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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
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BBC Proms and the tyranny of the children’s encyclopedia

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As the annual administrative behemoth known as the BBC Proms lumbers into motion, filling the national ether with its familiar blend of civic piety and corporate branding, one is forced to confront a recurring fatigue.To listen to BBC Radio 3’s broadcasts of these mammoth London concerts is to witness a curious ritual of cultural containment. Before a note of Vaughan Williams or a forgotten rarity by Jonathan Harvey can safely enter the acoustic space, it must first be sanitized. The listener is subjected to presenters topping and tailing each masterwork with breathless, patronizing trivia, as if lifting entries straight from an illustrated children’s encyclopedia of classical music. One hears the familiar, smug cadence—that unmistakable institutional voice which assumes that the public cannot possibly encounter sound unmediated by narrative hand-holding.  The star system versus the art  The modern Proms season operates less as a sanctuary for deep listening and more as an e...
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Critical Mass

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I'm a big fan of Marin Alsop . But last night her BBC Prom performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra playing her own sequence of the suites from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was strangely unsatisfying. Tempi were pulled around, and rather than adding to the tension the wayward performance weakened it. When it finished I wanted some 'in your face' music making that was over the top, but which really worked. So as Marin Alsop was a pupil of Bernstein's I put on his 1971 recording of his own Mass , a work I don't listen to very often. Is Mass Bernstein's unrecognised masterpeice? Or is it a failed experiment in using the vernacular and exploiting street chic? (But wasn't the 'parody mass' a legitimate renaissance musical form which exploited contemporary music such as L'homme arme ?) My view used to be that Mass was simply a failed experiment, but I have to confess I am slowly moving towards the view that it may be a misunderstood m...
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I am not a Classic FM housewife

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Having returned from travels in a distant land I was looking forward to listening to BBC Radio 3's Proms broadcasts. But it wasn't to be, because after just two concerts I have given up. For me, even great music-making cannot survive Radio 3 presenters topping and tailing each work with endless quotes from a children's encyclopedia of classical music punctuated by smug info-commercials.  There has been much self-congratulation by Radio 3 about audience gains; however audience data shows that increase has been achieved by poaching Classic FM's listeners. Despite Radio 3's audience increase, the UK classical radio audience is not increasing. Because listeners are simply moving from Classic FM to Radio 3. In fact the total classical radio audience is decreasing . Under ex-Classic FM supremo Sam Jackson, BBC Radio 3's strategy of taking listeners from Classic FM was initially targeted at the daytime housewife audience. But that strategy has now been applied to even...
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The real 'Piano Man'

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"Here then…are some of the harsh facts behind the words ‘severe mental illness’ and ‘serious nervous breakdown’ which the press has been using about me so often lately. Not that I am complaining about the press! – I was thrilled by the sympathetic and wide spread media interest that came my way both before and after my return to the….concert stage" - these words were written by the real ‘ Piano Man’ John Ogdon in 1981. Ogdon (above) was thrust into the limelight in 1962 when he was joint winner, with his friend Vladimir Ashkenazy , of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition. He wowed the Moscow audiences with his performances of Rachmaninov, Balakirev and Scriabin, as well as the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto which became his signature piece. Although Ogdon is mainly remembered today for his stunning interpretations of the Russian romantic repertoire he was also a ceaseless performer of modern music. He studied in Manchester at the same time as Peter Maxwell Davies , who wrote ...
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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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New music for old instruments

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There is a neat inversion of yesterday's theme of modern orchestras being influenced by baroque performance practices in the double CD above. About Baroque features the unusual combination of contemporary music and period instruments. It was the product of an innovative funding initiative by the Siemens Arts Program that brought together the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and five leading young composers in a series of workshops and rehearsals that allowed the composers to understand the sonic potential of period instruments. The output from the programme was five new works from Michel van der Aa , Juliane Klein , Rebecca Saunders , Benjamin Schweitzer and Nadir Vassena written specifically for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. These were captured in concert performances and released on About Baroque in 2006. Let's make one thing clear, About Baroque is not ersatz early music. It is very contemporary music written for a leading period instrument ensemble. And how well it wo...
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