Peace


Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience ~ Thomas Merton
Happy Christmas, and a peaceful New Year to all my readers. With thanks for all your support in 2008.

Remembering Richard Hickox, Vernon Handley, Esbjörn Svensson and the other musicians who left us in 2008. More Lux Christi here. Photo taken at Le Barroux, France, December 2008. All original photos on the path are taken with a Casio EX-Z120 digital pocket camera. Photo (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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A Philippa Schuyler moment

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An earlier post painted a word portrait of child prodigy, pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler. Her music is rarely heard today and difficult to find. So we are very fortunate that John McLaughlin Williams agreed to record her Nine Little Pieces for piano specially for On An Overgrown Path . His recording can be heard via the YouTube video above, and in the article below he analyses her music Philippa Schuyler. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler’s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent’s large sheet music library, occupying shelf space alongside the giants and talented lesser lights of our canonic music literature. Even among those lesser lights Schuyler seemed to me an odd duck a the time, for here peering at me from the cover of the sole piece of music by her in our possession was a picture of a seven year old girl of mixed race, rather than an aged, w...
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The truth about those French orchestras

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My article reporting Claudio Abbado’s negative views on French orchestras certainly generated a lot of attention, including a response from Parisian Antoine Leboyer which corrected the myth that Abbado hadn’t actually conducted a French orchestra. Too much attention is given to British and American orchestras here On An Overgrown Path and elsewhere, and I was delighted when Antoine offered to give an inside view on the musical health of the French capital. So here is a guest blog from Paris with the truth about those French orchestras that Claudio Abbado and Daniel Harding love to hate: Let us put things in perspective with a few words on French orchestras. Abbado may not have had the best of experiences, and he may still not find it perfect today but things are improving. Paris has many orchestras (I do not know those outside Paris well, and cannot comment on them; I do have regards for the Lyon Orchestra which played some great concerts when David Robertson was their music direct...
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Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

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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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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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Few musicians have generated such a mixture of respect and revulsion as Herbert von Karajan. It takes Richard Osborne 851 pages in his masterly biography to capture the essence of this extraordinary conductor, entrepreneur and opportunist, and it would be impertinent to even attempt to cover the same ground here. So instead, with the centenary of Karajan's birth falling on April 5, I offer this personal vignette from my time at EMI, which I hope in some small way illustrates the conundrum that was this extraordinary man. During the late 1970s the Machiavellian Karajan had carefully nurtured a deadly rivalry between EMI and his other contract company, Deutsche Grammophon. This meant that EMI had, at very considerable expense, outbid DG for the four act version of Verdi's Don Carlos with José Carreras and Mirella Freni , and Debussy's Pelléas et Méliande with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell . Pélleas was a personal passion of Karajan, and because of this he ...
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You say Mariinsky - I say Mravinsky

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The Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra is the house orchestra of the the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, and is also known as the Kirov Orchestra. It dates back to the 18th century and was known before the revolution as the Russian Imperial Opera Orchestra. Today the Mariinsky is known for its association with Valery Gergiev . Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) was a legendary Russian conductor who led a different orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, for fifty years. Among the first performances given under Mravinsky's baton were Shostakovich's symphonies numbers 5,6,8,9, 10 and 12. But the story of Mravinsky and the Mariinsky are intertwined. Yevgeny Mravinsky was the nephew of the Mariinsky's star diva Yevgeniya Mravina. He literally grew up in the famous theatre where he worked as an extra while studying, and in 1933 made his debut there conducting Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty . Valery Gergiev's biography has him attending Mravinsky'...
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Britten – music does not exist in a vacuum

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Three Overgrown Paths converge. Antoine Leboyer wrote about the role of hall acoustics in creating good ensemble, sfmike asked about live performances of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem , and the Middle East is a recurring nightmare here , and everywhere. This convergence sent me back to the inspirational speech Britten made when he accepted the first Aspen Award in the Humanities in 1964: And then the best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem – I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best. I believe you see, in occasional music , although I admit there are some occasions which can intimidate one – I do not envy Purcell writing his Ode to Celebrate King James’s Return to London from Newmarket . On the other hand almost every piece I have ever written has been composed with a certain occasion in mind, and usually for defi...
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There is more than one War Requiem

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Eleven young choristers from the famous Kreuzchor were among more than 25,000 who died in the British and American bombing of Dresden on February 13th 1945. As well as this terrible human loss the famous choir also lost its its Neo-Gothic choir school on the Georgplatz, its library of sheet music and archive, and its very raison d'être, the beautiful Kreuzkirche (Church of the Holy Cross) which dated from the 13th century. The history of the Kreuzchor dates back to the 14th century, and its reputation grew through the Reformation and into the 20th century. In 1932 Rudolf Mauersberger was appointed cantor, and the choir's reputation spread through its acclaimed performances of Bach's choral music in the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy tradition , and the Kreuzchor made two tours of the USA in the 1930s. A year before he died in 1971 Rudolf Mauersberger recorded Bach's Matthäus Passion with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The two choirs were the Kreuzchor and the Thomanercho...
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The power of music blogs - and poetry

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John Lennon beyond the Maharishi

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May I say a word about André Rieu?

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