Downloads are a state of mind


Happy 65th birthday to our download detective Walt Santner. Even on his birthday Walt was sleuthing. Here is his link to Chicago Lyric Opera podcasts, you can find all the cases that he has solved here. More evidence that youth is a state of mind, not a time of life.

I took the photo in the Abbey Church of St Philibert in Tournus in Burgundy. It 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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Does it have integrity and relevance?

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Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Closer to Vaughan Williams than Phil Spector

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Colin McPhee - East collides with West

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Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

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Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

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