Double vision

Stereophonics on V2 Records 2005



Stockhausen on BMC Records 2006

More double vision here.
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Body Mandala - a contemporary classic?

Why do we make life so complicated? Making a great recording is really quite simple. All you need is some outstanding music, an orchestra and conductor who thrive on risk taking, a first-rate recording venue and a visionary record label to release the result. Which is precisely what this new release of Jonathan Harvey's music delivers, and believe me it is a truly great recording.

69 year old Jonathan Harvey worked at both IRCAM in Paris and Stanford University, California before a period as Composer in Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 2005-7. On this CD the BBC Scottish perform five of his compositions under their dynamic, and outgoing, young Israeli Chief Conductor Ilan Volkov. There is a transcedental theme to the programme, with the song cycle White as Jasmine, which is beautifully sung by Finnish soprano Anu Komsi, using Hindu texts and three of the four orchestral works reflecting the composer's preoccupation with Buddhism.

From the three Buddhist inspired works Body Manadala must surely become a contemporary classic. It is has its origins in Buddhist ritual music, and uses Western instruments to mimic the famous Tibetan low horns called tungschens seen on the excellent cover above. The opening of Body Mandala with its low horn calls echoes Philip Glass' 1997 score for Martin Scorsese's Kundun, but whereas Glass stays in his own stylistic comfort zone Harvey takes us post-Boulez and beyond. The sole work without religous connections is Timepieces which uses two orchestras and two conductors (Stefan Solyom conducts the second group) and three rhythms to pay homage to Gruppen, a seminal work by another Harvey influence, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Everybody involved in this recording deserves credit, with special mentions for independent label NMC who continue to tread where the majors fear to go, and to BBC Scotland staff engineer Graeme Taylor for capturing the ravishing sound of the refurbished Glasgow City Halls. But the real heroes are the BBC Scotish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov who delight in music making on the edge while their compliant cousins in the BBC's London based BBC Symphony remain happy to provide a platform for Jiri Behlolavek's global ambitions. What a delicous irony that the BBC Scottish are now upping the ante on the BBC management in London who tried to disband them in 1980.

Highly recommended, particularly to those who are "tired of the Brits shoving their immature wunderkind composers down our throats". Lots more Jonathan Harvey resources here.
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Tripping the Licht fantastic

'Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts' - Thomas Merton


Karlheinz Stockhausen and Thomas Merton are also together here.
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BBC Proms 2008 tries some time travel

1972 - Stockhausen's Carré for four orchestral groups is performed twice in a late-night Promenade concert, rehearsal shown in photo above. Other Proms include the first UK performance of Elliott Carter's Concerto for Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez and George Crumb's Echoes of Time and River.


2008 - Proms season includes Stockhausen's Klang (13th and 15th hour), Kontakte, Stimmung and two performances of Gruppen in one concert. There is also Xenakis coupled with Vaughan Williams, and four works by Elliott Carter including two UK premieres, plus lots of Messiaen and Vaughan Williams and a programme of twentieth-century music mixed with renaissance polyphony. (Wish I had thought of that).

Are things getting better under new Proms director Roger Wright? Well, there is also music from Doctor Who as shown in the ridiculous BBC photo opportunity above, dancing round a maypole in Kensington Gardens, and musicians "popping up" on street corners, as the Times reports. But overall it's goodbye Nicholas Kenyon and hello the most interesting Proms season for years.

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What price the music of an unsung master?

1968 was a year of upheaval. It was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll and saw the assasination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the accidental death of Trappist monk and social activist Thomas Merton, the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the rise of the anti-war movement, the student rebellion that paralysed France, and the growth of the civil rights and women's movements. Stockhausen composed Stimmung, Hair opened on Broadway, the Beatles released their White Album and a Lindsay Anderson film put an African version of the Latin Mass at the top of the UK charts. Finally, as a reminder that history rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away, in October 1968 Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their controversial protest in support of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) on the podium at the Mexico Olympics.

While society was in upheaval elsewhere Dom Charles was completing the remarkable work of art seen above in the Abbey church of the Benedictine community at Buckfast in a peaceful Devon valley. The huge east window (judge the size by the altar visible in lower foreground of my photo) is in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel at Buckfast Abbey. It uses the technique known as dalles-de-verre in which ‘tiles’ of coloured glass are chipped to shaped and laid mosaic-fashion in a matrix of resin. The window was made by the monks in the Abbey's workshop, and since its completion in 1968 windows have been made by the Brothers for more than 150 other churches using the same technique. One of the most recent commissions has been a window commemorating the New York firefighters who died in 9/11.

We had travelled to Buckfast to hear a concert of choral works by the unsung master Philippe de Monte. The music of this 16th century Flemish composer is very rarely performed today (although it is recorded), which is surprising as he wrote 1,073 secular and 144 spiritual madrigals, 45 chansons, 319 motets and 38 mass settings - eat your heart out Leif Segerstam! The intelligently planned and beautifully delivered concert was given in the Abbey church (Lady Chapel seen in my photo below) by the vocal ensemble Voces directed by Martyn Warren. There may still be many voices to a part in choirs in Devon and the men may still wear suits, ties and white shirts, but in other ways they are right up there with Radiohead. Here is an extract from the free programme book which included texts:

Concerts are normally free, allowing you to make your own decision about the contribution you make to the retiring collection. After expenses this will be split equally between the Abbey and the Voce music fund. Neither singers nor conductor take a fee. As a rough guide, a ticket for a concert like this would normally cost you at least £8, and we hope you will give generously with your money as the performers have given of their time in preparing and performing.


Masses of early music on iPods here.
My wife and I stayed in one of the Buckfast Communities splendid retreat houses on the edge of the monastic domain - recommended. Photos (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Stockhausen off the wall

After John Cage in Bruges Stockhausen has been happening in London. Take a leading rock music venue with no seats and a bar across the back wall, pack in three hundred experimental music fans, add contemporary music specialists Daan Vandewalle (piano - making his UK debut) and Chris Cutler (percussion) and a dodgy piano, and you have last week's Stockhausen tribute.

The first half of the SPNM promoted evening at the Luminaire deep in darkest Kilburn was devoted to emerging British experimental artists and in a neat move the audience was given a free CD recording of the set at the end of the evening. In the second half Stockhausen's Klavierstucke I-IV and the improvised version of Kontakte were coupled with two tributes in which Robin Rimbaud (electronics) joined Daan and Chris.

First came a solo from Robin, Retuning Stockhausen, which used samples of the composers music. A very off the wall evening ended with Opus 2128 based on Stockhausen's curiously suppressed Opus 1970 which was composed to mark the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. In the original the performers listened on headphones to extracts of Beethoven's work and accompanied them in designated ways with the option of making them audible.

In Opus 2128 (the number presumably being the year of Stockhausen's centenary) the Beethoven extracts were replaced, with one exception, with samples from Stockhausen's output. This improvised premiere brought the tribute evening to a suitably experimental end. Daan Vandewalle and Chris Cutler were also the driving forces in the Bruge John Cage Happening, and these tireless musicians are making a habit of showing that off the wall is still a good place for contemporary music music to be.

You can have too many low-light photos of gigs. So, as we were off to the Marcel Duchamp Tate exhibition the next day, my header photo was taken at the Stockhausen gig but shows the grafitti in the mens' toilets (rest rooms in Sequenza21 land). Much more interesting than the Glyndebourne equivalents, and like the Bruge photo I'm in their somewhere. More off the wall pictures here.
Header photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Stockhausen chaotic music and communism

'Dr. Trey notes that music has lost its way since the nineteenth century. It has changed from earlier eras—the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic epochs (1600-1900)—to trends starting in early 1900's. These earlier eras spanning 300 years represent the pinnacle of classical music in the West and are based on higher principles and values. Composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen composed music from a listener's perspective as if experimenting with noise.

When this chaotic music appeared, atomic bombs, communism and cold war also surfaced. He believes this chaotic music in no small way contributes to the chaos in modern times. Destructive political movements, such as communism, thrived by killing people in its own society.

Europe boasted excellent philosophers and scholars when classical principles were followed. When music lost its classical values, chaos developed in societies and so for 100 years, music has been struggling to find direction' - from an Epoch Times interview with Dr. Torsten Trey, German medical practioner and oboeist with the New York based Divine Arts Performing Orchestra.

Now read about music, acid and the collapse of communism.
Header photo is of a performance of Stockhausen's suitably chaotic Hymnen at St John's Smith Square, London in 1971. The composer is in the centre. The Epoch Times is a New York based independent free newspaper specialising in reporting on China. 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

Indeterminacy in music blogging

Stockhausen, Xenakis, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia, Mozart and Mahler beckon from London - as one savant wrote about the contemporary music scene in England over on Sequenza21 "I do hate ... the lack of diversity in performance (not much range/choice) and all the self aggrandising anti-’intellectual’ inverted snobbery regards the ‘continentals’". I'm away from the keyboard for a few days enjoying the live music, so below is the schedule for my Future Radio show for this Sunday (March 16) plus the following five weeks with links to related articles.

March 16 - Angela Hewitt recital:
* J.S. Bach Toccatas
* Messiaen excerpts from Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus


March 23 - Celebrating Easter with A Love Supreme
* Yuval Ron Ensemble play music from Iraq and Muslim and Jewish Andalucia
* John Coltrane's jazz suite A Love Supreme

March 30 - Vaughan Williams anniversary
* Thomas Tallis Felix Namque for organ
* Vaughan Williams Third Symphony 'A Pastoral Symphony'


April 6 - Contemporary Karajan, to mark the conductor's centenary his recordings of:
* Berg Three pieces from the Lyric Suite
* Honegger Symphony No 3 'Liturgigue'.


April 13 - Pupil and teacher
* Xenakis Komboi
* Hildegard of Bingen lament and Scene 3 from Ordo Vitutum
* Messiaen Oiseaux Exotiques

April 20 - Modern English music
* Maxwell Davies Missa Parvula
* Rubbra Symphony No 6


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Stockhausen's mysterious Scandinavian Classic

Stockhausen's fragmentary piano music played by Elisabeth Klein on the German TIM label (sleeve above) has spent a lot of time in my CD player recently. It's a very rewarding release which I recommend to any readers who still run a mile at the mention of Stockhausen. But the reason for its inclusion in a Scandinavian Classics series with related sleeve artwork escapes me. Or is it simply that Hungarian born pianist Elisabeth Klein built her reputation as a leading interpreter of contemporary music in northern Europe? (Do check out her CD of piano music from the Weimar Republic).

Am I missing the connection? Or is it part of a dream?
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What's in a name?

Hip hop, trance, house, dance, techno and electro aren't just categories of rock music. They are fan bases, communities, underground networks, marketing tools and cultural directions. And more importantly they are self-contained markets which combine to form a thriving scene for new rock music.

In classical music we have the tried but dry categories of early, baroque, classical and romantic, but after that things become difficult. Until eight years ago twentieth-century music was a useful fallback, but should Mahler be in the same category as Boulez? Then there is modern music, but that sounds like furniture, and avant-garde which sounds forbidding. How about contemporary and new music? But is John Cage, who died sixteen years ago, contemporary? Is Britten as contemporary as Christina Kubisch? Or is Stimmung, which was composed forty years ago, new music? Then there are experimental, aleatoric, chance, electronic, atonal, serial, minimalist and other technical labels which sound just like what they are, technical labels.

It's not an academic discussion. We want new audiences and knowing what to call something is the first step towards liking it. Which is why BlackBerry, PowerBook and iPod are much more than mere names. Future Radio bills my programme as contemporary classical and on this blog and on air I use the default of contemporary music or new music. But I keep thinking there must be something more compelling and descriptive to stand alongside hip hop trance, house, dance, techno and electro.

Is there? Or doesn't it matter?

Now read about a title given by the gods.
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Is this a record?

CDs just seem to get shorter. After 48 minutes from the Kronos Quartet yesterday comes a new Deutsche Grammophon full price release today of Mikhail Pletnev playing Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto which lasts for 38 minutes. But neither match the Wergo CD of Stockhausen's Kontakte I wrote about here which plays for just 34 minutes 56 seconds. Is that a record? Or is it an MP3 file?

More music and mathematics here.
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New music is Europe's hot ticket

The all day John Cage Happening in Bruge, Belgium this Sunday (Feb 17) is a complete sell-out. On An Overgrown Path will be there and also at Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel two days before. Adventurous programming and new music is certainly pulling in the European audiences, and the next hot ticket looks to be the happening previewed below, and we will be there as well:

spnm’s experimental music night The Sound Source returns to Kilburn’s Luminaire (see footer photo) on 12 March with an unusual and creative response to the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Headlining the event are Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle, who will perform Klavierstücke I-IV, and drummer and percussionist Chris Cutler, who will join him for a version of Kontakte. Electronic artist Scanner completes the line-up with some Stockhausen-inspired works. Rounding off the evening, the three will team up to perform a newly commissioned tribute to one of Stockhausen’s hidden gems, Stockhoven/Beethausen.

The event begins with an Open Source slot, in association with Music Orbit, offering emerging British artists the chance to showcase their work. A CD of the results will be given to audience members at the end of the night.

Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. After working in the ‘70s with English avant-garde rock group Henry Cow, he founded Art Bears, News from Babel and Cassiber, and joined the American band Pere Ubu. In addition to special projects for stage, theatre, film and radio he still works consistently with Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Jon Rose, Tim Hodgkinson, David Thomas, Peter Blegvad, Daevid Allen, Hugh Hopper, Daan Vandewalle and Stevan Tickmayer and has toured the world as a soloist with his extended electrified kit. Other recent projects include Out of the Blue Radio - a daily year-long soundscape project for Resonance FM and p53 for Orchestra.

Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle enjoys an international reputation as a new music specialist, with a strong focus on 20th century American piano music. He studied at the Conservatory of Ghent, Belgium with Claude Coppens and at Mills College, California with Alvin Curran. His recitals and projects have become increasingly more diverse and challenging, and his programmes are often highly unusual, both on a technical and intellectual level, often combining the classical repertoire with premieres of new works written especially for him e.g. Frith, Newman, Curran, Rzewski. As an improviser he has collaborated widely with David Moss, Fred Frith, Han Bennink, Chris Cutler and Tom Cora amongst others.

British artist Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner (see header photo), traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways. From his early controversial work using found mobile phone conversations, through to his focus on trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge, his restless explorations of the experimental terrain have won him international admiration from amongst others, Bjork, Aphex Twin and Stockhausen. Scanner has collaborated with artists from every imaginable genre, including Bryan Ferry, Radiohead, The Royal Ballet, Merce Cunningham, Michael Nyman and Luc Ferrari.


Read about other 'hot ticket' new music festivals here and here.
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Is live classical music price elastic?

Amid all the debate about the benefits of free recorded music shouldn't we be asking if live music has the same price elasticity? Would cutting the cost of concert tickets attract new listeners and boost audiences?

One case study suggests it would. I have already written here about the success achieved by Aldeburgh Music in building audiences for adventurous repertoire. Aldeburgh has an established policy of half-price tickets for anyone under 27, no other qualification such as student status are required although Aldeburgh also runs its own student card.

Extending discounts beyond students is a smart move. Student concessions have an image of uncomfortable seats way up in the 'gods'. There are a lot of high disposable income under 27s who are not students and who haven't yet 'got' classical music. They buy designer brands, drive nice cars, and leverage price elasticity through websites such as Lastminute.com. They want decent seats at a concert, and if they like the experience they will return. They are from the other long tails I wrote about recently, and they are an untapped new market for live classical music.

The half-price concessions at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival translate to £11 for a top seat for Yannis Kyriakides' new opera, and just £5 for either Stimmung or for the Faster Than Sound experimental music event. Judging by the attendances and age range at Snape it works, and Aldeburgh Music will be extending the scheme in the near future to strengthen their links with younger audiences.

Of course there is a cost in any price reduction. But a lot of money is being thrown at more fashionable and less effective schemes aimed at attracting younger audiences. These include advertising with 'attitude', e-cards, Second Life gigs, commissioning concertos for tap dancers and promoting music for babies, not to mention signing wunderkind.

I suspect the problem is that simple old-fashioned price reductions don't earn fees for the many advertising agencies, artists' agents, marketing consultants, digital production agencies and other middle-men who feed off classical music today. But if live music really is price elastic the simple solution may be the most effective.

Stimmung for a fiver is a no-brainer (which would have been my headline if it wasn't a no-no for the search engines). But now read about a Stockhausen concert where ticket prices were a problem.
Image credit is appropriately from The Future of Classical Music - BBC. 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

Harmonia muddle

BBC Radio 3's CD Review programme has been on a jolly to Arles in the South of France. The event was French label Harmonia Mundi's 50th anniversary sales conference, and payback time came last Saturday when the BBC programme played the contents of the conference goody bag and gave several senior French executives a lot of valuable airtime to promote the Harmonia Mundi solution for today's turbulent classical music market.

In simple terms the Harmonia Mundi solution is internet bad and independent sector good. Now I am a huge fan of both Harmonia Mundi recordings and independent record stores and feature both here frequently. The header photo of the excellent Harmonia Mundi store in Avignon was taken by me last September and I have spent an awful lot of Euros in their French stores over the years. So congratulations to Harmonia Mundi on fifty wonderful years, and it's great to find such solid support for independent bricks and mortar stores. But just a minute, look at this ...


Open this link. You will see that Harmonia Mundi are trading on the internet as part of the Amazon Marketplace. You can buy Stockhausen's Kontakte on Wergo (a Harmonia Mundi distributed label) online direct from Harmonia Mundi for £10.73 delivered in the UK which is competitive with the price in leading independent record store (see comment from Harmonia Mundi below). And you don't even need to visit Amazon, just buy from Harmonia Mundi's own online store.

To find out what was really happening I ordered Kontakte direct from Harmonia Mundi. My copy arrived in 48 hours, which is faster than I could have got it from an independent store, and it even came with the business card of John Falla, Harmonia Mund's direct sales manager. Great service; but why are Harmonia Mundi cutting out the very independents they claim to support? Could it be that their private view on the future of the independent bricks and mortar sector differs from their public position?

Harmonia Mundi make great CDs, and you cannot blame them for running with the hare and the hounds in today's turbulent music market. But they are going about it in a muddle-headed way. A top independent record store I spoke to before running this story didn't know about their Amazon Marketplace presence, and, not surprisingly, was very unhappy when I told them. And it's a pity that BBC Radio 3 swallowed Harmonia Mundi's bait hook, line and sinker without doing any research. But then the bouillabaisse in the South of France is very good indeed.

Now here is a contemporary composer saying independent record labels never failed me yet.
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Gruppen for the facts

We all knew it was true. But here is forensic confirmation.
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Weak at the knees over this gig

28 January - a legend - concert room 7.30 - a legend
Paolo Pandolfo viola da gamba
A legend. I've had members of the public weak at the knees over this gig. You won't have heard of him as you are music students but don't let that or good natured sarcasm stop you from coming. FREE FREE FREE for MUS students

That's what the University of East Anglia School of Music internal flyer said, and for once the hyperbole was justified. Like his viol da gamba teacher Jordi Savall, Paolo Pandolfo is a legend. Pandolfo's concert last night, with its seamless transitions between the 17th and 21st centuries, confirmed his status. The evening was crowned by one of the pinnacles of classical musiuc, Bach's Fifth Cello Suite in a transcription for viol, after revelatory interpretations of music by Tobias Hume, Le Sieur de St. Colombe, Marin Marais and Pandolfo himself. The music students may not have heard of Pandolfo, but there was standing room only with the widest range of ages that I have seen at a concert since last summer's Faster Than Sound.

My photo above captures some of the magic of the evening, and there is more magic in the brutalist 1960s architecture of the UEA music room in which it was taken. Paul Hillier's first recording of Stockhausen's Stimmung, made for Hyperion with Singcircle, was recorded there in 1983. Which may explain the interesting similarities between my header photo and Richard Friedman's 1971 shot used in my recent Stimmung post, and no comments, please, that we were both struggling with available light.

Paolo Pandolfo is one of a a disappearing breed - a musician with views on more than his next recording contract and music directorship. Read about them in Baghdad's Spring.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Stockhausen's Stimmung at summer Snape

A late night performance of Stimmung is one of the highlights of the 2008 Aldeburgh Summer Festival. It will be sung by London Voices as part of the Faster Than Sound experimental music festival within a festival. The evocative photo above was kindly provided by fellow blogger Richard Friedman. He took it at the October 1971 performance of Stimmung in the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris by the group that commissioned it, Collegium Vocale Köln. Richard is also a fellow webcaster, check out his Music From Other Minds on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco. The footer photo was taken by me at the 2007 Faster Than Sound. Stockhausen's music is just one of many delights at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival which runs from 13th to 29th June, here are some of the others:

* World premiere of a new opera An Ocean of Rain by Yannis Kyriakides directed by Cathie Boyd.
* Featured composer György Kurtág and his wife Marta in recital.
* Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays The Art of Fugue and conducts the Britten Sinfonia.
* Ensemble Organum sing Machaut.
* Steven Isserlis and Thomas Adès play music by Kurtág, Debussy, Janáček and a new work by Adès.
* I Fagiolini sing Byrd.
* Premiere of John Woolrich's Violin Concerto.

As I've said here before, contemporary music is flourishing in Aldeburgh. This is due to adventurous and challenging programming. And Aldeburgh is not frightened of controversy. They proudly feature the 2007 premiere of their multi-media opera Elephant and Castle on the front of their new brochure, in confident defiance of a one star Guardian review from a grumpy Andrew Clements. Here are the facts that prove music has to be an adventurous experience:

In the past twelve months Aldeburgh Music has:
* Presented more than 150 concerts and events, including music, opera, dance, visual arts, public masterclasses and talks.
* Sold 91,000 concert tickets.
* Involved 8000 people in 250 Aldeburgh Education project days.
* Nurtured musical talent from around the world through the Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme which has more than 300 alumni.
* Started building its visionary new music campus.
* Involved more than 200 established musicians in Aldeburgh Residencies.
* Coached 25 of the region's finest young musicians through the Aldeburgh Young Musicians scheme.

As Benjamin Britten said, music does not exist in a vacuum.


Header photo (c) Richard Friedman 2008, footer (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

New music - but Weir is BBC's chief conductor?

"While I thought Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio were all great composers - especially Berio, who had melodic poetry and eloquence that stood out for me - there was a sense that the postwar serial tradition was starting to fray at the edges. It was ripe for change, and for people to cock a snook a bit" - says 53 year old Judith Weir in a Guardian interview previewing the forthcoming BBC Symphony Orchestra composer weekend featuring her music. My header photo shows Judith Weir on the set of her 'A Night at the Chinese Opera'.

It's great to see some much needed adventurous programming from the BBC in the Judith Weir festival from January 17th to 20th. As well as talks and films there are seven concerts featuring many of her works, and all are to be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Full concert details here, broadcast details here, and a Judith Weir feature On An Overgrown Path here.

With the BBC Proms handed over to reality show winners these annual composers weekends are now the showpiece contemporary music event for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and they are playing in three of the concerts. Two are conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and one by André de Ridder. None are being conducted by the orchestra's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek. So where is the BBC's peripatetic maestro? Recording an unadventurous CD of Brahms with the BBCSO, and last seen on the podium in Amsterdam with the Concergebouw Orchestra conducting Dvorak.

Another contemporary opera composer from Scotland here.
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Oscar Peterson or Karlheinz Stockhausen?

Who touched more people's lives, Oscar Peterson or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Not a rhetorical question, but one prompted by reading a fascinating book over the Christmas break. Both Peterson and Stockhausen were consumate musicians who created seminal works in the 1960s. Night Train was recorded in 1962 and Stimmung was composed in 1968. But they were polar opposites in their approach to music making, and they were polar opposites in their propensity to disturb people.


White Heat, A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties by Dominic Sandbrook is a superbly researched social history which follows on from the author's survey of Britain in the 1950s. Sandbrook's central thesis is that 'the sixties are best understood not as a dramatic turning point, interrupting the course of the nation's history and sending it off in a radically new direction, but rather as a stage in a long evolution stretching back into the forgotten past'. His conclusion is echoed by a New Society survey of social attitudes carried out at the end of the 1960s.

'Shouldn't one talk of the Cautious Sixties, rather than the Swinging Sixties? Hardly any of the obsessions of the metropolitan mass media rate favourably: some of them don't even rate strongly. You emerge with the very strong impression that if the the 1960s meant anything special to most people in Britain it was because they got, during them, a better chance to lead a not-too-poor, not-too-insecure life ... Despite the way the 1960s have often been portrayed, this has not become a wildly changed country: most people are not that keen on being disturbed.'

Oscar Peterson or Karlheinz Stockhausen? I would choose both. But despite our current obsession with all things new, doesn't Dominic Sandbrook's summing up apply as much to the first decade of the twenty-first century as it does to the 1960s? - 'Not ... a dramatic turning point, interrupting the course of ... history and sending it off in a radically new direction, but rather as a stage in a long evolution stretching back into the forgotten past.'


Read how Bill Evans and György Ligeti were part of that evolution.
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