Music blogging from Palestine


Read about music making on the West Bank in Simon Hewitt Jones' blog, and see the video of the Queen of the Night aria sung in Arabic, with traditional Arab instruments. The picture above is from the blog, and shows audience members taking their seats at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace for a concert violinist Simon played in. Ramallah has featured in the news in the past week in connection with the dreadful kidnapping of BBC journalist Alan Johnston.

Now read about Lebanon - a war of our time
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Pliable said…
There's quite an echo around here.
6:50 am
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
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Why cats hate Mahler symphonies

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My recent post ' Your cat is a music therapist ' was well appreciated judging by site traffic. So here is a codicil which raises some interesting points about synaesthesia. Reportedly Alexander Scriabin, Jean Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Franz Liszt were among the classical composers who experienced cross-over between sensory channels. The impact of narrowing sensory bandwidth as music moves from a live to a recorded environment, and then from analogue to lossy digital formats is little understood and little researched.But it may have important implications for classical music's attempts to reach a new audience, and, topically, it may be very relevant to the post-COVID experience of Zoom concerts and live music in socially distanced auditoriums . I will discuss how what we see influences what we hear in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile here is an extract from Akif Pirinçci and Rolf Degen ’s book Cat Sense which explains the synaesthetic impact of a Ma
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The radiance of a thousand suns

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Watch Michel Petrucciani video online

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Back in January 2005 I wrote about legendary jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani (right), and that article remains high in my 'popular pages' listing after fifteen months. Since writing that piece Overgrown Path reader Andrew Nathan and I have been tracking down Petrucciani video footage, and just this week Andrew came up with an absolute gem that is available free on Google video. In my original article I wrote that Michel Petrucciani was a 'pianistic genius' , and it is no coincidence that he is buried in the Pierre Lachaise cemetery in Paris alongside Chopin. This 38 minute video with excellent sound (and a bonus guest appearance from the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling ) is not just essential viewing for jazz fans, it should be watched by all students of the piano - whatever their discipline. Just click here to view this important document. (The video is not hosted by On An Overgrown Path , this is a link to an external site). And to set the video into context here is m
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Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
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Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
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Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of his great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the château, the harpsichordist gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos below were taken by me on a
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Götterdämmerung

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That photo shows the ruins of the great 12th century Tinmel Mosque in Morocco's High Atlas mountains which collapsed in Friday night's terrible earthquake . Below is the post I wrote after my 2018 visit to Tinmel.  Four days after the earthquake I was scheduled to fly to Marrakech and then, once again,  trek in the High Atlas close to the quake's epicentre. The mountain village I would have been based in is now cut-off by landslides, and has no electricity or mobile phone connection. But we have received information that, thankfully, our Moroccan friends there are safe, although others have died in the village. Now playing: Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, Klaus Tennstedt conducting the LPO .  Is this Wagner's legendary Monsalvat? No, this is not Monsalvat, the mythical castle of the Knights of the Grail in Parsifal. My photos show the 12th century mosque in Tinmel at an altitude of 1270 metres in the High Atlas mountains 100km from Mar
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The truth about those French orchestras

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My article reporting Claudio Abbado’s negative views on French orchestras certainly generated a lot of attention, including a response from Parisian Antoine Leboyer which corrected the myth that Abbado hadn’t actually conducted a French orchestra. Too much attention is given to British and American orchestras here On An Overgrown Path and elsewhere, and I was delighted when Antoine offered to give an inside view on the musical health of the French capital. So here is a guest blog from Paris with the truth about those French orchestras that Claudio Abbado and Daniel Harding love to hate: Let us put things in perspective with a few words on French orchestras. Abbado may not have had the best of experiences, and he may still not find it perfect today but things are improving. Paris has many orchestras (I do not know those outside Paris well, and cannot comment on them; I do have regards for the Lyon Orchestra which played some great concerts when David Robertson was their music direct
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Negativity is positive

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