An American in Berlin


Barack Obama's recent visit to Berlin reminded me of a visit to that fine city by another American politician.
Header photo is from my photo essay I am a camera - Berlin and is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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Musician's dissent dismissed as "sanctimonious shit"

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Violinist, conductor, composer, and improviser Pekka Kuusisto recently announced he would pausing his professional engagements in the United States in the following message: I’ve decided to stop working in the United States for the time being.  I want no pressure placed on any of my colleagues to come to the same conclusion.  Love and solidarity Predictability his decision was greeted by an outpouring of bile on the classical music industry's online resource of choice Slipped Disc . Just as the decision of respected American composer John Luther Adams to relocate to Australia  was greeted with similar bile . Here is just one comment posted in response to Pekka Kuusisto's decision: Sanctimonious piece of shit. Never going to another one of his concerts. The US didn’t kill Iranian school girls for performative violence. This false accusation is disrespectful to the US military which gives Pekka his freedoms. Online forums always attract nutjobs. But this thread is a conti...
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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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Early musician who could have become a great conductor

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In the shadow of Chopin

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The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau...
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In the 1950s a number of prominent jazz musicians converted to Islam, including - to use their adopted names - Ahmad Jamal , and Sahib Shihab , Yusef Lateef . One of the most notable converts was the drummer Art Blakey , while the very personal heterodox cosmology of the most celebrated jazz musician of that period John Coltrane was influenced by the beliefs of his first wife Naima, who was a Muslim convert . Many of the musicians who converted were African Americans endeavouring to escape from the shadow of Western colonialism ; they saw Islam as an attractive alternative to Christianity within the Abrahamic tradition, and jazz at that time was heavily influenced by music from cultures beyond the Judeo-Christian world. These circumstances were unique to the 1950s, and fewer jazz musicians have taken the path to Islam since. But those who have include the bass player Danny Thompson who converted in 1990; he has played with many great musicians, including Nick Drake on the legendary...
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How classical music became a pseudo-event

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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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Good enough for Toscanini, Ormandy and Stokowski

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Edmund Rubbra's Brahms Variations And Fugue On A Theme By Handel Op. 24 was performed in the 1940s and 50s by Arturo Toscanini and Eugene Ormandy, and his Rubbra's Fifth Symphony was recorded by Sir John Barbirolli and programmed by Leopold Stokowski. Yet today Rubbra's music is rarely if ever heard in the concert hall. So we are fortunate that it has been better served in the recording studio. Notable recordings include Richard Hickox's indispensable survey of all the symphonies for Chandos , supplemented by compelling interpretations by Norman del Mar, Tod Handley, Sir Adrian Boult, and the composer. (But strangely, Rubbra's Brahms Variations is missing from the current CD catalogue.) But why has Rubbra failed to gain traction in the concert hall? Why, for example, in an age when accessible trumps challenging , is Rubbra's Fourth Symphony virtually unknown? Why is his music so neglected when the Lark Ascending consistently tops popularity polls, and Robert L...
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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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In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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