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

Happy long tail to all my readers

Right at the end of 2007 the Observer ran a story that shames the whole classical music community, including this and other blogs. It was about the BBC's rejection of director Tony Palmer's Vaughan Williams film, a news story that was featured prominently by the Observer and several music blogs, including this one. It now appears that the rejection letter quoted in the coverage was a publicity-seeking hoax, although the identity of the hoaxer remains unclear - read the full account here.

This story neatly sums up a year in which relevance became the order of the day, and swapping the long tail of culture for the short head of the mass market became the number one priority. 2007 saw Norman Lebrecht's attempts to go mass market hit the buffers, while William Barrinton-Coupe's efforts on behalf of his late wife met a similar fate. It was also the year when the Royal Opera House went mass market with its advertising, BBC TV went mass market with its classical music programming, Deutsche Grammophon went mass market with its CD covers, John Foulds went mass market with his World Requiem, the BBC Proms went mass market with its crooners, and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra went mass market with its concert attire and politics.

'Relevance' is in and the long tail is out. But it doesn't always work as Dominic Sandbrook recounts in his excellent book White Heat, a History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties? 'Many Protestant churchmen, alarmed at their inability to reverse the long decline in church-going, concluded that 'relevance was the order of the day'. According to Grace Davie, the churches, besotted like so many other institutions by the 'desire to be modern', consequently 'looked to the secular world for a lead and borrowed, in some cases rather uncritically, both its ideas and forms of expression'. It was in this period, for example, that liberal churchmen first began wielding guitars, introducing handclapping into the Anglican rite and generally conducting themselves like frustrated pop singers, a tactic that failed to attract many new parishioners and often alienated those still loyal to the Church of England'


In 2008 On An Overgrown Path will stay focussed on the long tail, and now playing is Satori (1999) for solo harpsichord by John Palmer. A long way from the Anglican rite, Satori describes the spiritual awakening during Zen meditation. This penetrating work, with its long silences is influenced both by the composer's friendship with John Cage and by his deep involvement with Japanese culture. Adventurous and thought-provoking new music from the enterprising Sargasso label, which revels in promoting the long tail. Check out good length MP3 samples here.

The CD has excellent sleeve notes by Peter Burt, including this one for the title work - A koan, for instance, is that type of apparently nonsensical question by means of which students in the Rinzai school of Zen are trained to transcend the limitations of verbal reasoning, the most famous example perhaps being Hakuin's 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' (My own mischievous answer has always been that it is the audience reaction at the average new music concert).

Peter Burt neatly disposes of the long tail versus mass market conflict with these words - All this picturesque 'Japaneseness' might make it sound as though the listener to this CD is in for a comfortable session of 'New-age' easy listening. But be warned: someone who submits himself to the ascetic severities of Zen monastery life could hardly be expected to opt for facile and superficial artistic solutions, and the musical language of John Palmer's work is uncompromisingly Western and modernist. It demands of its listener, no less than of its creator, an attitude of disciplined seriousness. Deeply rewarding listening.

Which eloquently sums up the long tail listening experience.


* Celebrate the new year with some more long tail - my David Munrow on the record programme is being repeated on Future Radio by popular demand at 7.00pm on New Year's Day, click here for the audio stream.

Sand mandala header photo from my 2007 post about the Free Tibet campaign. And no apologies to all those who think politics, music and sport don't mix. With the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 it is a subject I'll doubtless be returning to. Sand mandalas are a motif in Martin Scorsese's film Kundun which also deals with the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and I featured Philip Glass' score for the film on internet radio in November. My middle photo is from Going Buddhist which featured the music of Lou Harrison, the footer image is from Zen and the art of new music about Jonathan Harvey's music, and there is another contemporary music Koan here from James Tenney. Lots of long tail links for the new year.
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Now - Joyce Hatto the book

I have been contacted by a journalist researching a book on the Joyce Hatto 'forgeries'. Presumably 'Joyce Hatto - the movie' will follow shortly. But deciding which pianists to put on the soundtrack album could be interesting.

Or will 'Joyce Hatto - the book' meet the same fate as a work in progress about a musician who has featured here several times? Reports suggest that biography may have been canned following threats of legal action from the musician's surviving spouse.

Before anyone asks, no I am not contributing to the Joyce Hatto volume. Photo, which is NOT Joyce Hatto is from Jans' piano page. 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

Encore - new music for prepared keyboards

Piano stories are the Da Vinci code of music blogs. After huge readers for that notorious story, the saga of the dropped Bösendorfer broke reader records here last week. So now, if you are prepared, why not read about a burning harpsichord and a grand piano up a mountain?

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The essence of the music itself is there

When does a recording become a forgery? How much can be added that wasn't created by the musicians on the label before it is a fake? My post on a 'recreation' of Glenn Gould's 1955 Goldbergs raises some interesting questions, and so does the following story.

By chance I bought last week the excellent transcriptions of Handel's recorder sonatas for cello and harpsichord played by Tatty Theo (cello) and Carolyn Gibley (harpsichord). The girls are part of the local baroque ensemble, The Brook Street Band. The recording was made a few miles from here in Raveningham Church in Norfolk, the label is Avie, and the producer and engineer is Simon Fox-Gál.

Now here is the first interesting point. The sleeve contains the following message: 'Reverberation included in this recording from Classical Reverberations Impulses produced by Ernest Cholakis for Numerical Sound'.

Research reveals the Toronto based Numerical Sound: 'develops low level manipulations of sound's primary elements. Essentially, we deconstruct, analyze and separate sound by recognizing individual events, elements, or spectral properties, and depending on the situation use the resulting components to modify existing sounds or reconstruct new ones. For example, we might separate a tone into its harmonic or partials or percussive components, and then rebuild those elements into something new.'

A number of high profile classical recordings use Numerical Sound's technology, which shapes sounds to pre-determined profiles in a similar way to the Loft Recordings Tournemire project that I wrote about here. The Numerical Sound website includes some musical examples before and after reprocessing.

I don't want this to get out of proportion. Artificial reverberation has been added to recordings for decades (although why it is needed in the acoustics of a church is a puzzle). On the Handel sonatas disc we are told the sound shaping technology has been used for the reverberation only. But this technology can also reshape instrumental sounds, and this is where the story gets very interesting.

Producer and engineer Simon Fox-Gál of the Handel disc is the grandson of the Viennese born composer Hans Gál (photo below), and he has created recordings of his grandfather's orchestral scores using another technology that has featured here before - Vienna Symphonic Library - which synthesizes music using digital samples of real instruments. Here are Fox-Gal's words about the Hans Gál project: ' It's not a real orchestra, but the essence of the music itself is there, time and our imagination being the only limits to the extent to which we can achieve perfection in the smallest of musical details.' You can listen to the 'not a real orchestra' playing Hans Gál's Symphony No 2 here.

Yes, all perfectly above board, and just the wonders of technology. But let's not forget these words - 'He thinks he began editing “ambience” in the late 1980s.'

Now wonder How much is Stravinsky, and how much is Craft?
Fractal sampled from Jing-reed with many thanks. 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

Click here for a Glenn Gould forgery

Or is it a forgery? Read here how digital technology helps build a virtual concert hall.
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Joyce Hatto - the other story

Last week a reader contacted me with a story to tell about Joyce Hatto. I said I would publish the story without comment or editing. Here it is:

It is necessary to cast a slightly different light on the facts and myths, some of which even cast doubts on Hatto’s very existence (The Times). Joyce Hatto was a brilliant pianist, a great teacher, a very highly informed and well-read person, but above all an inspiring human being. I first encountered her purely by chance when, as an immigrant fresh off the boat from India, desiring to make a career as a pianist, badly trained, impoverished, alone and penniless, she took me on as a pupil in 1965.

As her pupil, I lived from one encounter with her to the next. Each encounter was, for me, a fresh experience – reflecting her constantly repeated admonition, “You may have played this a million times, but for the audience, it has to be as though it is the first listening.” Her ability to impart her knowledge – both of technique and of interpretation – were beyond question. And she knew how to draw out of each pupil what she saw as his or her latent qualities. The series of Pupils’ Concerts that she set up in the Purcell Room attest to this: the range of performances, from Claire Walton’s ephemeral performances of Impressionist composers, to Jacqueline Fairhead’s brooding Schumann and Gail Buckingham’s dramatic flair (Lizst), only served to reflect the chameleon-like qualities that later detractors now ascribe to her. This can be verified by listening to Gail Buckingham’s Lizst “Early Works and Operatic Transcriptions” recorded under Joyce’s encouragement for RCF (005).

Joyce achieved this by rarely speaking of herself, but by always looking closely into the hearts of her pupils. When playing the first two notes of the Lizst Twelfth Rhapsody at one lesson, she stopped me, looking into my eyes and asking, “Tell me, is God dead?” Shocked, I replied, “As a matter of fact, he is.” This opened up a long discussion on literature, of which she clearly knew much.

Joyce was a devoted teacher who cared deeply about every pupil. The only time I saw her looking at all distressed when was a pupil had disappointed her. When she learned of my own intention to go into teaching, she hammered one sentence in: “You have no right to teach, unless you believe deeply in the ability of every pupil.” This is something that has echoed through my mind throughout my own long (and generally considered successful) career as a teacher both in London and in Israel.

As I read of the family history, one of the things that strikes me sharply is that despite the distress she must have encountered in the late 60’s over Barrington-Coupe’s difficulties, she never displayed a sign of it. Just as, at the audition with her, she had said, “Do not come and spill the beans over my carpet,” (my playing was “emotional” but totally lacking in discipline), she never gave the slightest clue as to what was going on in her personal life. Rather, she always looked her best, smiled warmly and welcomed one with a befitting elegance and grace.

She did make occasional references to the music world – whether referring to the cut-throat atmosphere that exists between competing artists, the cruelty of certain critics, the “philistine” attitude to Art in some establishments, the difficulties of recording when building works might be taking place nearby or when an aeroplane flew over during a session. But such critical comments were few and far between. On the contrary, when I had told her of how worthwhile it had been to hike all the way to Edinburgh in order to hear Annie Fischer play at the Festival, she received the comment as though it was a compliment to her own playing.

Although I had tried, in vain, to get in touch with some of my fellow-pupils from the late 60’s in order to see what had come of them musically, although I have not been able to communicate with them since the Hattogate Affair made the headlines, I am sure that my fellow pupils will relate to her in the same vein. If there is only one thing that makes me glad about her demise, it is that she has not been exposed to some of the statements now being made about her.

In fact, if there is anything to be learned from the affair, it is that the commercialization of music-making has taken on such proportions that there are innumerable potential Ashkenazis who live a life of oblivion because of marketing and purchasing practices that now dominate music making. If Joyce Hatto suffered in her lifetime, she never showed it, but would have suffered from this.

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Hoax that fooled music critics for 30 years

The front-page headline in the New York Times on 8 February 1935 rang down the curtain on one of the longest-running musical hoaxes in history. Years before most of his fellow violinists had rediscovered the pre-Classical repertoire, Fritz Kreisler (right) had been in the habit of featuring a group of short pieces by seventeenth and eighteenth-century composers in his recitals. Critics and even a few scholars duly applauded his modest contribution to the early music revival. Little did they suspect that more than a dozen of the pieces by sundry 'old masters' that Kreisler had popularized over the years had been penned by the great violinist himself.

Why did Kreisler dissemble? He explained, unapologetically, that he had needed pieces to fill out his recitals as a young man and adopted various pseudonyms because he considered it 'impudent and tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the programmes'. Certainly he made only a half-hearted attempt to mask his fraudulent identities and readily pleaded when Olin Downes of the Times accidentally stumbled onto the secret. (Several of Kreisler's friends had apparantely been in on it for years.) But Kreisler was not above having a bit of fun at the expense of the experts, and he obviously relished thumbing his nose at the 'snobs ... who judge merely by name and who draw upon musicians' lexicons for their enthusiasm for us'.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Kreisler affair was that it was deemed newsworthy at all. When Fétis practiced what Weckerlin indulgently called his 'innocent deceptions' almost a century earlier, no great hue and cry was raised in the musical world, let alone the popular press. Nor was Berlioz censured for facetiously passing off the Shepherds Chorus in L'Enfance du Christ as the work of a fictitious seventeenth-century composer. (One had to be 'as ignorant as a fish', Berloz said, to believe the date he assigned to the piece.) Kreisler, like Berlioz, was both amused and aghast to find his bogus compositions accepted at face value by people who should have known better, especially in his frank admission that he 'made no endeavour to stick closely to the style of the period to which they were alleged to date'. While most critics took Kreisler's prank in good part, Ernest Newman indignantly attacked the violinist's behaviour as unethical and likely to discredit bona fide arrangeemnts of old music. The virulence of Newman's accusations caught Kreisler by surprise. On the contrary, he retorted, he had done the musical world a service, for 'who ever had heard a work by Pugnani, Cartier, Francoeur, Porpora, Louis Couperin, Padre Martini or Stamitz before I began to compose in their names? They lived exclusively as paragraphs in musical reference books, and their work, when existing and authenticated, lay mouldering in monasteries and old libraries'.

From Harry Haskell's excellent 1988 book The Early Music Revival, A History, Dover Publications ISBN 0486291626.
Now read more about music history rewritten
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A troubled cure ... for a troubled mind

The Gramophone has a not unexpected development in the Joyce Hatto story.

Now read A troubled cure ... for a troubled mind.
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A little light among a lot of heat

"Assuming that the allegation that László Simon's BIS recording of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes was copied and passed off as Joyce Hatto's own recording is true, I would be most interested in the background to this theft. Given the circumstances surrounding Ms. Hatto's sickness and fate, there may be deeply felt – if misguided – personal reasons for it. Unless further, aggravating circumstances are discovered, we do therefore not intend to take any legal steps against those responsible for the possible infringement of the copyright of BIS Records." BIS founder Robert von Bahr on his company's website.

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Paul Hindemith - a true visionary

"You are not permitted to sell unsanitary macaroni or mustard, but nobody objects to your undermining the public's health by feeding it musical forgeries." Paul Hindemith (left) writing in his 1952 book A Composer's World:" Now read the rest of the story.
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Variations on a theme

Today’s Telegraph has a further instalment in the Joyce Hatto story. All this is becoming very familiar to anyone who drives on busy motorways. An accident happens on one carriageway in which people are hurt. The traffic on the other carriageway backs up as everyone slows down to stare at the carnage.

This story in the Guardian is far more important.
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Some help and understanding needed

I spoke to Joyce Hatto's husband yesterday. William Barrington-Coupe runs the Concert Artist record label that is at the centre of the controversy over the provenance of some of Ms Hatto's CDs. I had been disturbed by the tone of some of the coverage of this story, and thought it might be useful to do the obvious, and speak to the person at the centre of the story.

We spoke for a few minutes, and Mr Barrington-Coupe said he had read the stories on the websites and 'was not running away'. But he asked for questions to be put in writing, and undertook to answer them in twenty-four hours. I submitted six questions, twenty-four hours have elapsed, and I don't have any answers.

I am not surprised I haven't heard from him, and in a strange way I'm relieved. Mr Barrington-Coupe sounded like somebody who needs some help and understanding, irrespective of the facts behind the story. I can offer no information on the source of the disputed recordings. But perhaps we should all remember compact discs are not the most important things in this world.

If I hear back from Mr Barrington-Coupe I will publish his responses. Meanwhile I am moving on to another subject.

Related posts are Pointed questions raised in musical circles, and Faking it in early music.
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