The shock of the missing new

Email received - Dear Herbert (sic), The Los Angeles Philharmonic is hosting an online Enter-To-Win a pair of tickets to the Philharmonia Orchestra concert in May. Would you be able to mention this on your blog for your LA readers?

LA Phil Presents – Philharmonia Orchestra – May 6 & 7, 8:00 PM at Walt Disney Concert Hall Christoph von Dohnányi, conductor

For a chance to win tickets to the Philharmonia concert on May 7, click here or visit: http://www.laphil.com/tickets/special_events/philharmonia_contest.cfm

Thank you! All the best, Stacy
Allied Live/TMG - The Marketing Group
110 S. Fairfax, Suite 210
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Stacy, I'm delighted to give Walter Legge's old orchestra a plug. But couldn't the Philharmonia have offered your funky West Coast audiences something a little more challenging than the programmes below? Did classical music really end with Mahler? Couldn't they have included some of that gorgeous Xenakis I heard them play in London in March?

Regards from UK, Herbert

Tue May 6 8pm
Philharmonia Orchestra
Christoph von Dohnányi, conductor
Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4, "Italian"
Mahler Symphony No. 1

Wed May 7 8pm
Philharmonia Orchestra
Christoph von Dohnányi, conductor
Beethoven Egmont Overture
Schumann Symphony No. 1, "Spring"
Beethoven Symphony No. 5

Header photo shows Elizabeth Schwarzkopf viewing the commemorative display I created for the Philharmonia Orchestra's Walter Legge Memorial concerts in June 1979. I am standing alongside Madame Schwarzkopf. More on that story 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 broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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

Boulez - great bogeyman of 20th century music

Henry Holland has left a new comment on the post "Boulez - Rituel In Memoriam Maderna":

Ah, one my favorite Paths of yours Pliable since I started to read OAOP two (three?) years ago. I love Rituel in Memoriam Maderna, I listened to it on my iPod a few weeks ago. I wish that there was more than one official recording of it or I could find some live versions on my usual file theft sites. I know Boulez is The Great Bogeyman of 20th Century music along with Schoenberg, and while I certainly don't like all of his pieces, there are some that are among my favorite pieces of music.

I went to a performance of Pli selon Pli at the Concertgebouw when I was in Amsterdam recently and despite the excellent performance by the ASKO Ensemble and Barbara Hannigan I wasn't impressed by the piece all that much; I hadn't heard it in a while.

I keep hoping that a performance of the amazing Repons will take place in the US so I can easily afford to travel to hear it but it's obviously very complicated to do in a live situation.

About 15 years ago (?) Mr. Boulez conducted the four Notations that he had then completed the orchestral versions for here in Los Angeles with the Philharmonic and it was one of the most stunning things I've ever heard in a concert hall. The Phil back then could just barely play the pieces (they'd have no problem now that Mr. Salonen has whipped them in to shape) but what stunning music. I've really wanted Mr. Boulez to come back and conduct here, anything will do, but he hasn't been here in at least a decade. I wonder if he and Mr. Salonen had a falling out? :-(

Great picture of the set-up for the Gruppen premiere and what handsome men Boulez and Stockhausen are in the bottom picture. There's apparently going to be a book about the gay aspect of the Darmstadt group appearing soon and while I will buy it instantly, I'm also afraid that the revelations in it will be used to browbeat that group, much like if you read some of the criticism of Britten in the 40's-70's, there's a barely disguised layer of homophobia to it. As if a lot of people needed the gay angle to denigrate the Darmstadt composers, any excuse along the lines of "they killed classical music" will do! :-)

Thanks for that diversion Henry. Now follow this path for the funny side of Darmstadt, and my picture shows more handsome men there, from left to right, Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
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

Does anyone still care about the major labels?

Does anyone really still care about the "majors" anyway? Their astounding lack of imagination has hastened their own entropy. Example: the Cleveland Orchestra hasn't made a recording in nearly a decade, and when they finally get the wherewithall to do so, on DG no less, what do they announce? Beethoven's 9th. The yawns are deafening. I can't remember the last time I bought a major label recording." comments a reader on my recent post Classical music under different stewardship.

A good point, but some people do still care about the major record labels, not least the major orchestras. If you are the Los Angeles Philharmonic and you need a new music director, when the unquestionably talented Gustavo Dudamel comes knocking with a Deutsche Grammophon contract in his pocket you suddenly care. But it didn’t use to be that way, as this story tells.

Mrs Louise Hanson Dyer (photo below) was an enterprising and charismatic Australian millionairess who trained in Australia as a singer under Dame Nellie Melba before settling in France in 1927. Mrs Dyer’s lifestyle was definitely ‘A list’, and included haute couture, a house in Monaco, a flat on the Right Bank in Paris, and a Blue Period Picasso bought from the artist himself. She was passionate about baroque music, and committed to its promotion and preservation. To achieve this she founded Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre (Lyre-Bird Press) in Paris in 1932, and commissioned leading musicologists to produce accessible editions of then little-known repertoire, including Couperin, Lully and Rameau. The next logical step was to supplement the editions with authentic recordings. These were originally on 78 rpm discs, and L'Oiseau-Lyre went on to became one of the first companies to release long-playing records in France.

As the major record labels muscled in on the growing baroque market Mrs Dyer turned her energies to discovering new talent. Her extraordinary ability to identify the potential of musicians early in their careers resulted in some of the first recordings of Sir Colin Davis, Joan Sutherland, Janet Baker, the Melos Ensemble and Thurston Dart.

Louise Dyer had immense flair and style, but she was also a hard task-master. The first ever record made by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields was recorded for L'Oiseau -Lyre in the Conway Hall in London in 1961. No royalties were paid, fees were low and session time was limited. For 'A Recital by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields' the players each received £5 ($9) from Mrs Dyer in used banknotes notes from her handbag. The 40 minute programme of rarely heard works by Corelli, Torelli, Locatelli, Albicastro and Handel was recorded in just two three hour sessions, and the performing editions of the Albicastro and Handel works were prepared by the session's producer, Jimmy Burnett. Despite the pressures (or perhaps because of) this first release was rapturously received by the critics, and went on to become a best seller. It also launched the Academy of St Martin of the Fields on a career as one of the top classical recording ensembles.

When Louise Dyer died in 1962 control of L'Oiseau-Lyre passed to her second husband. The catalogue of recordings was sold to Decca in 1970, the label went on to make many fine recordings with Christopher Hogwood and others, but eventually became a baroque music sub-label in the faceless world of corporate recording. But the Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre publishing house continues to thrive today as a joint venture with the University of Melbourne.

The remarkable success in the 1950s and 60s of L'Oiseau-Lyre was down to Louise Dyer’s entrepreneurial flair, astute talent spotting, tight financial control, and above all passion for music. It was all snuffed out after Decca was bought by Universal Music, who also own Deutsche Grammophon, whose artists also include Gustavo Dudamel (left) and the Cleveland Orchestra, which is also where this overgrown path started. The thought of Gustavo Dudamel being paid in used dollar bills from a Gucci handbag round the back of Disney Hall is appealing - we can but dream.

Now read how a surprise appointment of a conductor by another top American orchestra went pear shaped.
* With acknowledgements to 'The Academy of St Martin in the Fields' by Meirion and Susie Harries, (Michael Joseph ISBN 0718120493), to Scott Belyea whose comment on my Howell's and Lambert's Clavichord originally sparked this article, and to the Los Angeles Philharmonic for giving me a reason to upload it. Image credits: Record label from Revolutions 33, do visit this site if you are interested in LP labels, Louise Dyer from Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre. Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "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