On An Overgrown Path

My life has been enhanced considerably over the last few months by working my way through recordings of the complete Haydn Symphonies. What energy, what inventiveness, what humanity, and what sheer joy. And what a laudable absence of the histrionics that were soon to become an integral part of symphonic writing. I have been listening to Adam Fischer and the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra's cycle of the symphonies originally recorded for Nimbus and now relicensed to Brilliant Classics . My 33 CD set cost £66 delivered in the UK . The Austro-Hungarian Orchestra's performances are really quite excellent, and so is the sound. But the gold standard is Antal Dorati's cycle recorded with the Philharmonia Hungarica for Decca in the 1970s. When I was in Cambridge last week to see The Class I noticed the Dorati set (also 33 CDs) selling in Heffer's for £60. This is a limited period offer. The amazon.co.uk price is £66.98 , and some Amazon resellers are down below £60 . It i...

Antal Dorati was born in Budapest on April 9th 1906. He is best known today as a conductor, but he was also a composer of forty-five works including two fine symphonies , and a talented painter and author. The last work that the 82 year old Dorati composed was a setting of the Pater Noster . This was completed in 1988, a few weeks before his death, and is a moving a cappella work for mixed chorus (SATB). It is difficult to understand why this beautiful five minute composition is not better known, or more widely performed. We are very fortunate though to have a fine recording in the catalogue by the Kammerchor der HdK-Berlin conducted by Christian Grube on BIS where it is coupled with another of his works, Jesus oder Barabbas? Sadly parts no longer seem to be available from his publisher Boosey & Hawkes . Antal Dorati resources On An Overgrown Path include Antal Dorati the composer and Who am I - attaca? . CDs in this article are available from Prelude Records . Photo cre...

Antal Doráti's reputation was justifiably built on his conducting. Just one example is his recording of Stravinsky's complete Firebird ballet which was made for Mercury in Watford Town Hall in 1959. It is one of the major achievements in the history of recorded music and was made on Ampex 350 series three channel ½ inch recorders using valve (tube) recording electronics. (See link in web resources below). Listening to it again does raise the question as to what real benefits do digital recording and jet-setting maestros bring us today? Less well known, but very well worth finding, is a live Missa Solemnis recorded in the Philharmonie in Berlin with Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists on BIS . Beethoven's Missa Solemnis was a very personal work for Doráti, and its score gave the title, and inspiration, to his posthumously published book 'For Inner and Outer Peace' which can be...

WHRB 95.3 FM in Boston is treading where the BBC fears to go with their current Mozart 0rgy, and joy of joys, their upcoming Antal Dorati 0rgy. The Mozart marathon is WHRB's longest-ever project, running continuously, around the clock, from May 8th to 18th. It is the world's only broadcast of the complete works of Mozart, and is available as a webcast. To find out more, On An Overgrown Path went behind the scenes in Boston to get this exclusive interview with Ken Schultz, General Manager of WHRB-FM 95.3 FM , Cambridge. Pliable - Who compiles and presents WHRB 95.3 FM's programmes? Ken Schultz - Harvard undergraduates are the staff of the station, and all our station members are volunteers. The team come from all fields of study, and bring their own love of music - we have jazz, underground rock, et al in addition to our highly dynamic and well-known classical programming Pliable - How do you cover that range - is there one single producer responsible for each proj...

Can anyone explain why huge numbers of Americans are currently arriving on the path from searches for the term 'Maestro Dorati' ? I'd love to think there has suddenly been a revival of interest in this great musician . But I think it is something more prosaic such as a crossword clue. If so congratulations to the compiler on their excellent musical tastes. That's Antal Dorati above; by a weird coincidence he also featured in a quiz On An Overgrown Path back in 2005 . 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

'For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni's supporters must have sounded obvious: "to avoid phenomena," as he put it, "such as begging". The new measures, he said, were indispensable "in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy"' - no not in Italy in 1938 but in Italy today. Read the full story in the Independent . I fear it is the shape of things to come, and not just in Benito Mussolini's old stamping ground. Now playing - Bela Bartók's Roumanian Dances with Antal Dorati conducting the Minneapolis Symphony on vinyl LP (SRI75105) in glorious Mercury sound in those wonderful days before the 'benefits' of digital encoding, multi-tracking, multi-miking, multi-editing and multi-promoting. The ...

A very happy New Year to all my readers and fellow bloggers. 2006 brings some important musical anniversaries. The 'biggie' is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mozart's birth in January, but let's not forget the hundredth anniversary of Shostakovich's birth as well. There have been howls of outrage because there is no Mozart Fest on BBC Radio 3 , but not a single call for a broadcast of the complete Shostakovich opus . Other birthdays include composer and conductor Antal Dorati (100) and Sir Malcolm Arnold (85 - a real birthday for the only living composer with a major anniversary), while deaths include composer of the sublime 'Dies Natalis' Gerald Finzi (50) - if you do not know Finzi's wonderful songs follow this path to an online Finzi jukebox, Benjamin Britten (30), Edmund Rubbra (20), Robert Schumann (150), and Michael Haydn (200), younger brother of Joseph and friend of Mozart. Here is a more complete, but fallible, list of the ...

The fate of the millions of Jews murdered in Hitler's death camps is well documented, but less is known about the 500,000 Gypsies who also died . There are not many written accounts of the Roma or Sinti travellers who died in the camps, because, their culture is traditionally oral, not literary. By contrast the majority of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust came from educated middle-classes, and left behing written records of their terrible fate. The photograph above shows Roma prisoners in the Belzec concentration camp . The genocide of the Roma by the Nazis is the most shocking example, but the history of the persecution of Gypsies goes back to their first appearance in Europe in the 15th century, when they were often confused with the hated Muslim invaders from the east. Laws were enacted against them across the whole continent, and centuries of persecution, forced assimilation, enslavement and extermination followed. In England the last executions for the crime of being a G...

Jordi Savall's office in Spain was quite certain, he really wanted to give an interview On An Overgrown Path when he was in Norwich. The maestro (above) even phoned me back from his home in Barcelona to say yes, he would definitely find time. I couldn't raise him again on his mobile phone after he arrived in England, but on the morning of the concert I met him at his signing session and he told me to come to the concert venue of St Peter Mancroft at the end of the sound-check at 6.45pm, and he would do the interview between the rehearsal and the 7.30pm concert start. But I arrived at St Peter Mancroft at 6.30pm to find a disaster. The taxi sent to collect him had arrived at his hotel 30 minutes late. So everything was behind schedule and the event manager thought an interview was unlikely. But a message came back from the maestro, he would do the interview after 7.00pm. The sound-check finished late at 7.05pm and as the capacity audience started to fill the church a charm...

Yesterday's article about Harvard Radio station WHRB 95.3 FM included a number of occurences of the words 0rgy/ies, all in a music programming context. Many large organisations run web proxy software such as WebMarshal which, to quote their website : When a user on your network requests access to a web page, the request goes through WebMarshal. WebMarshal then checks the requested web page against a set of rules that you (the employer) define (your internet access policy). WebMarshal then scans the page for its content - viruses, profanity, appropriateness, b0mb making, adult themes etc - a whole host of things.. Then if the rules allow, and the user is allowed access, and if WebMarshal deems the page is "safe", WebMarshal fetches the page and sends it to the users browser. It does all this instantly and transparently to your users - affording them a safe Internet browsing experience. Some web proxy software decided that my article Harvard Radio treads where BBC fears t...

'As a by-product, this development will put an end to today's star system. The indispensable quality of "stardom" is its rarity. But, on the one hand, the difference between a star and a non-star performance will not be tolerated much longer by a growingly knowledgeable public. On the other, the stars themselves will fade. Even now, their strength is being progressively dissipated by the incredible fatigue of their enforced nomadic life , and in the end they will be unable to deliver what is expected of them. The true future of opera lies in the ensemble principle, by which I mean well-matched ensembles of fine singers working together and staying together. This mode of organisation has never completely disappeared. A few, very few, theatres have always maintained it, and elsewhere, now and then at the insistence of a maestro, a performance reflecting it turns up. So the ensemble principle will not need to be re-discovered. Even the public knows about it. And once the...

That great visionary Carl Nielsen wrote 'even if we reached agreement on the fact that now the best and most beautiful has been achieved, mankind thirsting more for life and adventure than perception, would rise and shout in one voice: give us something else, give us something new' . Today I celebrate two projects that bring something else and something new; both are for the piano and both from across the Atlantic. First for 'something new', and an uplifting story from blogger Michael Strickland who be more familiar as a serial comment poster on the Path using his sfmike handle. Michael tells us that pianist Sarah Cahill , who is seen above, has commissioned eighteen composers to write music for the piano on the subject of peace . The project is called 'Sweeter Music' and the impressive list of contributors includes a refreshingly large number of women composers: Meredith Monk , Frederic Rzewski , Terry Riley , Yoko Ono , Bernice Johnson Reagon , Pauline O...

Recent adventures in classical amnesia took me back to the Third Symphony 'The Song of the Night' by Karol Szymanowski in the compelling recording by Antal Dorati and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. What is remarkable is not that Szymanowski set the poetry of the Sufi master Rumi, but that he set it in 1916 . In the intervening century Szymanowski has failed to reach the audience he deserves, but Rumi has become a best seller. So using the criteria currently applied to classical music , Rumi has succeeded and Szymanowski has not. But is that really true? Here is Stephen Schwarz writing in The Other Islam If Rumi is the best-selling poet in America today, in most English-language editions of his writings, Islam and metaphysics have been extracted like internal organs from his verse and it falls to the idiom of the gift card. A Jew or Christian who desires to attain the peace of the Sufi without entering into Islam will probably not gain much by attempting a Sufism lite, ...

A highlight of my recent listening was BBC Radio 3's broadcast of the superlative Haitink/LSO Mahler 3 Prom seen above. The BBC's Proms relays maintain a commendably high sound quality, but it is still worth auditioning them with a constructively critical ear. Listening to a Prom on a monitor quality audio system underlines the presence and impact of the sound. But that impact comes at a price: individual instruments and soloists are spotlit - e.g. the mezzo in Mahler's Sehr langsam Misterioso - and although the soundstage is wide the location of sections within the orchestra is ambiguous. These may be esoteric points, but they do lead down a path that raises important questions about how classical music can reach new audiences. A post here in 2012 touched on the up close and personal signature sound of Proms broadcasts, while a post a year later reflected on how placing multiple microphones close to the musicians has, of necessity, become standard recording pract...

At no time in his life after the age of about fifteen did Grainger abandon his sadistic and masochistic pleasure-seeking. Blood-letting was often part of his activities and he nearly always laundered his own shirts because of the telltale bloodstains. With the possible exception of Mimi Kwast, all his girlfriends were to be drawn into his particular form of lovemaking and there is ample photographic evidence of this. Several photographs exist which he took himself after one of his bouts of auto-flagellation. An indication of his extraordinary mentality can be detected from the fact that as he stood before the camera lens with bleeding wounds he also held up a notice which gave details not only of the exact time of day, location of session and number of lashes with what kind of whip, but also the type of film used in the camera and the exposure and aperture. Whenever he went on tour he took a selection of several dozen whips with him. From Percy Grainger by John Bird (ISBN 0571117171 ...

This 1967 LP from my collection draws together several current paths . The conductor is Antal Dorati, and we mark the twentieth anniversary of his death on November 13. The orchestra is the London Symphony, which reminds us of the recent contribution by a reader lamenting the decline of that orchestra under the leadership of Valery Gergiev . And the main work on the LP is Darius Mihaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit , an early example of jazz meeting classical . Milhaud's score dates from 1919 and was used to accompany a farce created by Jean Cocteau and set in an American bar during Prohibition. Today, Milhaud's ranking as a minor composer belies his influence; his students included Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich and Philip Glass . The jazz meets classical path was started by Radka Toneff's exquisite album Fairytales . This 1982 classic of the gramophone features just two musicians, Radka Toneff and pianist Steve Dobrogosz . The latter also composed two of the songs, i...

On 11th March 2008 Madrid marked the fourth anniversary of the terrorist bombings (above) that claimed the lives of 191 people and wounded 1,856. It was the biggest terrorist attack in the history of Spain and, indeed, Europe, with 10 simultaneous explosions on four of Madrid’s district trains at the height of the morning rush hour. It happened a few minutes before 8 a.m. Later, the police exploded another two bombs that had failed to go off and a third was defused, leading to the identification of those responsible. The ceremony of remembrance for those who were killed began at twelve noon in front of the monument inaugurated last year which stands in Plaza de Atocha . It was led by their majesties King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia, who laid a wreath at the foot of the monument. After a minute’s silence in memory of the victims, there was a rendition of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s “Da pacem, Domine ”, a work commissioned by Jordi Savall for performance at the Barcelona Forum...