Goodbye conductor - hallo composer

Overgrown Path's web logs over the past few days showed little uplift in traffic to my wide range of Herbert von Karajan articles. Most of the increase that happened came either from searches for the conductor's political and sexual predilections or from Japan, which has always had a special love affair with him. This analysis was mirrored in the mainstream media where, despite strong promotion from Deutsche Grammophon and EMI and some unashamed puffery from Simon Rattle, there was little interest in the Karajan anniversary other than tabloid-style trash from Norman Lebrecht and Ivan Hewett. The music industry loves an anniversary and two years ago we celebrated Shostakovich to death. So why did Herbert's birthday party fall so flat?

Many will say it was because of Karajan, but I disagree. Love him or hate him Karajan was a very high profile conductor who has never struggled in the past for column inches. Nobody came to the party this week-end because our love affair with the conductor is finished. The twentieth-century was the age of the maestro, and the big industry names held a baton - Walter, Toscanini, Furtwängler , Karajan, Boult, Beecham, Barbirolli, Klemperer and others. But as the millenium approached new names emerged, and they were holding a pen instead of a stick. The three 'Bs' of Britten, Bernstein and Boulez were on the cusp, and they have been followed by Stockhausen, Reich, Adams (header photo), Maxwell Davies, Adès and many more. Crucially, a number of these composers are, or were, fine conductors not just of their own music but also of composers as far back as Bach.


As we say goodbye conductor and hello composer major festivals such as the 1938 London Music Festival built around Toscanini (programme above) and the Salzburg Easter Festival created as a vehicle for Karajan have become things of the past. Their replacements are events like the South Bank Centre's Messiaen celebration (poster below), and try finding the conductors (one of who is Pierre Boulez) on that poster.

None of this means conductors will disappear. Orchestras need them just like they need concert masters. But how many readers can name the concert master of the Los Angeles Philharmonic? The celebrity conductor is a dying breed and it is interesting to speculate what that means. The record companies (again) stand to lose most as they depend on personalities to sell CDs. It is almost impossible to get composer/conductors such as Thomas Adès to work the press. Which explains the increasingly shrill attempts to promote increasingly young conductors who are only too willing to co-operate in photo opportunities. When they finally read the writing on the wall (which will probably take as long as it did for them to realise the impact of MP3s) will we see labels signing exclusive deals with composers instead of conductors? And before anyone tells me that contemporary composers don't sell I'd remind them that Naxos' second best selling album in 2007 was Philip Glass' Symphony No. 4 (23,000 units) and the fourth best seller was John Adams' Piano Music (14,000 units). Remember that it took four years for Glenn Gould's 1955 of the Goldberg Variations to sell 40,000 units.

Will we see back catalogue exploitation of neglected conductor/composers of the past such as Antal Dorati? Will we see Thomas Adès recording Mozart concertos directing from the keyboard, and Peter Maxwell Davies recording Mahler and John Adams Beethoven from the podium? Will more composers follow the example of Philip Glass (Orange Mountain Music) and Peter Maxwell Davies (MaxOpus) and establish their own record labels? Your guess is as good as mine. But it is definitely goodbye conductor and hallo composer. Watch this space.


Read more about an artist extraordinaire here.
Toscanini programme from my personal collection and (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. 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

Variations on the Goldberg Variations

The big bonus of presenting programmes on internet radio is I get to play the music I want to play, not the music that a focus group tells me to play. On Monday afternoon we have a fun programme for New Year's Eve, and as part of it I'm playing a 15 minute sequence from a double CD that's a personal favourite, but that doesn't fit into any conventional programme format.

Jazz pianist Uri Caine's treatment of Bach's Goldberg Variations defies any categorisation and I'll be playing tracks varying from solo piano to full on jazz. It's all part of our Happy New Ear's programme which is on Future Radio from 1.00 to 4.00pm on Monday December 31st, the Goldberg sequence should be on air at around 2.00pm.

Uri Caine's take is just one of several variations on the Goldberg Variations in my CD collection. Least successful is Robin Holloway's 'recomposition' for two pianos titled Gilded Goldbergs on Hyperion, a double CD which takes a long time to add very little, while Jacques Loussier's jazz variations take less time to say little more.

Among my favourite variations on variations are two recordings of Dimitri Sitkovetsky's masterly transcription for strings. One is a limited edition CD recorded in the beautiful Romanesque cathedral in Vaison la Romaine by the Trio de Prague in 2002, while the other is the fine 1993 recording by the NES Chamber Orchestra on Nonesuch which is noteworthy for both its committed performance and the sleeve notes by John Adams. But Uri Caine is up there with the best, listen in at 2.00pm UK time on Monday December 30th if you can.

Read more about Dmitry Sitkovetsky and those John Adams sleeve notes here.
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Lots of fallout from Doctor Atomic Symphony

Length was also a problem in the brand new John Adams work. By default, this turned out to be the world premiere of the Doctor Atomic Symphony - the scheduled premiere in St Louis last March was postponed because the score had taken Adams longer than he anticipated.

But in creating a four-movement, 45-minute span by recomposing music from his 2005 opera, Adams seems to have trusted the original material too implicitly. Without the narrative and text to provide a spine, the result is all surface, lacking in rigour and any genuinely striking ideas, save for the trumpet solo that appears in the final section, which lingers in the mind through its sheer sentimentality.

It was no help to either of Adams's works that the playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra left such a dreary impression of routine. The whole concert, beginning with a drab account of the suite from Aaron Copland's ballet Billy the Kid, was of a programme left one rehearsal short of a top-quality result.

Andrew Clements reviews the BBC Proms premiere of the Doctor Atomic Symphony in today's Guardian. Sounds like the BBC Symphony Orchestra needs a decent rehearsal facility

Header image shows the first Atomic explosion, July 16, 1945, Trinity Site, New Mexico; July 1945. Photo credit Yellowstone National Park. 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

Doctor Atomic explodes as BBC Proms excel

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

* August 20, 7.30pm - Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face - Suite, London premiere, plus Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle in a complete performance. Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra
* August 21, 7.30pm - World premiere of John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony which is a BBC joint commission, plus his Century Rolls. The composer conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Olli Mustonen rolls in the opening work.
* August 22, 7.30pm - Mahler Symphony No. 3 with Claudio Abbado and Lucerne Festival Orchestra
* August 23, 7.30pm - Handel, Purcell and Telemann played by the combined Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, plus the divine Kate Royal.
* August 24, 7.00pm - my prediction for one of the Proms of the season, Bernard Haitink conducts Bruckner's Symphony No. 8. And how good it is to see Haitink back with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. One of my more bizarre Proms memories was in 1975, I think, hearing Zubin Mehta with the touring Los Angeles Philharmonic perform Brucker 8 at a Prom, and then immediately travelling to Amsterdam to hear Haitink conduct Bruckner 9 the following evening with the, then, Concertgebouw Orchestra in the ravishing acoustics of their own hall. Haitink followed the 'unfinished' Bruckner 9 with the composer's Te Deum, a practice which seems to have fallen out of favour. At around the same time I also attended Colin Davis' Ring Cycle at Covent Garden before being sidelined by a nasty attack of glandular fever. Oh to be young and foolish again.
* August 25, 6.30pm - my last choice from an outstanding week's Proms features Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra again. (I can't get used to typing that 'Royal'). Orchestral excerpts from Parsifal and Tristan will confirm that youth is not a time of life but a state of mind.

Nicholas Kenyon has, quite justifiably, taken a lot of stick here about this year's Proms season. No stick this week though. If I still lived in London I would be at every one of the concerts above. Now read the back story on Doctor Atomic.

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BBC Proms - dumbing down is contagious

Today's Observer seems determined to follow the BBC down the slippery slope to editorial oblivion. No less than two pages are devoted to a vacuous article whose title, 'From Iggy to Gigli: my journey to the Proms', says it all. Observer journalist Sean O'Hagan is given some free tickets to help puff the BBC Proms to the crossover audience, and reports: - At other times, though, I was totally baffled by what I was hearing. And some of it was simply was too much to take in, particularly, though it pains me to say it, the more modern stuff: Adams's Symphony No 4, and especially Sam Hayden's cacophonous Substratem.

If we ignore the misspelling of Sam Hayden's Substratum and a later incorrect reference to the "Soweto String Quartet", I am sure John Adams' would be surprised to learn that he has written four symphonies, and even more surprised to find one of them confused with Charles Ives Symphony No. 4, which was in fact performed in the July 17 Prom.

But as another journalist and BBC presenter, the inimitable Norman Lebrecht, recently wrote: - Esoteric as it may seem, the supposed fraud shows up the flaws of a classical blogosphere that trades in unchecked trivia. Classical blogs are spreading but their nutritional value is lower than a bag of crisps. Unlike financial blogs, which yield powerful and profitable secrets, classical web-chat is opinion-rich and info-poor. Until bloggers deliver hard facts and estate agents turn into credible critics, paid-for newspapers will continue to set the standard as only show in town.

Now read about a great journalist who wouldn't have made those kind of mistakes
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Essential minimal piano collection

June 2007 is rather early to be talking of CDs of the year, but it is going to take a lot to trump the treasure I have for you today. The Minimal Piano Collection is a survey of minimalist works for the solo piano. The breadth of the survey is shown by the composers represented - Philip Glass, John Adams, Simeon ten Holt, Arvo Pärt, Erik Satie, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, Michael Nyman, Jeroen van Veen, Wim Mertens, Tom Johnson, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Klaas de Vries, Carlos Micháns, Terry Riley and Friedrich Nietzsche - yes, you read that last name right. The joys are too numerous to list, but include John Adams' China Gates, Arvo Pärt's Variatonen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka, and a complete In C from Terry Riley, here is the complete track listing.

The pianist for this extraordinary 9 CD survey is the Dutchman Jeroen van Veen, who also contributes his own Minimal Preludes Books 1 and 2. The record label is the Dutch independent Brilliant Classics which has featured here several times before, including their 2 CD survey of John Cage's complete music for prepared piano.

If all that isn't enough good news, I paid just £21.99 for the 9 CD box in London last week. The recordings were all made in Barbara Church, Culemborg, in the Netherlands in October 2006, and the sound is excellent. The project is a tour de force for Jeroen van Veen, as well as appearing as pianist and composer he also engineered and produced the recordings himself through his own production company.

Not only is the Minimal Piano Collection essential in any CD collection, it is also one of the bargains of the decade.

For more minimalism try a different take on Terry Riley's In C.
Image credit - Plaster Surrogates 1982/84 by Allan McCollum. In the past I have recommended buying Brilliant Classics from Amazon reseller. That recommendation is now withdrawn, my last orders with them have been plagued by problems, and the customer support is non-existent. 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

The virtual disappearance of classical music

As France moves into Nicolas Sarkozy's new Presidency here is an exclusive report from Paris by Antoine Leboyer on the worrying changes at a historic music venue:

If we are to be offended by the appearance of West End star Michael Ball for one evening at the BBC Proms, what should we say about the virtual disappearance of classical music from Paris’ historic Le Châtelet? Built in the second half of the 19th century, Le Châtelet used to be a venue that presented all types of music, from operas, ballet, and operettas to classical music concerts. Mahler conducted there and the theatre hosted several seasons of the Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes.

Le Châtelet then focused on light music and operettas until the 1980s when the City of Paris administration ran it as a “competitor” to the Paris Opera. The theatre was run by Stéphane Lissner before he moved to the Aix Festival, the Wiener Festwochen and then La Scala, and by Jean-Pierre Brossman after his time at the Lyon Opera. Very quickly, thanks to these directors, Le Châtelet became internationally recognised as a place of excellence.


Long-lasting relations with ensembles, orchestras, conductors, directors and soloists were established. Le Châtelet was the place where John Eliot Gardiner came every year to perform Mozart, Gluck, Verdi, and he found ideal working conditions there for his complete Berlioz Troyens (header image). For this occasion, national TV even broadcast live a Sunday performance. Ensembles like the Philharmonia Orchestra held long residencies, and performed concerts while still having the time to rehearse operas. This allowed Christoph von Dohnányi to stage many ambitious Strauss works. The Peter Sellars – Kent Nagano team came to premiere works by John Adams (El Nino above) and Kaija Saariaho (L'Amour de loin below), and foreign opera houses including the Berlin Staatsoper under Barenboim and the Kirov under Gergiev stayed for long residencies.

More importantly for French audiences, Le Châtelet became a showcase for regional opera houses from Lyon, Toulouse and other cities to present their best works each year. The programmes had classical music at their core, but found space for other genres.

Everything from Baroque to wonderful Offenbach operettas was given equal prominence, and the team of Marc Minkowsi and Laurent Pelly did wonders for the "Mozart des Champs-Elysées" (which to the French means Offenbach - his La Grand-Duchesse de Gérolstein is below). Jazz and non-classical singers were also invited, and, between operas, the hall was used for recitals and orchestral concerts.

Many halls offer cheap seats but these are often are of poor quality. Le Châtelet offered a wide range of ticket prices, and although the affordable seats were high up they offered satisfactory sound and sight-lines. The theatre became the most egalitarian venue for classical music in Paris, attracting audiences of all ages and from all backgrounds that would not have came to the more elitist Salle Pleyel and Theatre des Champs-Elysées.

All of this has gone. Le Châtelet is now in the second year under a new director, Jean-Luc Choplin, who is repositioning the theatre as a venue for light entertainment. To everyone’s surprise, his main production last year was Francis Lopez’s musical the Singer of Mexico, an insipid outdated operetta. Core programmes (not counting the two seasons of “Sunday Morning concerts” and the “Piano 4 étoiles” series which are hosted by, but not run by, Le Châtelet) included some classical music with Renée Fleming in Thais, a new work from French composer Pascal Dusapin and a staged Bach Passion with Emmanuelle Haïm and Robert Wilson. Given the need to book artists long in advance, it is safe to assume that these performances were planned by Brossman before he left. Orchestral concerts and recitals were almost non-existent, and, for the first time, amplification was used for non-operatic productions.

Many regular patrons were surprised, and assumed that the programmes were due to the transition of management. Choplin however made some controversial statements which seemed to reflect his personal tastes, praising the patience of French audiences who had to contend with “Germanic-like directors, and productions overburdened with meaning”. (For the interview in French follow this link.)


The 2007-8 season leaves no doubt about the future. Le Châtelet will now major one musicals with West Side Story being performed no less than 50 times, and there will be a Zarzuela and popular works from China and Africa. It is no longer Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler being played at orchestral concerts, but film music from Lord of the Rings. A few singers such as Felicity Lott and Simon Keenlyside are listed next to crooners who made their careers in the 70s.

There are no real operas save, perhaps, a rarity by Roussel which looks more like a vehicle for Bollywood director Sanjay Bhansali. Maybe this reflects the new director’s vision for classical music, but, for Parisian audiences, Le Châtelet is becoming the temple of crossover and mass-market entertainment. For years, the theatre’s directors held an open conference to present the forthcoming season. In keeping with his management style Choplin has decided to stop this tradition.

There is nothing basically wrong with performing popular works, and there must be room for all tastes. Where Parisian concert-goers are taking issue however, is that the music Le Châtelet is focussing on is already being performed at many other venues in Paris, as well as on mainstream TV, whereas classical music is having to fight for its existence. Le Châtelet was the venue where audiences went to enjoy quality classical music like the production of Korngold's Die tote Stadt below. But sadly that is no longer the case.


Now read Antoine Leboyer on French orchestras
Production shots from Le Châtelet, most by M.N. Roberts who does such an excellent job of documenting the house's fine productions, in descending order are Berlioz Les Troyens, John Adams' El Nino, Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de loin, Offenbach's La Grand-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Schoenberg's Erwartung , and Erich Korngold's Die tote Stadt . 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

Peter Paul Fuchs - one path ends

Hello Pliable, No sooner than we speak of Weigl and a few of his students than I see this today:

In Wednesday’s (3/28/2007) Greensboro News & Record (NC), Dawn Decwikiel-Kane reports: “Peter Paul Fuchs, longtime conductor of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Greensboro Opera Company, died Monday night after a long illness. Fuchs, 90, died at Friends Home Guilford after a 17-year battle with Alzheimer's disease (follow this link for more on music and Alzheimer's - Pliable). The Vienna-born Fuchs brought his vast musical experience and pleasant temperament to the symphony and opera company from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. Their leaders praised him Tuesday for his role in sculpting both organizations. ‘His expertise and talents led the orchestra to achieve the professional status and artistic excellence it enjoys today,’ said Dmitry Sitkovetsky, the symphony's current music director. Before arriving in Greensboro, Fuchs conducted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, directed the opera and orchestra at Louisiana State University and had led the Baton Rouge Symphony. Fuchs served as the Greensboro Symphony's music director from 1975-87, then retired and became its conductor laureate.”

He was a talented man that I was honored to meet once and speak to at length. I still have a score or two of his in my library, though I was unable to convince anyone to perform them at the time. That was no reflection upon his music. Best, John McLaughlin Williams

* Now playing - Bach's Goldberg Variations transcribed for strings by current Greensboro Symphony music director Dmitry Sitkovetsky (below), and played by NES Chamber Orchestra. The sleeve notes of this 1995 Nonesuch CD are by none other than John Adams, and say: 'The opportunity to experience a new view of a familiar work such as the Goldberg Variations should not be grounds for a skeptical raising of critical eyebrows, but rather a cause for celebration. Arranging the Goldberg Variations is risky business, however. One is working here not with a melodic fragment of single song, but rather with one of the summas of Western music, specifically a work which is a compendium of all the principal developments in European keyboard up to and including Bach's time. ... John Cage, in his lecture "Composition as Process," defines form as "the morphology of continuity." The morphology of the Goldberg Variations' continuity is one of a perfectly shaped and harmonious continuity. Symmetry and unpredictability coexist in an environment of impertuable serenity. ' Nice CD as well.

Now read about a year at the symphony.
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New positions for a string quartet

Vanessa Lann emails - Today is the world premiere of my string quartet, Landscape of a Soul's Remembering. In this work there are six separate locations on the stage where the musicians will stand or sit throughout the performance, changing to new positions between each of the four movements. At each spot there is specific music to be played, consisting of recognizable, repeated patterns that the players will interpret in turn - on their respective instruments - during each movement. As these patterns emerge again and again in new contexts, played on different instruments by different performers, they will each be heard in a new light.

Rather than this being a string quartet where the discussion exists in real time between the players, this is a study of the discussion, or realization, that takes place in one human soul - between the present, the future and one's understanding of Memory.

The premiere of Landscape of a Soul's Remembering is being given by the Doelen String Quartet, in the Eduard Flipsezaal, Concertgebouw De Doelen, Rotterdam on Sunday, March 18, 2007, 8:30 pm. The concert also includes the first performance of a work by Giel Vleggaar, and John Adams' John's Book of Alleged Dances.

Now read about another contemporary chamber work.
It is a Vanessa day - the sculpture is Sad beaver by Vanessa Pooley, bronze 13" high. 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

Elgar versus Adams in BBC anniversary lottery

Anniversaries on BBC Radio 3 are a lottery. If you are Mozart or Shostakovich you scoop the jackpot. If you are Robert Schumann or Malcolm Arnold you win a token prize. And if you are Edmund Rubbra, Peteris Vasks, Gerald Finzi and many others you lose your stakes. And interestingly the lottery also applies to Radio 3 itself. September 30th 2006 saw the sixtieth anniversary of the first broadcast by Radio 3's predecessor, the Third Programme, and unless you were listening very hard you would have completely missed any reference to that anniversary on Radio 3.

There are many possible explanations as to why the Third Programme anniversary won only a token prize. Was it because Sir William Haley's original vision for the service was jettisoned with the introduction of Network Three in 1957? Or was it because the horizon-widening aspirations of the Third Programme sit uncomfortably with today’s populist Radio 3 which so often does no more than mimic the commercial station Classic FM?

Personally, I think the BBC knew that today’s Radio 3 just doesn’t stand close scrutiny. Many voices are saying the same thing, and Richard Morrison’s Times review of one of the few anniversary events, the BBC’s own celebration concert, pretty well sums up Radio 3 today – ‘Counter-tenor Lawrence Zazzro deserves the highest praise for his accomplished performance of Jonathan Dove’s Hojoki (An Account of My Hut) after so little preparation time (Pliable note – Zazzro took over the premiere at four days notice after David Daniels fell ill). That redeemed an otherwise mediocre concert. There were three reasons why it should have been so much better. It marked the 60th anniversary of the BBC Third programme, forerunner to Radio 3. It was dedicated to the memory of Sir John Drummond, whose fierce defence of highbrow standards at the BBC and elsewhere is much missed, even by those of us who felt the full froth of his indignation. And it launched the month-long Listen Up! Festival of British orchestras, marked by a new Copland-like brass fanfare by Gareth Wood. All to no avail. In the hands of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Jiří Bělohlávek, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was bland, boring and not very well kept together. They need to raise their game.’

If 2006 was an entertaining year for anniversary lottery watchers 2007 is going to be even better. If there is one composer irrevocably linked with the original Reithian vision of the Third Programme it is Sir Edward Elgar, O.M. and Master of the Queen’s Musik. Elgar was born on June 2 1857, so the lottery numbers mean that 2007 is his 150th anniversary. And if there is one composer that sums up the new, cool, internet-enabled and US-obsessed Radio 3 it is John Adams (above), and he was born on February 15th 1947, which gives him a 60th anniversary.

So in 2007 two of the main players in the BBC Radio 3 anniversary lottery will be Edward Elgar and John Adams. Fortunately I’m not a gambling man, but I’m pretty sure I can predict the result as Adams is the BBC Symphony's Artist-in-Association, and shares a super-agent with the orchestra. But there is one possible resolution to this clash. The BBC could commission an anniversary work from John Adams called My father knew Edward Elgar as a companion piece to his My father knew Charles Ives. You see it is not as silly as it sounds; by a bizarre coincidence both Elgar and Adams were born in Worcester. There is only one small difficulty; Sir Edward was born in Worcester, Worcestershire, while John Adams was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. But why spoil a newsworthy BBC Proms premiere for a mere 3360 miles?

* The BBC is still capable of producing great programmes, including the profile of Brother Roger of Taizé and the Sofia Gubaidulina Festival which I have highlighted with delight here in the past two weeks. But such broadcasts are rare, and they increasingly look like 'flagship' projects aimed at filling the quality programme quota of the Corporation's Charter. When I wrote about the dire quality recently a regular reader from the UK emailed to say that the programmes were so bad he was planning to dispose of his TV to avoid paying the license fee. On the basis of the BBC's Christmas programmes I am sure many more people will be following him. And where is Jiří Bělohlávek? I was one of many who welcomed Bělohlávek back in July 2006 after the dark days of Leonard Slatkin. But as the review above confirms the BBC Symphony's new chief conductor has made little impact to date. As Richard Morrison says, the BBC need to raise their game.

Now read about Elgar’s other enigma
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The latest avant-garde tricks ...

'A multimedia event with music by Philip Glass, a huge work for amplified violin and orchestra by John Adams, a concerto for tap dance by Michael Torke, and Marin Alsop will lead the East Coast premiere of Life: Journey Through Time by Baltimore native Philip Glass, a work incorporating the projection of photography by the National Geographic's Frans Lanting.' The Baltimore Sun on the lineup for the 2006/7 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra season.

'There are many dangers which hedge round the unfortunate composer: pressure groups which demand true proletarian music, snobs who demand the latest avant-garde tricks; critics who are already trying to document today for tomorrow, to be the first to find the correct pigeon-hole definition. These people are dangerous - not because they are necessarily of any importance in themselves, but because they may make the composer, above all the young composer, self-conscious, and instead of writing his own music, music which springs naturally from his gift and personality, he may be frightened into writing pretentious nonsense or deliberate obscurity. He may find himself writing more and more for machines, in conditions dictated by machines, and not by humanity: or of course he may end by creating grandiose clap-trap when his real talent is for dance tunes or children's piano pieces.' From Benjamin Britten's 1964 acceptance speech for the first Aspen Award.

You are not going to believe this but the photo really is of Maestro Krio, a Sony robot who conducted a Japanese student orchestra in a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in 2004. I understand the critics found his rhythms rather mechanical. So he didn't get a Baltimore booking, but a Naxos contract is rumoured. Follow this link for the story in Italian (see first comment below for a rough machine translation). Photo credit Rai.it

Now playing: György Kurtág's Musik für Streichinstrumente performed by the Keller Quartet on ECM. Both Officium breve and the Twelve Microludes extend the concept of the quartet beyond Britten's three masterpieces for the genre. This is music which springs naturally from Kurtág's own gift and personality. The only machines involved are the recording equipment, and these works are about as far from grandiose clap-trap as you can get. (Shame though about ECM's design, or should that be non-design? for the CD inlay. It looks like a black and white blur in the image above because it is a black and white blur. I am sure Britten would have had some thoughts on it.)

Britten's On Receiving the First Aspen Award speech was published by Faber, ISBN 071100236.
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If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Baltimore Symphony chief quits and Music will rise from the wreckage.

The radiance of a thousand suns

In August 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 120,000 people, of which 95% were civilians, were killed outright. It is estimated that a further quarter of a million died from the after effects of the explosions. Six days after the second bomb was dropped Japan surrendered unconditionally, removing the requirement for an invasion of the Japanese mainland by Allied forces , an engagement that would undoubtedly have resulted in dreadful casualties on both sides. Hopefully the music community, as well as the world, will remember 2005 as the sixtieth anniversary of these terrible events, as well as the year of the premiere of an opera by John Adams.

My attempts to understand the almost incomprehensible events of 1945 led me to the recently published 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant. This is the story of the extraordinary secret community of allied scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico that, in a race against the clock, created the two bombs that were dropped on Japan. The Los Alamos scientists had also been racing to beat the threat of a German atomic weapon. Nazi scientists working in the Kiaser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin had discovered in 1938 that the splitting of a uranium atom set free enormous quantities of energy, opening up the possibility of a chain reaction creating an explosion of unheard-of power. Their 'uranium project' had the full backing of Nazi Minister of Arnaments Albert Speer, and one of the leading German physicists, Werner Heissenberg (who won the 1932 Nobel prize in physics) later said: 'Since September 1941 we saw a clear road towards the atom bomb.' Created initially to head off the German atomic threat the research centre at Los Alamos was led by the legendary J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Doctor Atomic of John Adam's opera.

The author of 109 East Palace is Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of former Harvard president and chief administrator of the Manhattan Project James B. Conant. She is unashamedly pro-Oppenheimer, and some will find this lack of objectivity a flaw, but despite this the new book makes a useful contribution to the Los Alamos literature. The title 109 East Palace comes from the nondescript office in Santa Fe that was the gatehouse for the secret compound created on the high mesa beyond the town. The book doesn't set out to be another academic study of Oppenheimer (right) and the development of the bombs. Instead it is a very human study of the people involved in the project, and the horrendous work pressures and ethical dilemnas that they faced. It tells how the young Oppenheimer failed to find a cure for his depression in medical treatment, and instead turned to Eastern mysticism, and in particular the Mahabharata, and other stories from the Hindu devotional poem the Bhagavad Gita. (Among others who turned to Hindu texts were T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, and somewhat surprisingly Beethoven, who in in his diary for 1816 wrote about the “Indian literature” he had been reading. After reading the Rig-Veda Beethoven wrote “God is immaterial and transcends every conception”.)

On the night before the first atomic test at the Trinity site Oppenheimer quoted this stanza from the Bhagavad Gita:

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountain,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him

And after the first successful test explosion which confirmed the horrendous destructive power created by his team he quoted the lines where Vishnu tries to persuade the Prince to do his duty and take on his multi-armoured form:

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds

Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist and intellectual. After the war he was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he was unofficial intellectual guru to an amazing roster of talent ranging from Nobel Prize winning physicists Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac, to the poet T. S. Eliot (neatly squaring the Sanskrit circle), and the historian Arnold Toynbee. Oppenheimer's mother was an artist, whose personal art collection included a Renoir, drawings by Picasso and Vuillard, a Rembrandt etching, and a Van Gogh. He was fond of the sonnets of John Donne, learnt Sanskrit to read the Hindu scriptures in the original, and read Marx's entire Das Kapital, in German, on a cross-country train trip. His musical tastes included Bach fugues and the late Beethoven Quartets, with the Op. 131 in C sharp Minor a particular favoutite.

Like every highly gifted person Oppenheimer was flawed. He was not averse to making highly damaging accusations against colleagues such Bernard Peters and Haakon Chevalier to throw the security services off his own scent as they investigated his left-wing sympathies. The political paths he continued to explore when working on the atomic bomb, and the doubts he later developed about the ethics of the develoment of the hydrogen bomb were used at the Gray Board hearings to categorise him as a security risk, and he lived out his final years as a marginalised figure.His treatment was a puzzling contrast to that handed out to scientists with proven Nazi connections. For instance the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun joined the Nazi SS in 1939, and headed the Germans missile weapons project until 1945. As well as developing the V2 rocket which was used with considerable effect against Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands he was working on the A9/A10 rocket which was designed to reach as far as the USA. In 1945 von Braun, together with 500 employees, surrendered to US troops, and the key scientists and their prototype rockets were shipped to the US. In 1960 von Braun became director of the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, and in the 1970s he was made vice-director of NASA. Following his death in 1977 he was honoured with a statue, and the von Braun performance centre for the arts in Huntsville, Alabama.

Robert Oppenheimer fared less well, presumably because he was judged to have sympathised with the wrong enemy. The story of his security clearance and fall from grace is not covered in Doctor Atomic, which ends with the first test in 1945. I haven't seen the opera, but was impressed by the positive response it received. However from a distance ending it at the Trinity test seems a bit like ending the Ring with the Ride of the Valkyries. Interestingly 109 East Palace also tells us that John Adams was not the first to dramatise the Manhattan Project. In 1947 a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer blockbuster The Beginning or the End? hit the silver screens, with Hume Cronyn starring as Robert Oppenheimer, and Spencer Tracy as his military boss, General Leslie Groves. The film flopped at the box-office.

109 East Palace does not set out to be a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, or a detailed study of the Manhattan Project. The literature of the project is already very rich, with books such as Gregg Herken's extraordinarily well researched, detailed and virtually unreadable Brotherhood of the Bomb shortly to be joined by a new life of Oppenheimer from the late Abraham Pais. By contrast 109 East Palace is Oppenheimer-lite. Instead of placing him centre stage it uses an unpublished memoir by one of the first civilians recruited to the project, a young widow and Smith graduate Dorothy McKibbin, as the thread that binds the narrative together. McKibbin was close to Oppenheimer, and clearly besotted by him, which is another reason why the book lacks objectivity. 109 East Palace is useful book for anyone wanting to place the cold mechanics of weapons of mass destruction in a human context. But in the final analysis it is too superficial (much of the information in this article about the Manhattan Project comes from other sources) and subjective to provide anything more than a fascinating lightweight introduction to a subject that cries out for heavyweight coverage.

109 East Palace by Jennet Conant is published by Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-5007-9
Los Alamos continues as a National Laboratory involved with nuclear weapons, and other activities. Interestingly, in view of the much publicised avian flu outbreaks, it is currently involved with researching influenza genetic codes. Visit the facility via this link
There are some excellent photos of Los Alamos and the test site, plus coverage of Doctor Atomic on New Yorker music critic, and fellow blogger, Alex Ross' web site.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) is a non-partisan international grouping of medical organisations dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They work with the long-term victims of nuclear explosions and accidents from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, and their work has been recognised with the 1984 UNESCO Peace Prize, and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. For the last 21 years IPPNW-Concerts has been working from its Berlin office with top musicians world-wide to raise funds for their work. The organisation is run by medical practitioner Dr Peter Hauber and his wife, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Berlin last week.

As well as being a fantastic cause there is some music well worth exploring available on IPPNW-Concerts' own CD label, and in co-productions with Swedish label BIS. These are all live recordings of concerts promoted by IPPNW over the years. There are forty-nine CDs in the catalogue with composers ranging from Monteverdi to Elliot Carter. The nuggets worth mining include Furtwängler's Te Deum coupled with Brahms and Hindemith (CD40).

Of particular relevance to this article is Wort und Musik - 60 Jahre nach Hiroshima. This is a live recording made at the March 2005 'Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project' which mixes readings in German from a range of authors including Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Sadako Kurihara with relevent music including the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich's String Quartet No 8 and Schubert’s Quartettsatz. On the lighter side there are also a number of jazz recordings worth exploring, including the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group playing live in 2004 in the Philharmonie in Berlin with the world-famous baritone Thomas Quasthoff.

IPPNW co-productions with BIS also contain some real gems. My own favourite is a live Missa Solemnis from the Philharmonie in Berlin with Antal Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists. Another BIS co-production recorded at the Philharmonie with the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra and members of the Czech Philharmonic and HdK-Chamber Choir conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau includes two of Doráti’s own compositions (his Pater Noster, Prayer for Mixed Choir and Jesus oder Barabbas? a melodrama after a story by Karinthy Frigyes for Speaker, Orchestra and Choir) alongside works from Bartok and Martinu. Finally among the BIS co-productions a live Mahler Symphony No 9 with Rudolf Barshai conducting the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra is a rarity well worth investigating. All proceeds from the sale of these CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Picture credits:
Nuclear explosion - UCL Astrophysics Group
Robert Oppenheimer - Gallery M
Book cover - Simon & Schuster
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