On An Overgrown Path

Confirmation that geniuses are more often not very good human beings is provided in a highly recommended new book by Matthieu Ricard. Born in France in 1946, Matthieu Ricard's parents were the French philosopher and journalist Jean-François Revel  (1924-2006) and the abstract painter and Tibetan Buddhist nun Yahne Le Toumelin  (1923-2023).  As he describes in his memoir Notebooks of a Wandering Monk Ricard grew up in the company of leading French intellectuals. He received a PhD degree in molecular genetics from the Pasteur Institute in 1972, but then abandoned his scientific career to practice Tibetan Buddhism, living mainly in the Himalayas. He is celebrated for his global advocacy of Buddhism as a science of the mind; all his income from books, photographs and conferences is donated to the humanitarian projects run by the Karuna-Sechel Association which he cofounded twenty-two years ago to alleviate the suffering of the most destitute in India, Nepal and Tibet. T...

A concerto for basset clarinet, orchestra and optional electronics inspired by the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali with four movements titled Breath of Life, Meditation, Mind Concentration and Intense Spiritual Union. And it gets worse or better depending on your point of view: the soloist and orchestra intone mantras, and in conclusion the brass and string sections chant the mantra of the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara Om mani padme hum . Is it classical music or is it New Age nonsense? The concerto is the sadly departed Wim Henderickx's  Sutra which was co-commissioned for the soloist Annelien Van Wauwe by BBC Radio 3 and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust . Annelien Van Wauwe was a major influence on the concerto's composition. She is a qualified yoga teacher who explains that “I feel many similarities between actually doing yoga, getting really focused and concentrated on the breath, and then being on stage as a woodwind soloist. It’s almost the same thing. A...

During my time at EMI commissioning power was split between the central International Classical Division - where I worked - and local operating companies. The International Classical Division  (ICD) controlled the big budgets needed for the international stars such as Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, André Previn and Riccardo Muti. While the local companies had smaller budgets for recording projects with local musicians: for instance EMI UK commissioned Sir Adrian Boult's recordings from their local budget. The ICD had to propose a major recording projects to the local operating companies around the world who would give their sales estimate. Only if the global sales forecasts recovered the cost of the proposed project would it be green-lighted.  This democratic but flawed A & R approval process was originally put in place by EMI's senior management to curb Walter Legge's penchant for recording music he was passionate about but which the record buying pu...

Bernard Haitink's 2016 recording of Mahler's Third Symphony is arguably the greatest interpretation of that towering work committed to record. It is also one of the last testaments from a conductor who together with Georg Solti, Herbert von Karajan, Sir Adrian Boult, Colin Davis and others defined a golden age of classical music. In response to my post ' Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares ' reader David has posted a comment that starts by asking "...have all the really great performances, recordings indeed all the greatest musicians come and gone?" He then goes on to observe that  "I haven't heard anything in the last twenty or more years that compares with previous generations". The classical industry has spent much time agonising over its failed attempts to reach a new audience. But an even bigger problem has received little attention. Not only is the new young audience remaining elusive, but the older lon...

Timothy Leary was reputedly branded 'the most dangerous man in America' by Richard Nixon, although that attribution now seems apocryphal . Many will consider LSD guru Leary a fruitcake; but, like many brilliant mavericks, he provided much food for thought. During his time as a clinical psychologist at Harvard Leary proposed that behavourial change was not triggered by extended exposure to subliminal influences such as therapy, but to a single revelatory experience which he termed the 'vitalizing transaction'. It was the search for a consciousness-raising vitalizing transaction that led to Leary's love affair with LSD.  Past Overgrown Path posts have explained how my 50 year passion for classical music  was sparked by vitalizing transactions. These included 1950s performances by the  Bournemouth Symphony of the Pathetique and of  Holst's Planets  by a local amateur orchestra ,  Emerson, Lake and Palmer's heretical take on Pictures At An Exhibition , an...

Classical music is an infinite multi-dimensional labyrinth. The accompanying photos taken from Overgrown Path posts show just three examples of that labyrinth. Seen above are players from L'Orchestre Philharmonique du Maroc performing al fresco in the medina at Essaouira, Morocco as part of the town's 2016 Printemps Musical Des Alizés festival. My second photo shows members of the Britten Sinfonia using classical music to bring positive change to the lives of young people at Larkman Primary School in Norfolk. While in the third photo, senior Tibetan Buddhist monk Kenrap-la is introduced to Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala for the first time, listening via my iPod as we approach his monastery at Thiksay in the disputed Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir in 2014.  Sub-atomic physics tells us that all phenomena consist of multi-dimensional energy waves that defy our conventional understanding of space and time. At the heart of quantum theory are the concepts of non-local...

Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc receives the unequivocal support of the classical music industry in the form of advertising, exclusive news and interviews, advertorial partnerships, and complimentary concert tickets and CDs. Yet  Slipped Disc  repeatedly publishes unmoderated misinformation about Covid vaccines - see just two examples above and below. Therefore the classical music industry is supporting potentially deadly anti-vax misinformation. (Follow this link for more on Dr. Luc Montagnier's alleged warning.) It pains me to hold Facebook up as an exemplar. But even that tainted social network banned misinformation about vaccines months ago: as the Guardian reported in February , Facebook "will remove posts with false claims and groups with repeated violations will be shut down". This is not about free speech. It is, like libel laws, about stopping irreversible damage by misinformation .  Slipped Disc , supported by the classical industry, regularly demonise...

That photo shows Herbert von Karajan with the composer Carl Orff. In 1973 Karajan recorded Orff's musical play De temporum fine comoedia (A Play on the End of Time). If that recording was reissued today it would be difficult to imagine any critic appraising it objectively, due to the preconceptions and prejudices associated with not only the composer but also the conductor . Which raises the important question of what exactly should critics judge? Recently one of our bright young critical things dismissed the late compositions of a number of prominent 20th century British composers in less than 280 characters. The same critic is equally dismissive of J S Bach ; but let's leave aside the question as to why, with such superior knowledge, he is not composing the great 21st century symphony instead of posting selfies on Twitter*. Our time is better spent drilling down into how, in recent years, classical reviews have moved away from their raison d'être of analysing...

Due to the appalling COVID-19 pandemic live classical music in concert halls is certain to be seriously curtailed for some months. Which puts the focus for most people on home listening to recorded classical music. For a very long time the great and good of the classical world have been fixated on the acoustic excellence, or otherwise , of concert halls. So it is now time to shift that fixation on sound quality to home listening. Because in classical music sound is what matters most , whether in the concert hall or in the domestic environment . There has recently been discussion about headphone listening on a social media account frequented by the classical alt-right. The general view expressed was that headphones are like laxatives, only to be used as a last resort. Thankfully I am neither critic nor classical influencer. But in my seven decades on this planet I have been privileged to work for the BBC and a major classical label , and to have heard many of the world's g...

Sri Nisargadatta 's teachings retain remarkable relevancy. Particularly this one, with its pertinent ambiguity: The real world is beyond our thoughts and ideas; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. In 1967 George Harrison accepted a commission to compose the music for Joe Massot's movie Wonderwall . It was the first album on the Apple label and was released three weeks before the Beatles White Album in November 1968. But it is puzzlingly forgotten despite being an early and important essay in what eventually became World Music. George Harrison used the commission to produce a mini-anthology of Indian music, because, to quote him, "I wanted to help turn the public on to Indian music". In his sleeve essay he pays tribute to the then chairman of the Gramophone Company of India Bhaska...

Over the years On An Overgrown Path has argued the case for classical music embracing the visual as well as the auditory, with one post arguing with tongue only half in cheek that sleeve artwork changes the sound of CDs . Classical music's de facto spokesperson Norman Lebrect has turned textual click bait into an Olympic sport . Yet Slipped Disc , which is supported by all the major classical labels and is acknowledged as the state-of-the-art classical website, has decidedly amateurish graphics - see typical example below. As the information age morphs into the experience age , visual cues are playing an increasingly important role in the overall experience. To quote an authoritative source : The human brain can process images seen in just 13 milliseconds... Given that most information transmitted to our brain is visual, and the brain processes images faster than text, it is crucial that websites, blogs, and social media posts, use effective visuals, images, and graphics, ...

Anybody who has been around the classical music industry for some time will be struck by the remarkable similarity between the portrait of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla on the cover of her first release for Deutsche Grammophon and Siegfried Lauterwasser 's brooding photo of Herbert von Karajan used on Deutsche Grammophon's 1979 vinyl release of the Beethoven Symphonies seen below. I tread on very dangerous ground here as expressing anything other than effusive praise for Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla simply prompts the usual social media tongue lashing . So let me make it clear right now that this release of symphonies  by the neglected Mieczysław Weinberg is very laudable . Moreover, let me also make it clear that there has never been a single artistic or personal criticism of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla on this blog. But what I have expressed several times are reservations about the way that classical music's next big things are marketed . That Beethoven cycle by Karajan was released f...

As classical music continues its increasingly frantic search for a new and larger audience it is worth revisiting the success of the K-Tel label's Classic Rock albums in the 1970s and 80s. The simple formula of a world class orchestra - the London Symphony - playing skillfully crafted arrangements of rock albums could not fail; to sample the flavour of Classic Rock watch the retro TV commercial via this link . The first album in the series was released in 1978 and included arrangements of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, A Whiter Shade of Pale, and Bohemian Rhapsody. It reached number 3 in the album chart - no specialist music charts in those days - and remained in the best seller lists for a remarkable 39 weeks, achieving platinum disc status. Classic Rock may not have been to the purists' tastes, but the project cleverly combined integrity with commercial flair: the first album was recorded at EMI's iconic Abbey Road studio and the organist on A Whiter Shade of Pale w...

Recently Deutsche Grammophon, home of Herbert von Karajan and other renown shamans of sound , announced the launch of DG Playlists in conjunction with Apple Music. Many will have sympathy with the reader's comment on Slipped Disc of "and so the slow death of a label without artistic vision continues". But that comment misses the crucial point that, whether we like it or not, the inescapable popularity of playlists is having as much impact on classical music as the digital piracy that decimated the record industry at the turn of the century. Because playlists are changing the way people listen; as a Forbes article explained : "In this new era of streaming dominance, playlists have taken on an importance never before seen in the music industry". This hegemony of streaming and playlists raises important and uncomfortable questions as to what 'audience' and 'listen' mean in this digital age. 'Listening' has traditionally meant auditionin...

Current demands for a new London concert hall with 'state of the art' sound need to be put into perspective. One critic recently tweeted "Harder and harder to tolerate the acoustic at the Barbican. Did anyone hear the B[avarian] R[adio] S[ymphony O[rchestra] cellos tonight? 'Cos I didn't." Yes, the three main London concert venues, the Barbican, Festival and Albert Halls suffer from compromised sound . But how compromised is that sound in orders of magnitude? To help answer that question I am proposing a model comparing concert hall and hi-fi sound. This comparison has validity both because recorded sound is now the dominant way music is consumed , and because the critics demonising the sound of London concert halls also review recorded music using hi-fi systems. Stereophile magazine under the inspired editorship of John Atkinson has for decades provided an objective guide to recorded sound quality. Stereophile publishes an annual listing of the top 50...