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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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Those are my principles....

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Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc and   Lebrecht Weekly, 12/05/2023   "Why I cannot, in good conscience, review this record I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter....Christian Thielemann, in the recent film ‘Music under the Swastika’, claimed that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s complicity in the Third Reich was justified by his legacy of extraordinary recordings.  Leonskaya’s presence in Putin’s Russia is not dissimilar. What are we to make of them?... The performances, per se, have nothing to do with the present situation. And yet, everything.I cannot review them". . ..and if you don't like my principles... well, I have others . Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc , 19/11/2025 "The Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven has cancelled a December 4 concert by the Russian-Georgian Jewish pia...
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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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Should creative artists be politically engaged?

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There is increasing concern about political involvement in the arts, with Trump's sequestration of the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC - see photo above - a prime example. Which raises the important question, should creative artists be politically engaged? One position on this is the one taken by Benjamin Britten. When he was asked in 1942 by a tribunal for the registration of conscientious objectors "What would you do if Britain was invaded?" Britten replied "I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example". But a contrary position is encoded in a 1985 speech by the award-winning author, environmentalist, Zen adept , and womanizer  Peter Matthiessen . Lance Richardson's masterly new biography of Matthiessen contains the following quote, which in these increasingly dark times  is an important wake-up call not just for American writers, but for creative artists all over the globe.   At a meeting of the Association of Writers & W...
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Know your audience

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Recently Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Luther Adams (seen above)  announced he had moved  from the USA to Australia, explaining "the current situation in the United States was a major element in my decision to leave". Even by Slipped Disc standards the response to that announcement on Norman Lebrecht's industry-endorsed website was deeply unpleasant. Here are just a few of the comments deemed acceptable for publication on Slipped Disc .  Good riddance. Maybe he’ll take his rather tiresome music to Antarctica next. He can be closer to Muslim assassins. Wise choice Absolute loser  If that’s what passes as a top classical composer these days, no wonder the genre is doomed. What a jerk. As a critic you cannot possibly ignore how unbearable his compositions are (I carefully avoid the word music). Let's ignore what a potential classical music funder would conclude from a typical Slipped Disc narrative . Yes, the defense of free - if not particularly intell...
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Requiem psychedelia

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Award-winning author, environmentalist, Zen Roshi , and womanizer Peter Matthiessen - seen in photo above - featured in a recent post here . This drew on Lance Richardson's engrossing new biography of Matthiessen. So now here is a a short and deliciously inappropriate vignette from the biography. When he wasn't hosting his girlfriend, Matthiessen smoked pot at Polgeto , swam in the castle pool, and caught up on writing. He also took LSD which was readily supplied by John Abbot . On a previous visit, Matthiessen had bought a small green notebook with ' Appunti ' stencilled on the cover - this became his LSD journal. One day he added 300 micrograms of Sandoz LSD to a cup of coffee, put Fauré's Requiem on the stereo, and pushed through an onslaught of paranoid self-pity.
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Young Britten

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That photo was taken by me today on the seafront at Lowestoft . Here is the opening section of Young Britten  in Alex Ross' acclaimed book The Rest Is Nois e. Homosexual men, who make up approximately 3 to 5 per cent of the general population, have played a disproportionately large role in composition of the last hundred years. Somewhat around half of the major American composers of the twentieth century seem to have been homosexual or bisexual: Copland, Bernstein, Barber, Blitzstein, Cage, Harry Partsch, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem. In Britain, too, the art of composition skewed gay. The two young composers who seized the spotlight in the early postwar era were Britten and Michael Tippett, neither of whom made an effort to hide their homosexuality.   Alex's book provides a salutary reminder of what we have lost in the era of lowest common denominator music writing . As does his long-running The Rest Is Noise website ;...
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No such thing as an unknown Venezuelan conductor

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The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra is playing at the BBC Proms tonight (5th August 2005) with a programme including Mahler ( Ruckert-Lieder with Anne Sophie von Otter), Tubin and Sibelius. Their superstar Principal Conductor Neemi Jarvi is ill, so stepping into the breach is 24 year old Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel (right) who becomes the third youngest conductor to appear at the Proms. As the two younger talents were Simon Rattle and Daniel Harding there is a lot for Gustavo Dudamel to live up to. Several famous conductors got their fairytale big break by taking over at short notice from an indisposed superstar. Probably the most famous was Leonard Bernstein who took over from Bruno Walter to conduct the New York Philharmonic in November 1943 at just a few hours notice. The media are having a field day in the UK with the 'unknown Venezuelan' story, and Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian seems to have swallowed it hook line and sinker with a screaming headline... Conducting pr...
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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
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Great recordings without the spin

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This wonderful Christian Steiner portrait of Charles Gerhardt(1927-99) featured in my 2007 post LPs were like the force of gravity . Gerhardt's important contribution as a conductor, producer and champion of twentieth-century composers such as Howard Hanson , whose Second Symphony is the main work on the disc above, has never been fully recognised. So I was delighted when David Cavlovic sent me a link to a wonderful appreciation of Gerhardt's work . Reading Robert E. Benson's memories of Gerhardt prompted me to dig some of his great recordings out of my collection, and to write my own appreciation below. Charles Gerhardt was a champion of the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold , and collaborated with the composer's son George on recordings of his film music. One result was the 1972 LP seen above conducted by Charles Gerhardt and produced by George Korngold, which is a true sonic and musical delight. At one time it was available as a Chesky CD transfer, but I can find no...
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