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.
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Honey I shrunk the soloist

Youth was the musical 'must have' in 2007. Could marriage be the musical 'must have' in 2008? My favourite Christmas disc this year was Ton Koopman playing Christmas Carols on the baroque Van Peteghem organ in St. Martinuskerk, Haringe, Belgium. Wonderful music from Sweelink, Buxtehude, Bull and Bach, wonderful playing by Koopman on the 1778 organ, with wonderful sound from producer Tini Mathot, who just happens to be Mrs Koopman, and the CD really is a family affair as it is released on Koopman's own Antoine Marchand record label. Tini Mathot is a distinguished keyboard player in her own right, and she is seen above playing alongside her husband. I last heard them together several years ago playing the Art of Fugue on two harpsichords ago in the peerless acoustics of St George's Brandon Hill, Bristol.

Tini Mathot and Ton Koopman are the latest in a distinguished line of couples who have worked together as performers and producers. There are Isabella de Sabata and John Eliot Gardiner at Soli deo Gloria, and Montserrat Figueras and Jordi Savall at Alia Vox (photo below), like Mathot and Koopman both couples work in the early music field, what is it about gut strings? They were preceeded by Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, and of course Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Walter Legge. Reminders of other husband and wife performer and production teams please. And yes, I know about Joyce Hatto and William Barrington-Coupe, while Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy don't count, even if the bling-bling President's son is a hip hop producer.


Judging by the number of mentions in recent weeks Belgium is the 'must have' country for 2008. Check out these links, and we are off there next month for John Cage, Morton Feldman et al.
Photo credit Trigonale early music festival. 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

Rostropovich – reaching out for the music

There are three ways of knowing a thing. Take for instance a flame. One can be told of the flame, one can see the flame with his own eyes, and finally one can reach out and be burned by it – Sufi scholar.

Some of us are told of music, some of us can see music, but Mstislav Rostropovich, who died today age 80, reached out and was burnt by it. I first met him after he conducted a wildly exuberant performance of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony with the Snape Maltings Training Orchestra in 1977. Rostropovich had a long-standing relationship with the Aldeburgh Festival, and with its founder Benjamin Britten, who had died the previous year. This relationship had produced the Cello Symphony, the Cello Suites, and a Cello Sonata, all of which Britten wrote for the Russian cellist.

Back in the 1970s I was working for EMI, and Slava’s relationship with the company went back to 1956 when he recorded the Miaskovsky Cello Concerto. In 1974 Rostropovich and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, left the Soviet Union, and the following year he recorded the two Haydn Cello Concertos, with Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, in the Henry Wood Hall in London for EMI.

At that time EMI’s famous International Classical Division, which had been founded by Walter Legge, was housed in modest offices in Hanover Square, just off London's Oxford Street, I was EMI’s international marketing manager working for the division’s director, Peter Andry, who had masterminded several legendary ‘east meets west’ recordings, including Karajan’s Dresden Meistersinger and the Berlin Beethoven Triple Concerto with Richter, Oistrak and Rostropovich.

For me, an incident away from the recording studio showed the difference between Rostropovich and other superstar musicians. We decided to celebrate the release of the Haydn record by inviting Slava to the EMI offices in 1977 to present him with the lavish EMI-Pathé gatefold edition of the concertos. The visit summed up Slava’s approach to life - energy, enthusiasm, passion, but above all a love for music and a love for the human race. He made sure he spent time talking to all the background staff who rarely came into contact with the artists, yet alone superstars. We were working with many other great musicians at the time, but the prospect of Herbert von Karajan visiting our offices, yet alone hugging a secretary was unthinkable.

Others will document Rostropovich’s career and achievements in more detail, and in particular his work defending human and artistic freedoms. We are fortunate that he leaves such a fine recorded legacy as a cellist. He went on to achieve much as a conductor, but the electricity he radiated from the podium was difficult to transfer to recordings. I can remember discussions at EMI as to whether his 1970s Tchaikovsky Symphony cycle should be remastered, as the pressings somehow lacked the frisson of the actual performances.

In the later years his energy was occasionally misplaced, and his fee as a conductor became an obstacles with some promoters, restricting his appearances at important series such as the BBC Promenade Concerts. The last time I saw him was in London several years ago with the Lithuanian Ballet, when he conducted a staged performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet that ended with a bizarre mis en scene with Rostropovich joining the dead lovers on stage in the final bars.

Mstislav Rostropovich will be remembered as a genius with the cello and baton, as a champion of human rights, as a consummate ambassador for music, and above all for his love for humanity. He truly reached out and was burnt by the music, let us celebrate that today.

Slava's Russian roots informed everything he did, now read about Western takes on Russian music.
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My first classical record

What was the first classical record you bought? Mine was an LP of Karajan conducting Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, the 'Pathetique', with the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon 13892SLPM. I bought it in 1969 from a music shop in Reading where I was at University. The shop had listening booths with acoustic tiles, and it sold sheet music, musical instruments, and classical records.

The LP is playing as I write. I have just serviced my Thorens TD125 turntable with SME arm (a capacitor in the motor control circuit blew after 30 years). The LP sound through my Arcam Alpha 10 amplifier and B & W Nautilus 803 speakers is magnificent, when the planets are aligned beneficially vinyl can still deliver a musicality that surpasses CD. (Thankfully I have kept my LP collection, and the surfaces are immaculate apart from the inevitable pressing blemishes).

What overgrown path led me to buy that LP of the 'Pathetique'? Well, I can answer that question quite easily. Some years previously I had been taken by my parents, while on holiday, to hear Tchaikovsky 6th played by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the Winter Gardens in Bournemouth. The conductor was a dynamic young Chinese maestro Choo Hoey. (Googling for Choo Hoey pulls up references to a conductor active in the Far East, could this be the same one? - I must have seeen him more than forty years ago).

Did that early hearing of Tchaikovsky 6 burn irreversible patterns into my neural networks a la Mozart Effect? Did the B minor key signature programme me towards an near obsession for Masses in minor keys in general, and Bach's masterpiece in particular? Was it that adiogio lamentoso last movement that inclined me towards the melancholic of the Four Temparaments? (Post coming up, time permitting, on a CD called the Four Temparaments - no not Carl Nielsen - it is an excellent new release from the innovative viol consort Phantasm, and it includes a setting for viols of the Byrd 4 Part Mass!)

Could it have been that brooding Siegfried Lauterwasser cover photograph of Karajan (this link gives an interesting perspective on Lauterwasser, who was HvK's 'court' photographer) that headed me towards a career that took me from the BBC, and then to EMI where I worked on some of Karajan's projects including his recording of Debussy's operatic masterpiece Pelleas et Melisande? That project summed up the Karajan conundrum completely, sublime music making and an odious personality. My favourite Karajan story is about when he was conducting at Bayreuth with Hans Knappertsbusch. There were just two lavatories at the end of a long corridor backstage. Karajan's personal secretary, it is said, put a notice on one, 'For the exclusive use of Herr Karajan'. An hour later a notice appeared on the other one written by Knappertsbusch, 'For all the other arseholes'.

I was also involved with others in the Karajan circle. When Walter Legge died in 1979 I created an exhiibition at short notice for the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall in London. Legge's wife Elizabeth Schwarzkopf (below) viewed the exhibition before a Philharmonia Orchestra memorial concert, and complained to me that I had described Legge in the display as an 'entrepreneur.' Now I have often been wrong in my choice of words, but in that instance I am convinced I was dead right.

But the path didn't just lead me to Karajan and his circle . My second LP was Bernard Haitink conducting the London Philharmonic in Holst's Planet Suite (A strange choice, the reading with its odd tempi has long since been deleted). Haitink resoundingly disproves the rule that you need an odious personality to be a great conductor. (And also Colin Davis - interesting he has no 'personal' web site, this is a quote from the article I've linked to.. I detest all that charisma stuff. It leads to unmusical things like the pursuit of power. The older I get, the more wary I am of power. It is a beastly ingredient in our society - he said that in 1990!).

I lunched once with Haitink in the staff refectory at Glyndebourne to seek approval for the cover design of his recording of the Brahms Double Concerto with Perlman and Rostropovich (approval was given without a hint of the vanity and petulance cultivated by Riccardo Muti and others). In those days conductors had cover approval in their contracts, nowadays they have to start their own record labels to make a recording. While driving down to Glyndebourne I had been listening to Previn's first (and by far the best) recording of Walton's First Symphony on RCA. I suggested that Haitink looked at the score, and he subsequently recorded it for EMI. It wasn't a great commercial success, it was a lesson in leaving A & R planning to the professionals. (But I do remember suggesting that Previn recorded the Korngold Violin Concerto and Symphony in F sharp in the 1980s, only to be told he wouldn't touch film music. It is amazing how principles adapt to economics). Haitink later did go on to record a fine cycle of the Vaughan Williams symphonies for EMI after I left. I am always puzzled as to why this fine conductor never plays or records Sibelius. With his achievements recording Bruckner I have always thought Haitink would be a natural Sibelian - give me one Sibelius symphony for every ten of Shostakovich!


The Vaughan William symphonies leads me on to another musical giant whose path briefly crossed mine, Sir Adrian Boult. But that will have to wait until another post.....

If you enjoyed this post you may enjoy Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer