Innocent of political delinquency


Furtwängler collage created from press cuttings from Nov 3, 1946. Now read about Furtwängler's forgotten new music.
Graphic (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Post a comment

Recent popular posts

How to reach a big new post-COVID classical audience

Image
Bruno Walter's 1938 Vienna Philharmonic interpretation of Mahler's Ninth Symphony still has the power to move and enlighten, despite the technical limitations of the recording. Similarly Wilhelm Furtwängler's Berlin Philharmonic concert recording from 1949 of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony still reminds us that beauty is more powerful than hatred, again despite considerable technical limitations. Today, blowing 866 million euro on a not quite acoustically perfect concert hall is the go-to solution for saving classical music, which means a celebrity conductor can  throw his batons out of the pram  when he is not rewarded with a blinged-out new hall. So why, given these contemporary priorities, can great recordings from the past touch us so deeply when heard through the technology equivalent of a tin shed concert hall?  The answer lies in the little-understood but vitally important process of listening . There is no such thing as perfect sound , or historic sound, or bad
Read more

Now the music industry is suffering from a famine of facts

Image
Bhaskar Menon, a leading figure in EMI Worldwide, has died aged 86. In a typically delusive Slipped Disc post Norman Lebrecht states that "He was responsible, with George Harrison, for organising the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh". So now the click bait has hit social media and Norman's readership numbers  are spinning like a fruit machine , let's look at the facts. In his autobiographical I Me Mine George Harrison recounts how:  "It must have been in 1971 when I was in Los Angeles doing the Raga soundtrack album. Ravi [Shankar] was talking to me and telling me how he wanted to do a concert, but bigger than he normally did, so that he could raise maybe 25,000 dollars for the starving in Bangla Desh. He asked if I could think of some way of helping, say for instance for me to come on and introduce it or maybe bring in Peter Sellers… something to help, anyway. " Ravi Shankar and George Harrison went on to organise The Concert for Bangladesh , with help fr
Read more

Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

Image
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
Read more

Because we will never again sow division

Image
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried. That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Extract is from poem recited by Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of US President Joe Biden. Report on civilian collateral casualties caused by Coalition airstrikes in Iraq via this link . When will they ever learn ? New Overgrown Path posts are available via the link at the top of the page. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
Read more

Critical Mass

Image
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
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the tow
Read more

Naxos 'dumbs-down production standards'

Image
'To those who see nothing to worry about in the cheapness of recordings, I'd like to point out that without a sensible stream of revenue the whole process of making recordings will be compromised - if indeed it is not already. Naxos, for one, pays very, very little to its freelance production staff. I can say from personal experience, that not only does the current economic climate make it almost impossible to earn a living wage as an independent classical music engineer or producer, it also has the inevitable knock-on effect of dumbing-down production standards: it's now almost impossible to invest in new equipment. Quite obviously this impedes qualitative improvements for which classical recording engineers are traditionally renowned. But who cares about quality anymore? Naxos among others blithely and inaccurately claim that their audio streams offer 'Near CD quality', which at 128k/sec is little more than 10% of CDs 1141Kb/sec. Anyhow, you won't need those
Read more

Philippa Schuyler - genius or genetic experiment?

Image
A child prodigy fêted by Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, performed by five leading American orchestras while still a teenager, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic at age 16, ranked alongside Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, mourned with a Pontifical Requiem Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and the rumoured subject of a Hollywood biopic. That is the executive summary of an American musical legend who was born eighty years ago tomorrow. Child prodigies, anniversaries and even executive summaries are the common currency of classical music today. But there are several reasons why the story that is going to be told On An Overgrown Path over the next two days is important. The first is that the legendary figure was a woman who had a black father and white mother. The second is that she experienced the barriers to musicians of colour that still linger on today. And thirdly, despite her legendary status, until the second part of this feature appears tomorrow h
Read more

Quite simply glorious music - and what is wrong with that?

Image
Classical music in the UK has become a silly and dangerous boxing match. In one corner are the virtue signallers who advocate any music which ticks the right boxes, irrespective of its merit . In the other corner is the growing anti-woke movement feeding off the click-bait power of alt-rightism . And enthusiastic support for this unseemly struggle comes from the blame-everything-on-Brexit claque . I was reminded of how this leaves much glorious and moving music relegated to the sidelines when listening last night to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's recording of Bach's Motets BWV 225-230 with his Concentus musicus Wien and the Stockholm Bach Choir. All the emotional power of the Passion's is contained in these relatively brief and overlooked masterworks. Great music like this can speak so eloquently when it is not drowned out by the unhelpful outpourings of our cultural commentators.  New Overgrown Path posts are available via RSS/email using the link at the top of the page. An
Read more