On An Overgrown Path

Between 1887 and 1895 Eric Satie earned his living playing piano in Montmartre cabarets, notably at the Le Chat Noir where the other patrons included Claude Debussy and Paul Verlaine . On my iPod during a  visit to Paris last December  was Satie in the Orient performed by the transcultural Ensemble Sarband . This presents Satie's music in performances by Eastern instruments judiciously augmented by Western forces. Satie's scores are respected almost to the letter, with the objective of creating not a fashionable musical fusion , but what an illuminating sleeve note describes as music that is "neither East nor West". Le Chat Noir is on the hill in the north of Paris called La Butte Montmartre, and at the foot is Les Bouffes du Nord , the home of Peter Brooks' transcultural theatre group. In his essential biography of the director Michael Kustow describes how Brooks' theatre group is "not a swap-shop of skills and techniques, but... a culture like y...

'Where to find the cheapest music on the internet' is the promise in today's Independent . But, on the weekend that the BBC Proms start , the Indie forgets that there is such a thing as classical music to download. To redress the balance, here is an alternative guide to the digital revolution in the form of twelve 'wild cards' of classical downloads. All but one (thanks Bernard) have been supplied from the States by the indefatigable Walt Santner whose complete download detective work can be found down this path . Walt and I must bracket these wild cards with a major health warning. We can't guarantee the quality or copyright status of the files which the links point at. We are not hosting these files, they are not recommendations but rather suggestions for exploration. Feedback from readers on Aces and Jokers and other recommendations via Comments will be very much appreciated. * American works for winds with Howard Hanson - Card 1 * Transfers of Victor Red Se...

News comes from Future Radio that one of the station's four salaried team members has lost his job because of funding pressures. Producer Dan Nyman has been a huge support for my various Overgrown Path projects and will be badly missed. Future Radio is a not-for-profit community station and the rest of the team (including me) are volunteers committed to exploring alternative programming and new media opportunities, and the impressive download figures for projects such as my podcast of the music of Peter Paul Fuchs show it is working. Donations to support the running costs of the station can be made via PayPal. Elsewhere comes news that the BBC's management has been accused of "poor financial accountability" by the BBC Trust after it emerged that the corporation went almost £36m over budget in its spending on bbc.co.uk in the past financial year. A review of bbc.co.uk published by the trust shows that the actual spend in the 12 months to the end of March 2008 on t...

Dear Bob, I just listened to your brilliant program on composers in exile. Bravo to you and to Future Radio . Thank you for playing Peter Paul Fuch's music (photo above). I do hope that you will have some interesting feedback. Thank you also for helping me discover Karl Weigl's music. I must admit that I really knew nothing of it, and it's wonderful. I must now run to rehearsal this evening, we're an hour later here. Bravo, et à bientôt.. Adrian McDonnell , Orchestra de la Cité International , Paris Hear Composers in Exile repeated tonight at 12.50am UK time May 19 (that is Sunday evening North American time, convert to local time zones here ) or download Peter Peter Paul Fuchs' music on An Overgrown Path podcast . We may not be BBC Radio 3, but strong enthusiasm really can change the world. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Here are three very good reasons to try the Future Radio experience . All the broadcasts are available on the internet plus 96.9FM in the Norwich, UK area. Times are UK (convert to local here ) and more details on the two marathon projects will follow nearer the broadcast dates. May 18 & 19 - As relief from BBC Radio 3's endless Chopin Experience you can listen on Sunday May 18 at 5.oopm (repeated May 19) to music in exile by Bohuslav Martinu , Karl Weigl and Peter Paul Fuchs . The webcast of Peter Paul Fuchs' Five Miniatures for chamber ensemble from private tapes is a Future Radio first. Grammy winning conductor John McLaughlin Williams knew Fuchs and he sent me this comment after listening to the advance podcast of this Sunday's programme - ' I hope you'll have a wide audience for the Fuchs/Weigl broadcast. I downloaded the Fuchs and it's interesting. Sounds just like I imagined his mature music would. Merits further investigation'. May 26 12.01...

'The pause is as important as the note' ~ Truman Fisher We start a summer of travelling tomorrow with a flight to Morocco, so the tempo of posting will slow markedly. While I'm away do read other great music blogs here , but why not escape the tyranny of league tables and explore the long tail of music blogs over here ? But don't forget the music continues on my Future Radio programme at 5.00pm UK time every Sunday with a repeat at 12.50am on Monday morning. Here is the forward schedule which starts on April 20 with two modern composers who between them do not have a single note of their music in the 2008 BBC Proms season . April 20 Unique British voices - Peter Maxwell Davies Missa Parvula sung by Choir of Westminster Cathedral; Edmund Rubbra Symphony No 6 played by Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Norman del Mar. (Nice Max connection as I took the photo of the Japanese garden at Dartington Hall where he was a fixture at the Summer School for many years). A...

'It is worth noting that the novel's last scene, with it's off-stage procession, tumultuous church-bells and climactic murder, itself resolves a very inward drama in the convention of grand opera. A fact not lost on the twenty-three-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose opera Die tote Stadt (premiered simultaneously in Cologne and Hamburg in December 1920) is based indirectly on Bruges-la-Morte , and is now the form in which the novel is most widely known. Its immediate source was Le Mirage , the four-act theatrical version of Bruges-la-Morte which Georges Rodenbach prepared at the end of his life, but never saw staged. In dramatising his book he found himself driven to just those kinds of explication through dialogue that the novel pointedly avoids. Korngold, in following him, and in wrapping the play in his precocious melange of Straussian modernism and Viennese Schmaltz, prolonged and broadened the fame of this recondite novel - but at the cost of what makes it so si...

When composer and conductor Peter Paul Fuchs died on March 26, 2007, I marked his passing with two tributes written with John McLaughlin Williams . At the end of the second article I wrote the following - We now have information on Fuchs’ music, but don’t have any photographs of him. Any photos for publication would be very gratefully received. After writing that a student of Fuchs, Adrian McDonnell , who is now conductor of the Orchestre de la Cité Internationale in Paris, emailed me. He is in contact with the composer's widow Mrs. Elissa Fuchs in North Carolina who kindly supplied the photographs and biography that I am publishing to mark the first anniversary of his death. This is the only comprehensive resource on Fuchs on the internet and I am very grateful to Mrs. Elissa Fuchs, Adrian McDonnell and John McLaughlin Williams for making it possible. I have ported the article to Wikipedia so it will reach the widest possible audience. Peter Paul Fuchs was born on Octobe...

A charming and previously unpublished reminiscence of an 11-year-old Gustav Mahler (photo above) comes to An Overgrown Path from Elissa Minet Fuchs former ballerina with the Ballet Russe and the Metropolitan Opera. Mrs. Fuchs (see photo below) is the widow of conductor and composer Peter Paul Fuchs who was the subject of two tributes here when he died last year. A reader drew Mrs. Fuchs' attention to my articles and she has very kindly supplied me with material, including previously unpublished photographs, on her husband for a full appreciation to be published here on the first anniversary of his death next week. Among the material was this memory of a young Gustav Mahler. Peter's grandfather on his mother's side, Alois Rusicka, was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia not far from the Austrian border. He was a law student - pursuing his degree and an amateur musician, a cellist. On one of his visits home, he was approached by a tavern keeper. He was asked to meet ...

While Lucretia was still on tour, Britten left for a brief visit to America - his first transatlantic journey by air - where Peter Grimes was at last to be staged at Koussevitzky's Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood , a vast event involving hundreds of music students, past and present. Three performances were given in early August by a young and enormous cast - enormous in every sense, for Eric Crozier , who had flown over to produce, recalls that in overfed America it was impossible to find a thin child to play the appentice. The 1946 US premiere of Britten's Peter Grimes recalled in Humphrey Carpenter's book Benjamin Britten, A Biography (Faber ISBN 0571143253). The conductor was the twenty-eight-year-old Leonard Bernstein , his assistant was another musician who has featured here recently, Peter Paul Fuchs . In 1945 Joan Cross had sung the role of Ellen Orford in the UK premiere of Peter Grimes conducted by Reginald Goodall , read more about Joan Cross here . In ...

When I published a short tribute to the conductor and composer Peter Paul Fuchs, who died last week, I was very aware that there was practically no information available about his music. To try to rectify that I presumptuously asked John McLaughlin Williams (above) to write a short appreciation of Fuchs’ music for An Overgrown Path . John responded within a few days with this wonderful piece: “I pulled out two of the three scores by Peter Paul Fuchs that he gave me years ago. I think that I never collected back from an orchestra in Boston the score to Fuch's Concertino for Violin & Chamber Orchestra that I had submitted for consideration. Hope springs eternal. I have two violin works from opposite ends of his career: a Violin Sonata from 1937 and a Fantasy for Violin from 1978. Looking at them again brings back my initial impressions. Here was a fine, even inspired craftsman, exquisitely trained in the traditional methods of composition as it was taught in German and Aust...

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 conduct...