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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Breaking news - music blogging is not quite dead

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A comment added by Lukas Fierz in answer to my question Where has all the musical adventurousness gone? set me questioning once again whether music blogging, and that includes On An Overgrown Path , now serves any useful purpose. When OAOP first posted back in 2004 music blogging was driven by sharing discoveries and sharing experiences. Today that sense of revelation has been exorcised by a toxic mix of self-interest and couch activism, all driven by a paranoid pursuit of social approval. Readership numbers and egos have been boosted , but the music has suffered terminally. My recent post asked where has all the musical adventurousness gone? Who is transcending conventions and pursuing their own unique musical vision? In one of the most useful contributions to music blogging since the advent of social media, Lukas Fierz answered my question by listing a five contemporary musicians who are pushing the socially-defined classical comfort zone.  Slipped Disc's leadership  of the
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Why is the classical music industry anti-vax?

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Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc receives the unequivocal support of the classical music industry in the form of advertising, exclusive news and interviews, advertorial partnerships, and complimentary concert tickets and CDs. Yet  Slipped Disc  repeatedly publishes unmoderated misinformation about Covid vaccines - see just two examples above and below. Therefore the classical music industry is supporting potentially deadly anti-vax misinformation. (Follow this link for more on Dr. Luc Montagnier's alleged warning.) It pains me to hold Facebook up as an exemplar. But even that tainted social network banned misinformation about vaccines months ago: as the Guardian reported in February , Facebook "will remove posts with false claims and groups with repeated violations will be shut down". This is not about free speech. It is, like libel laws, about stopping irreversible damage by misinformation .  Slipped Disc , supported by the classical industry, regularly demonises
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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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Virtue signalling does not sell concert tickets

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This article is unique among the 4554 posts uploaded to On An Overgrown Path since August 2004. Because it agrees with a Slipped Disc post. Last week Norman uploaded a Slipped Disc reader's contribution headlined ' Why I won't be going back to concerts '. The thrust of the contribution was not the reader's fear of COVID, but how for him concerts had become "just a bit too often ordinary... a bit of a ritual". Which resonates with my recent post 'Where has all the musical adventurousness gone?'  lamenting the demise of musicians who is transcend conventions and pursue their own unique musical visions. David Munrow is talking to Peter Maxwell Davies in that photo. In the early 1970s David Munrow’s Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years and introduced a new audience to early music. He presented a successful TV series, and wrote scores for the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elisabeth R , and
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Mystery of politically incorrect London Philharmonic violinist

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My 2018 post profiled the Parsee violinist Homi Kanga who joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1950 and may have been the first non-white orchestral musician in the UK. My post related how Homi Kanga left the LPO in 1960 after he complained about the dismissal of a colleague for what he viewed as political reasons. In my post I speculated that Homi Kanga's departure was triggered by a dispute between the LPO management and its Anglo-Indian violinist John Mayer .  However a new comment on my 2018 post suggests Homi Kanga's departure resulted from the dismissal of another musician. An anonymous commenter has suggested that "It was over the sacking of Chumleigh Hind that Homi left the orchestra" but provides no more information. Chumleigh Hind was a scholarship holder at the Royal Manchester College of Music  from 1945-50 and went on to play in the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli and also performed as a soloist . But my research has uncovered no oth
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Where has all the musical adventurousness gone?

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My enthusiasm for ensemble sans frontières  Oregon is shared by Trevor Hodgett who wrote the booklet essay for the newly released 1974 . This double CD captures a live set by the band recorded in exemplary sound by Radio Bremen in March 1974. Oregon were then at the top of their game, and remained there until master multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott was killed in an East German tour bus crash. Here is Trevor Hodgett's assessment of Oregon:  'The late 60s/early 1970s was an era when musical adventurousness and eclecticism had become almost the norm and when musicians like Miles Davis, The Beatles and The Grateful Dead were redefining popular music and blending genres in previously unimaginable ways. But Oregon, who formed in 1970, may just have been the most dizzyingly original band of them all, with a clearly irrepressible determination to transcend conventions and pursue their own unique musical vision.'    In 1974 Kraftwerk released their seminal album Autobahn , Pa
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Classical music must woke up and smell the coffee

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As pointed out here previously Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc receives the unequivocal support of the classical music industry in the form of advertising, exclusive news and interviews, advertorial partnerships, and complimentary concert tickets and CDs. Yesterday Norman published an article headlined 'US orchestra: Conductor wanted. No whites need apply' which was sourced from the National Review .  This conservative publication has a certain notoriety, including being one of the few media outlets to publish material written by Jeffrey Epstein's publicist Christina Galbraith . The National Review also publishes contributions by Dinesh D'Souza who has tweeted "So Rosa Parks wouldn't sit in the back of the bus--that's all she did, so what's the big fuss?" and this year ran an article bylined 'The Editors' proposing that the Equality Act "represents is a cynical attempt to use the Civil Rights Act as a Trojan horse for radi
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How classical music slipped a disc

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Do you remember when streaming was classical music's next big thing? Do you remember when Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc declared   'There is only one classical future - and it's streaming'? Apple Music was recently acclaimed by a leading magazine as, together with Spotify, the Editors' Choice Pick for streaming music services. But did you see another Slipped Disc headline this week telling us that the absorption of Primephonics into Apple Music is not open, fair or classical friendly? Classical streaming may be a convenient short-term expedient for users. But it was a no-brainer to see that its long-term business model which shifts financial control from content producers (artists and record labels)  to content distributors  (artistically-sterile technology giants such as Apple) would hurt the music industry. The uncertain future for high quality streaming services such Primephonics is yet another example of the classical industry's self-inflict
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'I dig Strauss and Wagner – those cats are good'

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That photo shows Jimi Hendrix headlining at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. In his memoir The Last Great Event about the Festival, its co-founder Ray Foulk reveals that during the planning for the event there was a meeting with Harold Lawrence  who was then General Manager of the London Symphony Orchestra. Harold Lawrence was responsible for the high profile appointment of André Previn as Principal Conductor of the LSO in 1968, and Ray Foulk's vision was for the LSO to appear at the Festival "not only to accompany some of the acts, but also to give their own performance of music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and other suitable works" . But the LSO's busy schedule combined with doubts about the final venue for the Festival meant that, sadly, the LSO did not join Hendrix, The Who, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Joan Baez, the Moody Blues , and Leonard Cohen on the Isle of Wight. Ray Foulk's brave attempt to involve a symphony orchestra is a reminder of how in 1970 the
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