did not receive an immediate reply. The comments that appear on the blog are the tip of a very large iceberg. Unfortunately some eloquent messages remain buried beneath many from Nigerians generously offering to share their financial windfalls with me.

I hope that the next twelve months will be as rewarding as those just ended. But before my new blogging year gets into its stride On An Overgrown Path will be taking a sea interlude (that's the East Anglian equivalent of a hiatus) in September. In past years I've run the blog at arms length while away, but the size of the readership, its topicality and the risk of legal challenges now make that impractical. So after several more posts, on Monday (Aug 27) I'll be locking the blog down for four weeks, a gap that I'm sure that the many other fine music blogs will fill perfectly well.

Thank you readers for your support, comments, and corrections. In the coming months I will keep following the path mapped so eloquently by Libby Purves in Radio: A True Love Story.

'All that you can do is to make - and publicise - the best and most passionately well-crafted programmes you can think of. Ratings have to be watched, but calmly and with a sense of proportion. You have to believe that if even one person is swayed, or inspired, or changed, or comforted, by a programme, then that programme has been worthwhile'.


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Twentieth century music on an overgrown path

My article on the Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour told how the 23 year old violinist Gerhard Taschner (photo above) played in the orchestra's final concert before the surrender of Berlin in 1945. DG Archiv has just released a CD of Taschner's playing which combines the Bruch Concerto with two lesser known 20th century violin concertos by Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949) and Wolfgang Fortner (1907-1987).

Elsewhere my centenary tribute to Elizabeth Maconchy lamented that two important Lyrita CDs of her orchestral music had not been transferred to CD. Well, forget the complaint, the new owners of Lyrita have now combined the music from the two CDs onto a single CD which includes Maconchy's gorgeous Symphony for Double String Orchestra, and Manoug Parikian playing the Serenata Concertante for Violin and Orchestra. No excuse now not to get to know the music of this scandalously neglected composer.

Another outstanding CD of twentieth century music from the path is the BBC Legends release of Bruno Maderna conducting Mahler's Ninth Symphony. This recording dates from 1971, and I was fortunate to hear Maderna conduct this work at a Promenade Concert shortly before his untimely death in 1973. That evening was one of the most profound musical, and emotional, experiences of my life. This CD of Mahler Nine is one that I will return to repeatedly; a reviewer described it as 'an incandescent performance of a masterpiece'. I can add nothing more to that other than to express the hope that we may see a revival of interest in Maderna the composer as well as Maderna the conductor.

For more musical memories read The Year is '72
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Maconchy, Schubert, and synchroncity

Superb response to my article on the recordings of Elizabeth Maconchy's string quartets. Superb article in today's Guardian on Schubert's symphonies. Serendipitous synchronicity that Misha Donat produced the 1989 recordings and wrote the Guardian article this week.

Now read about serendipity, synchronicity and Bernstein
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Just one email makes it all worthwhile

mister bijou has left a new comment on your post "Flattery will get you everywhere":

Thank you so much for the post about Elizabeth Maconchy (above)-- of whom I'd never heard of before. Having now listened to the first programme about her on BBC Radio 3, and read the Pliable words, I went to Regis Records and ordered via their online service. Pliable readers may be interested to know their retail price is 12 pounds sterling for the 3cds. Cheers!

Posted by mister bijou to On An Overgrown Path at 6:00 PM

Now read how blogging is doing it for our time
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How important is a composer’s music?

Why a String Quartet? What is it that has given it its exalted reputation and mystique? Why have so many composers regarded it as the perfect medium of expression, though it is perhaps the most demanding to write for? And why do distinguished artists often prefer to work as a team in a first class quartet rather than make bigger money as, say, orchestral leaders? Music means different things to different people: but for those to who music is an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion – the string quartet is perhaps the most satisfying medium of all.

These words are by Elizabeth Maconchy (photo below) who was born one hundred years ago, on March 19th 1907. She has been described as the greatest ever English composer for strings, irrespective of gender. She wrote a remarkable cycle of thirteen string quartets, and three one-act operas. Her music is lean, sinewy and uncompromising, and develops from the central European styles of Berg, Bartok and Janacek. But, despite all these attributes, the neglect of Maconchy’s music is breathtaking. She is ignored by the mainstream. Her music is absent from our concert halls, and in the classical departments of London's two largest record stores her name does not even appear on the CD racks. And she is ignored by the cognoscenti, with neither William Glock nor John Drummond mentioning her in their autobiographies.

The neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy does raise the question, how important is a composer’s music? Comparisons with another twentieth century composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, are interesting. Korngold was born in the right place, mainland Europe. He had the right teachers including Zemlinsky, and moved in the right circles, including Mahler and Richard Strauss. He was forced to move to the right place, Hollywood, for the right reasons, political persecution. He worked in the right genres, film scores and neo-romantic orchestral music. And Korngold is rightly recognised with browser space in the CD stores, two biographies, and concert and broadcast performances.

Elizabeth Maconchy was born ten years after Korngold, in the wrong place. Her birthplace, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, is one of the few towns in the world that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry. She had the wrong teachers. Ralph Vaughan Williams, who remained a close friend but not a musical influence, is forever branded an English pastoralist, while her teacher in Prague, Karel Jirak (left), remains as neglected as his pupil. She had the wrong life changing event. TB claimed her sister and father, and she contracted and recovered from the illness herself. This experience contributed to the development of her individual musical voice, and her single minded and painstaking focus.

She also lived in the wrong place. Essex is a creative no-go area between the musical honey-pots of London and Aldeburgh. She didn’t network with musical movers and shakers, although she was the first woman to sit on the influential BBC music panel, and was also the first woman President of the Society for the Promotion for New Music. She was married to a historian for more than sixty years, and bore two daughters, one of whom, Nicola LeFanu, is a notable composer in her own right. And she wrote for the wrong genre. The string quartet stubbonly refuses to fit into the sound-byte culture of radio stations such as BBC Radio 3, where a single movement is rapidly becoming the largest acceptable single unit of musical currency.

Let’s make one thing clear, I am a big fan of the music of Korngold. In the 1970’s I discovered him through the three pioneering LPs of his music. First the RCA Red Seal LP of his film scores, The Sea Wolf conducted by Charles Gerhardt. Then, the still unsurpassed, recording of the Symphony in F-sharp with Rudolf Kempe and the Munich Philharmonic (nla), followed by Jascha Heifetz's recording of the Violin Concerto (below). But around the same time I discovered the music of Elizabeth Maconchy. First there was her unrepresentative overture Proud Thames on an adventurous Lyrita LP of 1972 (SRCS 57) that also included music by Geoffrey Bush, William Alwyn and Lennox Berkeley. But the record that got me hooked another Lyrita LP (SRCS 116) with Vernon Handley conducting her Symphony for Double String Orchestra, and Manoug Parikian playing the Serenata Concertante for Violin and Orchestra. It is very sad that the Lyrita re-issues on CD have not included these wonderful recordings in the composer's centenary year.

The peak of Elizabeth Maconchy’s achievement are the thirteen quartets, and these span more than fifty years from 1932 to 1984, from the youthful exuberance of the first, to the ultimate concision of the thirteenth (Quartetto Corto) which lasts for just eight minutes. The ghosts of Berg, Bartok, Janacek, and Jirak hover over the opus, and Maconchy's uncompromising approach to composition is expressed in her own notes about the Sixth Quartet: ‘Writing music, like all creative art, is the impassioned pursuit of an idea … The great thing is for the composer to keep his (sic) head and allow nothing to distract him. The temptations to stop by the way and to be side-tracked by felicities of sound and colour are ever present, but in my view everything extraneous to the pursuit of this central idea must be rigorously excluded – scrapped’.

We are very fortunate that the neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy’s music is not total. In 1989 Unicorn-Kanchana had the vision to record the complete quartets with three young string groups, the Hanson, Bingham and Mistry Quartets. The performances are committed, energetic, and exemplary. The recordings were produced by Misha Donat, and two church venues were used with the legendary sound engineer Tony Faulkner balancing nine of the quartets, and Anthony Howell the others. These are performances and recordings to die for, and the even better news is that the complete string quartets are now available on 3 CDs on the Regis label for the price of a single CD, and they come with an excellent 24 page booklet of notes by the composer and Nicola Lefanu.

But despite this wonderful recorded legacy we are still left with the conundrum of Elizabeth Maconchy - vital and astringent music combined with an unassuming personality. My header photo expresses this conundrum perfectly. When Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in 1957 he was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery just a few steps away from another film composer, Walter Jurmann, who is famous for writing the song "San Francisco". When I started writing this article I did not even know where Elizabeth Maconchy was buried. To my astonishment, my research uncovered that the unassuming final resting place she shares with her husband, shown in the photo, is a few miles from where I write these words, at Eaton Parish Church here in Norfolk.

But in the end it is the music matters. I started by asking the question ‘How important is a composer’s music?’ The string quartets of Elizabeth Maconchy are important twentieth century music. £15 ($28) is a very small price to pay to find out how important.


Good to see the BBC doing their bit. Elizabeth Maconchy (above) is the Radio 3 Composer of the Week starting March 19th, and you can also download audio files of her talking about her art. And read here about another scandalously neglected Elizabeth.
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This new CD demands blind listening

Composer Vanessa Lann's email proposing we listen to music 'without pre-judging its merits because the composer happened to be male or female, young or old, living or deceased, famous or unknown, European or non-European, etc' arrived the day after I bought the Maggini Quartet's (left) new CD of Sir Malcolm Arnold's two string quartets.

This excellent new Naxos CD just demands blind listening. Play it to a knowledgable friend and I wager they will tell you it is Bartok or Hindemith, but certainly not Arnold. The First Quartet dates from 1949, and the Second from 1975. The masterpiece is the Second, which was written during an Indian Summer of British string writing, a period which also produced Elizabeth Maconchy's quartets which I will return to in a future article. The Maggini are persuasive advocates of the Arnold quartets, and the sound recorded in Potton Hall here in East Anglia by producer Andrew Walton and engineer Eleanor Thomason is demonstration quality.

Arnold's Second Qartet was well received at its Dublin premiere, and was then performed at the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival. But since than both the composer, and the string quartet as a genre, have slipped out of fashion. If you need any proof of how stupid, and damaging, musical fashions are, go out and buy this new Naxos CD.

Now read about Arnold's neglected 20th century masterpiece
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