On An Overgrown Path

Given the desperate need to find common ground between the Christian and Islamicate worlds it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to the influence of Persian literature on 19th century Romanticism, an influence which left its mark on many of the great minds of the West. The bridge between the two cultures was built by the German poet, translator, and professor of Oriental languages Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) who translated into German the poetry of Rumi (who he described as "a great Sufi"), Sa'di , Jami and Hāfez. It was Goethe's admiration for the gazals (lyric poems) of Hāfez in translation that inspired his West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan) which was published in 1819 and from which Daniel Barenboim's band takes its name. Little is known about Hāfez. He lived all his life (1320-1389, which is contemporaneous with Chaucer) in the Persian city of Shiraz. He was a Sufi master, philosopher, mystic of Islam and spiritual rebel who w...

News coverage of the humanitarian tragedy in Syria has meant Abed Azrié's setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh has been on my playlist. Composer, singer and 'man of liberty' Abed Azrié left Syria for France in 1970 because he was unable "to work in the Arab countries in which the way people live is still conditioned by halal and haram " and today considers his country not as Syria but the Arabic language. The Epic of Gilgamesh originates from ancient Mesopotamia and is among the earliest known works of literature. It is the precursor of the great epic tradition that includes the Mahabharata and Nibelungenlied and is notable for its proto-environmentalist and feminist themes. The influence of the Epic of Gilgamesh has been identified in the work of figures ranging from psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung , poets Rainer Maria Rilke , Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky to novelists John Gardner and Philip Roth , and the plot of an episode of Star Trek is also indebte...

Arabic is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world and is the last surviving semitic language descending from the Aramaic spoken at the time of Christ. As an Arab proverb says: 'Wisdom reveals herself in the dialectic of the Greeks, the craftsmanship of the Chinese, and the language of the Arab.' All of which makes the music media's neglect of a setting in Arabic of one of the treasures of Christendom, the Gospel of John, disappointing but predictable. And the disappointment becomes greater when the setting is revealed as by a composer whose influence has been acknowledged by none other than John Adams. Syrian born composer Abed Azrié uses his own translation for his L'Évangile selon Jean (The Gospel of John). Abed Azrié has lived in Paris for more than thirty years and has released a succession of successful albums setting traditional and modern Arab texts to an updated style of Arab classical music that mixes ethnic instruments with synthesizers. His 1991 ...

Is is a sign of the times that American sound designer Mark Grey is billed above Willard White and the other El Niño soloists in the Edinburgh Festival 2010 brochure seen above? Mark Grey, who is entrusted with producing the sound for John Adams' oratorio, is a man of many talents . He is also a composer and his Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio was released in March 2009 on Naxos . Could this be the same label about whose recordings a leading American composer said in February 2009? They're poorly produced. In some cases, the performances are OK, and in some cases the performances are disgraceful. It's like going to Costco and buying toilet paper with no brand on it. Meanwhile back in Edinburgh the Festival brochure has the Philadelphia Enquirer describing El Niño as a "major mastepiece". Is a "minor masterpieces" one that is not quite Harmonium? No CDs or concert tickets changed hands in connection with this post; nor are any likely to. I have not ...

Avoiding what Wilhelm Furtwängler decried as 'the hoar frost of musical routine' has become something of a personal preoccupation. After Bach, Golijov, Piazzolla and Vivaldi from the Britten Sinfonia in Norwich on Sunday we travelled to London on Monday for a rare opportunity to hear an evening of Gavin Bryars' music in the architecturally and acoustically exquisite late 19th century Union Chapel in Islington . Monday's concert was part of the Marginalised festival to raise funds for the Margins Project which works with London’s homeless. The centrepiece of Monday's event was the first London performance for fifteen years of Gavin Bryars' influential 1971 Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet for tape loop and instrumental ensemble. Bryars' understated minimalism and innovative tonality have been constants on the contemporary music scene since the late 1960s. He studied briefly with John Cage after reading philosophy and music at university, and was a ...

Just as Decca is known as the label that lost the Beatles , ECM could have been known as the label that lost John Adams. But, other than triggering Adams' defection to Nonesuch , Manfred Eicher's decision not to travel to San Francisco for ECM's pioneering 1984 recording of Harmonium seems to have done his fiercely independent label very little harm. While other record companies are cutting staff , orchestras are cutting pay , and radio stations are cutting quality , ECM remains in rude health; despite not a single appearance of the highly fashionable word download on its website , and despite not a single appearance by a young female (or male) violinst clad in a wet T-shirt on its sleeve artwork. While others flounder ECM sticks to the knitting, and this autumn the label celebrates its 40th birthday with a range of releases that stand head and shoulders above the musical equivalent of airport fiction that is now the bread and butter of the corporate classical labels. Kei...

Judging by the emails offering free CDs, the major classical labels have finally realised that people buy music after reading about it here and on other leading music blogs . Elsewhere BBC Radio 3 famously offer bloggers a little bit on the side from their inexhaustible expenses account to write about their programmes, while others have received this message from Amazon: 'As a top reviewer, we would like to invite you to join Amazon Vine. Open to a limited number of customers, Vine members receive pre-release and new products--free of charge--in exchange for customer reviews'. I do not have a problem with free CDs, books or concert tickets per se and they sometimes feature here , although I do have a problem with the BBC's barely coded offer of accomodation and travel "in return for support". But would I be writing about Letting Go of the Glitz - the true story of one woman's struggle to live the simple life in Chelsea if Amazon Vine had not offered me a ...

Ravi Shankar (above) was 89 on April 7. As well as being the leading exponent of the sitar Shankar has a long history of collaborations with Western musicians. His project with Philip Glass, Passages , featured here recently . He worked extensively with George Harrison, and it is quite scandalous that their Chants of India CD is no longer available. Shankar covered new ground with his duets with Yehudi Menuhin, and in 1971 recorded his First Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra with André Previn . A double CD of the Concerto and some Menuhin duets coupled with traditional ragas is a current EMI bargain and is also available as a download . Shankar's Third Sitar Concerto was premiered by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the composer's daughter Anoushka in January 2009 . Ravi Shankar's creative progress from raga through rock to concerto reaches its logical (if, some would claim, moribund) conclusion in his ninetieth birthday year with the world premiere of his new Sympho...

I wonder if John Adams reads the Guardian ? In today's edition Andrew Clements reviews two new recordings of Ravel's sublime L'Enfant et les sortilèges. One is from the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle on EMI , the other from the Nashville Symphony under Alastair Willis on Naxos . The preferred version is the one from Naxos. How frustrating . Header image is sampled from the Previn/LSO L'Enfant et les sortilèges , on Deutsche Grammophon, which is also very good. 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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Jocelyn Pook’s Oppenheimer mixes Robert Oppenheimer invoking the Bhagavad Gita with a recording of the liturgy of the Yemenite Jews and the text of the Catholic requiem mass, all underpinned with violin, viola and and keyboards. The seven minute long Oppenheimer is one of the sections in Flood; this Jocelyn Pook composition dates back to a 1994 commission from the Canadian dance company O Vertigo , but was revised when two sections were used in the composer's score for Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut . John Adams' Doctor Atomic followed in 2005, there is no known connection between the two very different works. Myths and fears about the end of the world provide the narrative for Flood , which draws on Hindu, Christian, Jewish and Islamic sources. This truly universal music now has a terrible relevance which could never have been anticipated when Jocelyn Pook composed it in the mid 1990s. Find audio and video samples, including Oppenheimer , here. Flood is ava...

Is Naxos product mediocre? 84% of the Overgrown Path readers who voted in the recent poll (and the response was the biggest ever) said no . Which will come as no surprise to anyone other than John Adams . Talking of which, above is the first recording of John Adams' music that I ever bought. It is the 1984 ECM recording of Harmonium made by Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Yes, that is a vinyl LP, strange how things go full circle . The credits for that ECM LP tell an interesting story. The recording was made in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco. John Newton was the engineer, and mixing and editing is credited to Martin Wieland, Manfred Eicher and John Adams at the Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg . ECM founder Manfred Eicher did not travel from Germany to San Francisco for the sessions, a decision that was not taken well by the ambitious young composer. This precipitated John Adams' move to the American Nonesuch label, where he remains twenty-...

Alsop’s interpretations and her Bournemouth orchestra’s playing are every bit the equal of those on the continuing Nonesuch series of recordings - review by Matthew Rye , The Telegraph, November 20, 2004 Mediocre? Give your view in the poll on the right-hand sidebar. Feb 16 - poll results here It's a question of balance . Marin Alsop photo credit Baltimore Symphony Orchestra . 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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Feb 5 2009 - From Newsweek interview with John Adams - 'Yeah, (Naxos) do [all right], but their product is so mediocre' . Feb 8 2009 - From list of 51st Grammy Award winners via Associated Press ... Chamber Music Performance: Carter, Elliott: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5, Pacifica Quartet (Naxos). Do you agree with John Adams? Give your view in the poll at the top of the side-bar. Feb 16 - poll results here More on that Grammy winner here . My Father Knew Charles Ives is a work by John Adams; listen to a sample 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 problems to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Newsweek - The budget-label Naxos label seems to be doing well. John Adams - Yeah, they do [all right], but their product is so mediocre. They must have made … seven or eight CDs of my work. They're poorly produced. In some cases, the performances are OK, and in some cases the performances are disgraceful. It's like going to Costco and buying toilet paper with no brand on it. Foot in mouth quote from Newsweek's interview with John Adams . My personal view is that, like Woody Allen , John Adams did his best work early in his career. I also find the mutual admiration society Adams cultivates around himself a hindrance, rather than a help, to appreciating his later work. But I respect those who view him differently. However, the composer's habit of using the media friendly sound bite to further his own agenda does no favours to his music or its many admirers . Update Feb 9 - More on this story here . Do you agree with John Adams? Give your view in the poll at the top ...

This 1967 LP from my collection draws together several current paths . The conductor is Antal Dorati, and we mark the twentieth anniversary of his death on November 13. The orchestra is the London Symphony, which reminds us of the recent contribution by a reader lamenting the decline of that orchestra under the leadership of Valery Gergiev . And the main work on the LP is Darius Mihaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit , an early example of jazz meeting classical . Milhaud's score dates from 1919 and was used to accompany a farce created by Jean Cocteau and set in an American bar during Prohibition. Today, Milhaud's ranking as a minor composer belies his influence; his students included Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich and Philip Glass . The jazz meets classical path was started by Radka Toneff's exquisite album Fairytales . This 1982 classic of the gramophone features just two musicians, Radka Toneff and pianist Steve Dobrogosz . The latter also composed two of the songs, i...

Oh please! Will someone explain to John Adams what being blacklisted really means . Photo shows John Adams receiving the 2007 Harvard Arts Medal for his 'contribution to public good through the arts' from the university's president elect Drew Faust. 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

Oh, the sheer elegance of synchronicity! Two recent posts here touched on musicians as literary figures and John Adams' views on Britten's settings of English texts . The next book after Hallelujah Junction in the pile collected last week from the estimable Norfolk Library Service was Between Each Breath by Adam Thorpe . I had been greatly impressed by Thorpe's latest novel , but knew little about Between Each Breath . I picked it up today and read these words in the Acknowledgements : With many thanks to John Woolrich and Jonathan Reekie of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, where I was writer-in-residence in 2004, and where the germ of this novel was first sown. And these on the dust-jacket blurb: Once 'England's most promising young composer' - now living comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress - Jack Middleton is no longer so young, nor has he fulfilled his remarkable promise. Between Each Breath is a rich and often hilariou...

'I am astonished at how rarely the union of music and text succeeds in English-language opera. People invariably point to Benjamin Britten as the gold standard of setting texts in English. But to my (admittedly American) ear, his vocal settings can produce a sensation uncomfortably stilted and oddly archaic. They may satisfy the needs of the English dramatic sensibility, but they are not a comfortable fit for an American ear brought up on everything from George Gershwin and W. C. Handy to Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder' - from John Adams' Hallelujah Junction , which is, quite appropriately, sub-titled Composing an American Life . Photo shows Benjamin Britten in upstate New York, 1939 with Aaron Copland and Peter Pears. Another Britten gem here. Copy of Hallelujah Junction borrowed from Norfolk Library Services . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be ...

I see from the autumn publishing schedules that Paul Griffiths has a new novella being published titled Let Me Tell You . It is written in the Oulipo tradition of constrained writing, and uses only the vocabulary allotted to Ophelia in Hamlet . I know that Paul is not a composer, but he is, among other things, an authority on Stockhausen , scholar of Messiaen and librettist for Tan Dun . So, in the style of my composer as painter thread , it started me thinking about composers as authors of literary works, as opposed to music theory books and memoirs. Here for starters are two composers as authors. The most obvious one is in the photo above. Paul Bowles studied with Aaron Copland, composed a considerable amount of music most of which was for the theatre, and wrote five very successful novels and a number of short stories. My second composer as author is slightly more arcane. The Minimal Piano Collection which was featured here last year includes on CD 4, among contributions from ...