On An Overgrown Path

Last week the RPS (Royal Philharmonic Society) Awards 2013 shortlist were announced. As the entry page of the awards website explains they are presented "In association with BBC Radio 3". Elsewhere we are told "our media partner, BBC Radio 3, carry extensive coverage of the awards including a full length programme which focuses on the winners". And one of the award categories is sponsored by BBC Music Magazine, while the announcement of the awards shortlist was broadcast exclusively on BBC Radio 3 on April 11 - see header image. From which you will gather that the BBC has a heavy involvement in the RPS Awards. But their involvement does not end there. Shortlisted for the 2013 'concert series and festival award' is the BBC's own Proms concert series, while nominated for the 'chamber music and song' and 'instrumentalist' awards respectively are the Elias Quartet , Francesco Piemontesi and Steven Osborne , all artists whose career...

The problem today is not one of restricting classical music to any single audience. On the contrary, it is a matter of making concert going a necessary experience and consequently a social activity that is essential to a community as a whole. This cannot be achieved by popularising classical music in a naive way. This cannot be achieved by adapting classical music to the needs of its audience. It cannot be achieved either by limiting classical music to the expectations of an elite. Such a role for classical music can only be created on the basis of a new audience with the intention of serving all those members of a community who see classical music as a possibility of renewal for themselves. To create that manifesto I took the text of Peter Brook's 1969 funding application for his Centre International de Recherches Théâtrales and simply substituted the words 'classical music' for 'the theatre'. Brook's funding application was successful and resulted in milestone...

My co-presenter at this evening's Britten Sinfonia pre-concert event in Norwich is violinist Pekka Kuusisto - seen above. While researching the talk I came across this in a 2007 Guardian profile : Not that he's in sympathy with anything that might be described as crossover. Perish the thought. A few years ago, one of Kuusisto's UK visits coincided with the Classical Brit awards, and he found himself watching them on TV, agog for all the wrong reasons. "Andrea Bocelli got some kind of lifetime achievement award, and then the Opera Babes performed, and the Planets - and so the whole country is being taught to believe that this is what classical music is! It's really grim, you know? I was shocked". Less grim is the news that the first four New York performances of Missy Mazzoli's new multi-media opera ' Song from the 'Uproar: the Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt ', which presumably will not feature in the Classical Brits, have sold out - m...

This path leads from music education in Norfolk England to Thomas Adès in New York. Members of the Britten Sinfonia are seen here working as part of the In Harmony project which uses music to bring positive change to the lives of young people in some of the most deprived areas of England. I took the photos this morning at Larkman Primary School and the young musicians seen in them will be joining violinist Pekka Kuusisto and me for a pre-concert event in Norwich on February 25th at which they will play Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Pachelbel. After their performance Thomas Adès conducts his Concerto for Violin, felicitously subtitled Concentric Paths , with Pekka Kuusisto as soloist, and music by Couperin, Ravel and Stravinsky. The Norwich concert is part of a Concentric Paths tour by the Britten Sinfonia, Thomas Adès and Pekka Kuusisto; the other venues are Dijon (Feb 11), Cambridge (Feb 20), Lincoln Center, New York (Feb 22), London, Queen Elizabeth Hall (Feb 27), and Dublin (Fe...

Last night's BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra concert at Snape Maltings was a blinder. Back in January 2006 I wrote that the BBC Scottish was a band on a roll and last night the young Swedish conductor Stefan Solyom really had them rocking and rolling in Richard Strauss and Rachmaninov. In classical music the word ensemble has been devalued to mean a group of disparate musicians playing from the same score. My dictionary defines ensemble as "a group of performers working together" and that is also a perfect decription of the BBC Scottish. This is an orchestra that leaves its egos in the dressing room and plays together as a single instrument. It is a mark of their standard that the playing last night reminded me of one of the truly great European ensembles - Bernard Haitink's 1970s Concertguebouw Orchestra. Several planets have aligned to allow the BBC Scottish to bounce back from their near death experience in 1980 and become one of the best orchestras in Bri...

Frank Gehry's temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavillion , seen above, is currently the hot thing in London high art. It opens on July 19 with a concert by another priest of high art, Thomas Adès . Despite the photo on the Gallery's website of Adès with baton in hand the event is, in fact, a chamber music recital. The music by Adès and Conlon Nancarrow should be stunning. But high art comes at a price - the cheapest seats are £45 ($90). For which concert goers are warned 'The Pavilion is an open structure, so please dress accordingly. Due to the unique architecture some tickets may have restricted sightline'. High prices - best music by any twentieth century composer ? Picture credit Serpentine Gallery © Gehry Partners LLP 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 - ...

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 a...

Today's Guardian asks 'is this the most exciting thing to have happened to classical music this century?' - Thomas Adès? Osvaldo Golijov? or even Gustavo Dudamel? - er .. no . They were demanding jazz and rock and roll way back . Image credit Matrix Business Coaching .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

Youth is certainly a state of mind in Manchester where the Hallé Orchestra is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its founding. Last night there was a celebratory concert presented by Dame Janet Baker (age 75) which included Ralph Vaughan William's Towards the Unknown Region and Edward Elgar's In the South (Alassio) as well as a 1996 Hallé comission, Thomas Adès' These Premises are Alarmed . Well done the Hallé for defying current music fashion and recognising that Elgar and Vaughan Williams did more than linger "lovingly over musical depictions of pastoral hills and fields, implicitly resisting the march of progress." Hans Richter, Sir John Barbirolli and Mark Elder are the conductors usually associated with the Hallé. But my header photo shows Benjamin Britten rehearsing his Spring Symphony with them in Leeds in 1950. More on the Spring Symphony here . Image credit Leeds classical music . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "...

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 Brit...

'A greater triumph awaited [Sir John Barbirolli] in January 1963 when he conducted Mahler's Ninth Symphony. Mahler was not often played in Berlin, and the [Berlin Philharmonic] orchestra frankly confess that they did not particularly like his music - 'but,' said one of the principals, 'Sir John made us love it as much as he did himself and we played it as he wanted.' So well, indeed, that a leading Berlin critic wrote: 'Not since Furtwängler have we heard such human warmth and soul combined with superb musicianship.' The orchestra themselves asked that Barbirolli should record the symphony with them, the first English conductor to record with the Berlin Philharmonic since Beecham in 1937. During the cold January of 1964 this famous recording was made in the Jesus-Christuskirche , in the suburb of Dahlem' - from Barbirolli, the Authorised Biography by Michael Kennedy. Sir John Barbirolli's Mahler Nine is currently available in the EMI Great ...

Just received - a press release announcing that Pierre-Laurent Aimard (photo above) will succeed Thomas Adès as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival for three years with effect from 2009. As the Independent commented following his BBC Prom earlier this year: " At 50 , the French pianist-conductor still has the eager simplicity that induced Messiaen to make him his protégé at 12, and the luminous brilliance that persuaded Boulez to install him at 19 as resident pianist for his brand-new Ensemble InterContemporain . . . .” Pierre-Laurent Aimard explained: “It was a big surprise to receive Jonathan Reekie's proposal to become Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival. It was only after long reflection that I realised it was the right and possibly natural progression for me in terms of musical challenge and engagement. I love the exploration of musical confrontations and the encounter with various creators and performing partners - embracing the literature of differ...

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK, when we remember all those who lost their lives in the struggle for peace and freedom. Remembrance Sunday has many musical connections, ranging from Benjamin Britten through Arvo Pärt , to George Lloyd, who was himself traumatised in action . Next Saturday I will be at a performance in Norwich Cathedral of Herbert Howell's 1936 Requiem . This is an economic, intense and moving work that lasts for little more than fifteen minutes, and is scored for SSAATTBB and organ. There is an excellent recording of it on Naxos by the Choir of St Johns' College, Cambridge directed by Christopher Robinson. The CD also includes Take him, earth, for cherishing , the motet composed by Howells to mark the assasination of President John F. Kennedy. We will be remembering that sad event just five days after the Norwich Cathedral performance of Howell's Requiem . My footer photo is a reminder of one of the more obscure musical connections to Remembrance ...

'With a few obvious exceptions (John Adams springs to mind, as do Elliott Carter and Steve Reich), Britain is not conspicuously friendly territory for recent American music' writes Steven Stucky in a very well-argued article in today's Guardian. You are right Steven. The problem lies with our broadcasters and concert planners. They suffer from the American pie synodrome. If a composer's music shows any sign of audience acceptance we are fed such large portions of that composer's particular pie by the BBC and the Barbican Centre ( which are now, effectively, one and the same ) that we run screaming back to our own Thomas Adès and Malcolm Arnold . As reported here, it has happened recently with John Adams , Philip Glass , Elliott Carter , Steve Reich , and Osvaldo Golijov . We'd love to hear more of the many other fine contemporary American composers. Just tell the BBC and Barbican that a healthy diet is a varied one. When did the BBC last broadcast ' Americ...

"My ideal day would be staying at home and playing the harpsichord works of Couperin - new inspiration on every page" said Thomas Adès , and François Couperin is a major influence on the music of Adès, including his Sonata de Caccia , a trio for baroque oboe, horn and harpsichord. If you don't have a harpsichord at home all is not lost. Michael Borgstede (photo above) has recorded the complete harpsichord music of Couperin . The performances are excellent, and the the sound captured by engineer Peter Arts in three different Dutch churches is very good. The 11 CD box is on the Brilliant Classics label, and that means it's at budget price - I paid £30 ($62) in the UK. Michael Borgstede's background is interesting. He lives in Tel Aviv, and is the Middle East correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung as well as being a highly regarded harpsichordist and organist. Follow this link for a wide range of MP3 downloads from his website. No excuse...

Contemporary music is flourishing in Aldeburgh. Thomas Adès is the Festival's artistic director, innovative programming is pulling in new audiences, traditional musical boundaries are disappearing, and an inspirational £14m ($28m) creative campus will make new music available to future generations. Teamwork has played a vital role, but much of the credit for this success must go to Aldeburgh Music's chief executive Jonathan Reekie, who came to Suffolk in 1998 from Almeida Opera . The photo above shows Jonathan (left) talking to Bob Shingleton at Snape during this exclusive interview for On An Overgrown Path : BS - What is 'Aldeburgh Music', and what is its remit? JR - Aldeburgh Music was founded by the composer Benjamin Britten and singer Peter Pears in 1948, when they set up a Festival based in their home town of Aldeburgh . It’s remit draws on the original principles they established. These were to nurture talent by mixing established musical stars with emer...

Here are Pliable's personal picks for the remainder of this year's BBC Proms season. All Proms are available for seven days online, detailed programmes and broadcast times for every concert are available from the BBC web site . * August 29 , 10.00pm - important contemporary music is once again consigned to the bed-time ghetto . Works by Oliver Knussen, Anton Webern and Julian Anderson are performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. * August 30 , 7.30pm - a rare opportunity to hear Artur Honegger's excellent 1946 Symphony No. 3 Symphonie liturgie played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony under Mariss Jansons . Herbert von Karajan's recorded legacy has dated somewhat, but his recording of this symphony is definitive. (Lovely Lauterwasser cover photo as well). * August 31 , 7.30pm - shout it from the rooftops - the world premiere of Thea Musgrave's Two's Company, a BBC commission. I wrote about Thea Musgrave's concerto for orchestra, Helios, a few ...