On An Overgrown Path

In June and July 1945 Yehudi Menuhin performed at camps for “displaced persons” – Holocaust survivors – including outside where the demolished Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had stood. He was deeply shocked by what he saw; yet in 1947 he returned to Germany to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the recently de-Nazified Wilhelm Furtwängler. Menuhin was the first Jewish musician to perform in post-World War II Germany, explaining that he did so in order to support the rehabilitation of German music and to help heal the spirit of the German people.  My header photo shows Menuhin playing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 in 1966 with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the  now fashionably-reviled Herbert von Karan. The Jerusalem Cinematheque - Israel Film Archive describes that collaboration as an example of how "how music can still contribute to reconciliation today". Coincidentally, or possibly not, both Menuhin and Karajan were yoga practitioners. Menu...

Bruno Walter's 1938 Vienna Philharmonic interpretation of Mahler's Ninth Symphony still has the power to move and enlighten, despite the technical limitations of the recording. Similarly Wilhelm Furtwängler's Berlin Philharmonic concert recording from 1949 of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony still reminds us that beauty is more powerful than hatred, again despite considerable technical limitations. Today, blowing 866 million euro on a not quite acoustically perfect concert hall is the go-to solution for saving classical music, which means a celebrity conductor can  throw his batons out of the pram  when he is not rewarded with a blinged-out new hall. So why, given these contemporary priorities, can great recordings from the past touch us so deeply when heard through the technology equivalent of a tin shed concert hall?  The answer lies in the little-understood but vitally important process of listening . There is no such thing as perfect sound , or historic sound, or bad...

Attention focused by the #MeToo movement on high profile conductors including Daniele Gatti and Charles Dutoit has once again raised the question of whether alleged activities away from the podium should negate the value of what a musician achieves on the podium. This is certainly not a new question; but in the past it was ideology rather than intimacy that blighted musical legacies ; with Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm and Clemens Krauss among those whose reputation suffered due to ill-advised political dalliances . Classical music is a transcendent art, so it is no surprise it shares with spiritual teachers a history of debunked leaders. Among the many spiritual leaders who have been found to have toes, if not feet, of clay are Cardinal Donald Wuerl , Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh , Chögyam Trungpa and Shimano Roshi . But in a memoir touching on the life of the controversial mystic and Sufi teacher Reshad Feild , author Bruce Miller makes th...

Back in 2005 a post here looked at the 20th century music that Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic. Among the forgotten composers that Furtwängler programmed was Walter Braunfels, whose music featured in two Berlin Philharmonic concerts in the pre-National Socialism years of 1924 and 1925. Walter Braunfels was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1882. He studied music in Vienna and Munich, and converted to Catholicism in 1918. In the 1920s he achieved considerable success both as a pianist and composer; with the opera Die Vögel (1920) among his early successes, followed by a Te Deum in 1922. His Grosse Messe , modelled on Beethhoven's Missa Solemnis , followed in 1927, and received frenzied applause and lengthy ovation at its premiere in Cologne. But Braunfel was soon to fall from favour: his half-Jewish bloodline marked him out when Hitler became Chancellor, and in 1933 he was dismissed from all official offices and denounced as a composer of Entartete Mu...

But a masterpiece comes when you must be convinced that’s a masterpiece, and I make sure that’s a masterpiece. If you play a very boring performance of the Glazunov Number Six or Number Seven , people will be saying it’s not a masterpiece. You must convince them that’s a masterpiece, and there’s a lot of masterpieces which people don’t know. It’s my idea that we should not to be with only this great stuff of repertoire, which basically everyone conducts. You know them exactly and you love them, this Brahms Symphony Number Four; you love all Brahms’ music. Of course you want to explore very much, but you’re doing it anyway. But that’s a masterpiece. I had to discover the meaning of other composers which are around that did not write a masterpiece. It’s second rate music or third rate music, but don’t tell that to anyone. Try to convince people that’s not. Every conductor says that Glazunov’s music is second rate music or third rate music, but I don’t think so. This kind of ballet music...

Elsewhere the dead horse of changing concert hall conventions is being given another futile flogging . Has it not occurred to anyone else that concertgoers applaud between movements to add some spontaneity to the perfectly manicured and totally lifeless performances that are the stock-in-trade of the new generation of youthful maestros? Has it not occurred to anyone else that audiences bring drinks into concert halls because today's unadventurous and uninspired concerts are best experienced through an alcoholic haze? The sociologist Emile Durkheim posited that to redefine a convention you must first break that convention. Classical music revisionists preach that to attract new audiences, concert hall conventions must be broken. This doctrine may, or may not, contain some truth. But what is certain is that breaking existing concert hall conventions is simply part of Emile Durkheim’s process of redefinition, from which a new set of conventions - which coincidentally often serve...

That archive document from my collection details the concert played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler on January 22 and 23 1945. It was held in the Admiralspalast theatre in Berlin which the orchestra had moved to after the Philharmonie Hall was destroyed by bombs in November 1943. The footnote explains that on January 23 only the first two movements of the Mozart symphony were played. This was presumably due to interruption by an air raid as Berlin was under heavy attack at the time. In an age when a mobile phone ringing in a Mahler symphony causes a Twitter firestorm it is impossible to imagine what concert going was like for the audience and musicians at the time. Below is a 1944 British intelligence map from my library used by Allied bomber aimers for their night raids - the strategically important buildings are marked in black. I have added the Admiralspalast as a red square to show its vulnerable position: directly across Friedrichstraße is a major ra...

A New York PR agency was recently imploring me to bring to your attention an "adorable and amazing" eight year old Beethoven-playing piano prodigy. But I have a much more important subject to tackle today - underlining in books. Humanity can be divided into two groups, those who believe underlining selected passages in books is a heinous crime, and those who couldn't care less. I fall into the former category, and so, I know, do some readers . But embellishing books does have its uses, as the accompanying images show. Shortly after his death in 1977 I bought several books from the library of Harold Rutland. Born in 1900, Rutland was a pianist, composer, BBC music producer and editor of Musical Times . He was also a lifelong friend of the composer Kaikhosru Sorabji who dedicated three works to him including the massive Fourth Symphony for solo piano, and the Fragment Written for Harold Rutland, for piano which Rutland premiered in 1927. Some of Sorabji's legen...

'A musician is also a man, but more important than his music is his attitude to life.' That quote from Pablo Casals appeared in my 2010 post A musician is also a man . The vexed relationship between music, conscience and accountability has been a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . So thanks go to John McLaughlin Williams for pointing me towards a new article titled Music, Conscience, Accountability and the Third Reich on the website of the Oriel Foundation , which is dedicated to rediscovering suppressed music treasures of the twentieth century. Header image is from my 2008 post Innocent of political delinquency . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

BTW, regarding your most recent blog post about attracting young people to classical music, Jonathan Harvey's comments mirrors something I've been saying for years, that classical music is lacking bass. That was one of the first things I noticed when I switched from being a blues/rock fan to a classical fan was that one expects to have a visceral experience at a concert. That blasphemous email arrived from composer and techno-maverick Jeff Harrington . Or is it blasphemous? There is a strong correlation between the popularity of works such as the 1812 Overture and Ravel's Pictures at an Exhibition orchestration and their bass content. And Gustav Mahler , Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Leonard Bernstein, and Dmitri Mitropoulos all agreed with Jeff and turned up the bass by performing the quartet repertoire with string orchestras. Above is the LP release of Bernstein's recording of Mitropoulos' version for string orchestra of Beethoven's Op. 131 Qua...

In a commendable attempt to liven up the blogging silly season Alex Ross nominates a CD of Wilhelm Furtwängler's Piano Quintet as the worst recording ever made . Never one to refuse a challenge I respond with the CD seen above. Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996) was one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth century. After fighting against the fascist occupiers of Greece in World War Two he started writing the poem on which his reputation rests and which almost certainly won him the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature. Axion esti (Worthy it is) is a contemporary epic which progresses forward through history to the liberation of Greece in 1944 and on to a vision of a more peaceful future. It was published in 1959 to great acclaim and in 1960 Odysseas Elytis was awarded the Greek national prize for lyricism. Mikis Theodorakis responded to Elytis' masterpiece with his oratorio Axion esti , which was premiered in Athens in 1964. Like the poem on which it is based, Theodorakis...

Pliable's first law of music says that if a great musician becomes involved in repulsive politics, that involvement will eventually come back to haunt him. Richard Wagner , Wilhelm Furtwängler and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf are all proof of the law. So too is Reginald Goodall, whose classic English language recording of the Ring from the 1970s is seen above. As I recounted in my 2007 article my 2007 article on Goodall - Even though Britain was at war with Germany, Goodall continued to support the fascist cause. He campaigned for the British Union of Fascist, called the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck ‘disgusting’, and was actually arrested briefly for expressing pro-German views in public. Even after the war Goodall was unrepentant. He was recruited by Walter Legge to take part in a tour of to Germany in 1946. Some of the performers visited the site of the Belsen concentration camp, only to be told by Goodall, who did not make the visit, that Belsen was British fiction ma...

Just this morning I was reminded of how few performances these days avoid what Wilhelm Furtwängler described as "the hoar frost of routine". Driving back from a game of tennis I switched on the car radio in the middle of a BBC Radio 3 broadcast of Elgar's Cockaigne . Within a few bars it was obvious that something special had happened in the recording studio. The orchestra were playing with passion, the sound was magnificent, and the white-hot interpretation had comprehensively thawed any hoar frost. The conductor was Georg Solti, the orchestra was the London Philharmonic, and the recording dated from the 1970s. That Cockaigne is magnificent; but I must confess to being more ambivalent about some of Solti's other heart-on-sleeve Elgar, including his 1972 LP of the First Symphony seen above. It might not be my desert island disc of that particular work. But I am quite happy to return to it again and again as it passes the "hoar frost free" test effortlessl...

In Christopher and his Kind , Christopher [Isherwood] admits to have been 'violently prejudiced against culture worship' . He hated 'the gushings of concert audiences and the holy atmosphere of concerts.' Stephen thought it was 'in some respects' like 'the Nazi attitude' . It was particularly painful when the brutal sarcasm was turned against figures like the pianist Artur Schnabel and the composer Roger Sessions , both of whom Spender had come to know, and revere, in Berlin. He continued to go to concerts (by Schnabel, Bruno Walter and Furtwängler ), defying his friends philistine edicts. From - Stephen Spender the authorized biography by John Sutherland. I am a camera in East Berlin here . My montage shows Roger Sessions with Christopher Isherwood on the left and Stephen Spender right. 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...

Every recording of Bach's Orchestral Suites, Brandenburg Concertos and Keyboard Concertos made before 1957 are among the delights available free online from the British Library website seen above. That means Bach from Boult, Busch, Casals, Furtwängler ( his Brandenburg No. 3 with the Berlin Philharmonic plays as I write as a reminder of how every great musician has their blind spots), Horenstein, Klemperer, Koussevitsky, Reiner and Weingartner, to name just a few. There are also delights from Beethoven , Brahms (including Karajan's Brahms 1 with, I quote, 'Amsterdam Orchestra' and 1 and 4 with the Philharmonia), Haydn and Mozart , including Bruno Walter's Prague with the Vienna Philharmonic . Plus world music from the archives. It is an extraordinary treasure trove, except for one thing. The British Library site says, for obvious copypyright reasons - Available only in the UK . But a recommendation does come from download super-sleuth Walt Santner who liv...

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. Those three sentences make up the second paragraph of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Diary, which is dated autumn 1930. The four photographs were taken by me during my first visit to Berlin in 1973, at the height of the cold war - see Final approach to Berlin . They were taken on black & white film using an Olympus Pen S 35mm camera. They were then developed, carefully printed, fixed and mislaid during one of our numerous house moves. I found them a few weeks ago at the bottom of a drawer, and they have never been published before. The header photo was taken close to the notorious Spree River crossing point. It shows the memorials to those who were shot while attempting to swim the river and escape to the West. The two memori...

I caught a few minutes of this morning's new year's day concert with Daniel Barenboim and the Vienna Philharmonic. Today the concert is a shrink-wrapped package of DVD, CD and broadcast rights with guaranteed on-air mentions of the presiding maestros intercontinental enterprises. But it wasn't always like that. Willi Boskovsky , who directs the 1968 new year's concert above, was concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1936 to 1979, and led the new year's concert Vorgeiger -style (but, not in the video above, where he wields a baton) from 1959 to 1979. In Boskovsky's day there were no fringe benefits , and the Viennese conductor was famous for his astute handling of his personal finances. A colleague of mine at EMI, the late Douglas Pudney , told the story of a visit to Vienna to discuss a new recording project with Boskovsky. Douglas was invited to talk business over lunch at the Musikverein . Which turned out to be sandwiches and a thermos of coffee brou...

Above are the programmes from the Berlin Philharmonic archives for their 1944/45 season detailing the last five concerts that Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted with the orchestra before the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. The Gerhart von Westerman work was a first performance. The note after the concert on 22/23 January 1945 explains that only the first two movements of the Mozart Symphony G minor were performed on the 23rd. No explanation is given as to why, but we must assume that an air raid interrupted the performance. These were not the last concerts given by the Berlin Philharmonic before the Nazi surrender. After the interrupted concert on January 23 Furtwängler fled to Switzerland via Vienna. But the orchestra stayed in Berlin and gave their final concert under the Nazis on March 28 conducted by Robert Heger. Read the chilling story of that last concert here. A full analysis of the new music performed under Furtwängler is here . My source for the programmes Wilhelm Furtwängler...

It was a night spent in the basement of a burnt out building. People injured by the atomic bomb took shelter in this room, filling it. They passed the night in darkness, not even a single candle among them. The raw smell of blood, the stench of death. Body heat and the reek of sweat. Moaning. Miraculously, out of the darkness, a voice sounded: "The baby's coming!" In that basement room, in those lower reaches of hell, A young woman was now going into labor. What were they to do, Without even a single match to light the darkness? People forgot their own suffering to do what they could. A seriously injured woman who had been moaning but a moments before, Spoke out: "I'm a midwife. Let me help with the birth." And now life was born There in the deep, dark depths of hell. Her work done, the midwife did not even wait for the break of day. She died, still covered with the blood. Bring forth new life! Even should it cost me my own, Bring forth new life! by Sadako K...