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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Nowhere is safe from Messiaen

Violainvilnius commented on my recent post on Stockhausen's teachers "OMG, we'll have a Messiaen year next year? Where can I emigrate to?". Well, according to today's Observer nowhere is safe.

"Radiohead's exuberantly talented Jonny Greenwood is using his time as composer-in-residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra to allow his influences - Ligeti, Messiaen, Dutilleux and Penderecki - to guide his quirky, uneven pen. They certainly seem to be at work behind his latest offering, the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson's acclaimed new film, There Will Be Blood, due for release in the UK next February.

Those arid plains are captured impressively in the opening track 'Open Spaces', which employs what is fast becoming Greenwood's 'signature', the Ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. Its oscillating frequencies have just the right haunting, vocal quality to evoke an empty, forbidding landscape."

Sample a unique sound world with Naxos' excellent Music of the Ondes Martenot. And read the extraordinary story of another electronic instrument here.
No, it's not an Ondes Martenot. Photo is of Jonny Greenwood playing an Analogue Systems rs6000 synthesizer. 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

Contemporary music - I really enjoyed it!

Aude Gotto writes: When the King of Hearts’ Gallery in Norwich first exhibited my personal collection, composed exclusively of works by living artists, I wrote in the introduction: “This is the collection of someone who didn’t like contemporary art.” A reassurance for the public who generally feels wary of anything "contemporary”, with some reason, it has to be said,in the light of the Turner Prize and other such highlights of the “art world.”

The same wariness applies to modern music, because of what has been termed the “squeaky gate” school, which makes a concert more of a headache than a pleasure. However, I have come a long way over the years, discovering that there are many talented artists and musicians who use a contemporary idiom to express themselves in ways that are both beautiful and arresting, and who are worth making the effort of opening one’s mind to new forms and harmonies.

Indeed we have had quite a number of contemporary works performed at the King of Hearts: the memorable Messiaen recitals by Peter Hill were the initial foray into a world of sound very different from baroque; in 2000 we celebrated the millennium by the commissioning new works, among which the most rewarding was David Bedford’s Quartet, bringing together Piers Adams on recorder, Simon Dinnigan on guitar, Gary Cooper on harpsichord and Tatty Theo on baroque cello. This proved eloquently that a modern composer can write for period instruments with charm and imagination. I was encouraged in the adventure by the comment of an older lady who was a regular attender, and who exclaimed at the end of a concert: "I was rather worried about this contemporary piece and not looking forward to it, but, do you know, I really enjoyed it!”

As far back as 1994, the adventurous harpsichordist Jane Chapman gave a recital which brought together baroque and 20th century music for the instrument; this was quite a revelation, and the reason why we are having her again this year! So we arrive after this rather long preamble, at the theme of this article, the Autumn Festival at the King of Hearts, in Norwich.

The title, Journey across Time, conveys the purpose, which is to cross over barriers, and present music written in the last hundred years as well as baroque favourites. There is an emphasis on Bach and Handel played by some of your favourite performers, so you will no be stretched all the time! But in each concert contrasting contemporary or at least 20th century pieces are included.

The most avant-garde work is a piece for flute and pre-recorded tapes by Jeremy Peyton-Jones, a premiere for the King of Hearts. I trust that flautist Rachel Brown, for whom it was written and who was keen for an opportunity to play it, will present it with her usual musical sensitivity so that we will enjoy the novelty. Another feature is the use of period instruments, such as baroque violin and particularly harpsichord, by modern composers. Stephen Dodgson writes lovely accessible music, Ligeti has toe-tapping rhythms in Hungarian Rock and Takemitsu creates dreamy Japanese harmonises on the harpsichord.

Full details of Journey Across Time from the King of Hearts website, On An Overgrown Path will be there. And stay on the 'old and new' path with Bach and modern technology
Image of 'Boaz Wakes up and finds Ruth at his feet' - original lithograph by Marc Chagall from Aude Gotto's personal collection. 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

BBC Proms - new music in safe doses

Here are Pliable's personal picks for the remainder of this year's BBC Proms season. All Proms are available for seven days online, detailed programmes and broadcast times for every concert are available from the BBC web site.

* August 29, 10.00pm - important contemporary music is once again consigned to the bed-time ghetto. Works by Oliver Knussen, Anton Webern and Julian Anderson are performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

* August 30, 7.30pm - a rare opportunity to hear Artur Honegger's excellent 1946 Symphony No. 3 Symphonie liturgie played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony under Mariss Jansons . Herbert von Karajan's recorded legacy has dated somewhat, but his recording of this symphony is definitive. (Lovely Lauterwasser cover photo as well).

* August 31, 7.30pm - shout it from the rooftops - the world premiere of Thea Musgrave's Two's Company, a BBC commission. I wrote about Thea Musgrave's concerto for orchestra, Helios, a few weeks ago when I played the NMC recording of it on my Overgrown Path radio programme. The soloists for this premiere are oboist Nicholas Daniel, who also plays on the NMC recording of Helios, and Evelyn Glennie. For this Prom we have a rare sighting of chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek on the podium with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, obviously finding out where the Albert Hall is before presiding over the Last Night on Saturday. Great to see a big dose of new music, but the BBC really does have a blockage about women composers at the Proms. At the time of writing Thea Musgrave's name is completely missing from the BBC's online listing of composers with performances at the 2007 Proms.

* September 4, 7.30pm - the Vienna Philharmonic and Daniel Barenboim serve up Ligeti in a digestible portion (Atmosphères - 9 mins), and a rather bigger serving of Bartók (Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta - 30 mins). No minimalist composers, but a distinctly minimalist programme - 30 minutes of music in the first half and 38 minutes in the second with top price tickets at £45. Did I hear anyone mention attracting new audiences?

* September 7, 7.30pm - is it a coincidence that this concert by the Boston Symphony and James Levine also contains exactly nine minutes of contemporary music in the form of Elliott Carter's Three Illusions for Orchestra? Or is nine minutes the maximum permissible duration for contemporary music before it is shunted off to the late-night graveyard slot? Safer Brahms and Bartók provide the other 86 minutes.

* September 8, 7.30pm - tokenism reaches its logical conclusion with just one contemporary work in this concert - a three minute excerpt from Thomas Adès' The Storm. Not enough to mar the whitewashing of the history of music.

Now read more about music history rewritten.
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You can't get more inclusive than that

Some very interesting reactions to my post on the Conlon Nancarrow (above) anniversary, including emails about Nancarrow interpretations, and a nice link from Sequenza21 where there was some useful discussion on György Ligeti's assessment of Nancarrow.

So a heads-up for pianist Joanna MacGregor. Her 2001 CD Play includes Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 11 in a multi-track recording by her (the score is for eight hands!), as well as Etudes, Book 1 No. 6 ("Automne à Varsovie") by Nancarrow champion György Ligeti, and music by William Byrd, Howard Skempton, John Dowland, John Cage, Charles Ives, J.S. Bach and others. You can't get more inclusive than that.

And yes, I'm all in favour of early music on the piano, as well as the harpsichord, and greatly enjoy Alexandre Tharaud's Rameau and Angela Hewitt's Bach. Then, of course, there is Byrd on the piano in what Glenn Gould described as 'the best damn record we've ever made'.

Image credit Minnesota Public Radio, which also has a nice audio download on Conlon Nancarrow. 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Best music of any late-20th century composer?

Conlon Nancarrow (above) died on August 10 1997. György Ligeti rated him as the most important composer of the second half of the twentieth century, saying: "For me it's the best music of any living composer today".

Personally I have found the new MDG Scene releases of Nancarrow's Player Piano Studies recorded on a Bösendorfer Grand with a 1927 Ampico Player Piano Mechanism very rewarding, and my header photo from 1950 is taken from volume 1 of that excellent series. There is an fine biography of Nancarrow by Jürgen Hocker, but it is, alas, only available in German. The extraordinary jazz-like music of Conlon Nancarrow will be familiar to many of my readers. But if you don't know it there is a real discovery awaiting. Follow these two paths to Kyle Gann's Nancarrow web resources and book, and then watch a video by Tal Rosner. This uses Nancarrow's music arranged for two pianos by Thomas Adès, who is video artist Tal Rosner's partner .

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Osvaldo Golijov's cover job

Big thank you to Serenade in Green for noticing that György Ligeti was not the only contemporary composer influenced by Bill Evans. Now see some more gorgeous, and original, album covers here.
Undercurrents by Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall was first released on a Blue Note LP in 1963. Osvaldo Golijov's Oceana was released by Deutsche Grammophon in July 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Who said that? - the answer is ....

As we finished, he suddenly said: "I hope these new harmonies will work, but I'm not sure. We will see. You know, I have no confidence in myself ..." When I protested that this was impossible, he gently responded: "But I don't. I know I should, but I don't. I'm basically doing all I do in the most amateur way, just trying to realise something that I imagine in my ear, in dreams. I use techniques, of course, but I forget them after writing and I have no overall scheme or permanent procedures. People of my generation truly believed that music could be explained and structured in a pseudo-mathematical way, but I never believed that."

And the answer is ......

A number of readers emailed in the right answer, and they were split pretty well equally between those that recognised the composer behind the quote, and those that pasted the quote into Google. The prize of a virtual bottle of champagne goes to the Frankfurt-based Californian composer Daniel Wolf who blogs on the esteemed Renewable Music for this answer:

Hello -- the mystery quote is definitely from Ligeti. The subject matter is his late concern with harmony based on mixed spectra and the false modesty and over-polite slight on his contemporaries is typical Ligeti. A great composer, but one who should have never given interviews!

But he did give interviews, now read about György Ligeti's Private Passions
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Now this is what I call a concert

Riot - Can Music Change the World?
9 Feb 2007 7:00 pm LSO St Luke's

Peter Edwards: Wayfaring Stranger
Paul Fretwell: New work
Sergio Ortega: Lonquen
Damien Harron: Events Unfold
Claudia Molitor: Leek
György Ligeti: Sippal, Dobbal, Nadihegeduvel
Rolf Hind: Follow the Leader
Frederic Rzewski: Coming Together

BackBeat percussion quartet
Loré Lixenberg mezzo-soprano
Julia Bardsley designer
The event concludes with a discussion about the music in the event and a look at riot as protest and celebration. And if you can't make it to LSO St Luke's BBC Radio 3 are broadcasting this outstanding example of forward looking programming on Saturday 7th April, 10.00pm BST. Well done the BBC for having the vision to broadcast it .

Now this is a 3' 21" download of the music of protest and celebration, but please note the date of the post.
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Ligeti's Etudes fit the Bill

Milestone Record’s extraordinary 8 CD set ‘Bill Evans Trio the last waltz’ was recorded on eight successive evenings at Keystone Korner in North Beach, San Francisco in September 1980. Just thirty-two different compositions are featured in the nine hours of music, and nine of those are Bill Evans (right) originals.

This is literally music making on the brink. Miles Davis’ Nardis makes five obsessive appearances. Several of these include epic piano solos, and the longest Nardis cut lasts for seven seconds short of twenty minutes. Evans knew he was on the edge, and he wanted to leave his definitive version of Nardis before he went over.

The final Keystone session was on September 8th 1980. Seven days later Evans was dead from the effects of cocaine dependency.

It is a mark of the importance of Bill Evans that Gyorgy Ligeti cited him as one of the influences on his seminal Etudes for solo piano. The other eclectic influences credited by Ligeti are traditional African music, the player-piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow, and the jazz piano writing of Thelonious Monk.

The classical connection comes as no surprise. Recalling his childhood in New Jersey Evans said: “I can remember, for instance, the 78 album of Petruschka which I got early on in high school as a Christmas present – a requested Christmas present. And just about wearing it out, learning it. That was the kind of music that at that time I hadn’t been exposed to, and it was just a tremendous experience to get into that piece. I remember first hearing some of Milhaud’s polytonality and actually a piece that he may not think too much of – it was an early piece called Suite Provençale – which opened me up to certain things.”

Evans went on to a musical scholarship at Southeastern Louisiana College fifty miles outside New Orleans. His studies there included sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven, and works by Debussy, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Ravel Gershwin (the Piano Concerto in F), Milhaud, Khachaturian and Villa-Lobos. His senior recital included a group of Dmitry Kabalevsky’s recently published Preludes. Literature was another passion. He was something of an authority on Thomas Hardy, and his heroes included the visionary18th century artist and poet William Blake.

Bill Evans carried heavy emotional baggage through his 51 years. He played on Miles Davies’ iconoclastic Kind of Blue, and then pretty well defined the jazz trio format. Without a doubt his two greatest trio recordings are Waltz for Debby and Sunday at the Village Vanguard, both recorded live in one day in June 1961 at Seventh Avenue South, New York. These are two of the greatest jazz CD’s ever. No, they are two of the greatest CD’s ever. The trio plays as a totally integrated unit underpinned by the masterly bass playing of Scott LaFaro. Ten days after the recording LaFaro was dead, killed in an automobile smash.

If you don’t know the two Village Vanguard recordings I urge you to buy them. Forget about the fact that this is jazz. This is intimate chamber music making that is up there with the greatest trios like the Beaux Arts and Florestan. These are two recording classics, and they should be in everyone’s collection.

Following LeFaro’s tragically early death Evans spent years trying to put another dream trio together. In those years he produced some fine music, but never attained the heights of his work with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. The solo recordings from this period are worth exploring, including his pioneering work with over-dubbing.

During the 1970’s Bill Evans creative flame burnt less brightly. Many recordings from these years seem to be no more than re-workings of his own compositions and standards. But towards the end of the 70’s a renewed energy and drive emerged, fuelled by working with the younger bass and drums team of Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera.

Those final Keystone sessions revitalise Bill Evans classics like Letter to Evan, Turn Out the Stars, and Waltz for Debby. But that is where we joined this overgrown path…..

Bill Evans would have been seventy-six on August 16th.

..................................................................................

Bill Evans' recorded legacy is considerable. The Fantasy catalogue is the best starting point for exploration. The written literature is also comprehensive. Peter Pettinger's 'Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings" is the definitive biography. Keith Shadwick's "Bill Evans, Everything Happens To Me - a musical biography" is more sumptuously produced, but is less scholarly in its approach.

For further exploration of jazz piano as a musical form Robert L. Doerschuk's 'The Giants of Jazz Piano' and Len Lyons' 'The Great Jazz Pianists' are a good starting point.

If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Improvisation