Instrument of the moment


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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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Philip Glass half empty

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As a big fan of both Philip Glass and Tenzin Choegyal I greatly admired their collaboration on the 2020 album The Last Dalai Lama . So I was particularly looking forward to their Be The Sky project. This was released by Philip Glass' Orange Mountain Music (OMM) label as a download last year to celebrate the 90th birthday of the His Holiness the Dalai Lama , and has only just appeared as a CD release .  Unsatisfactoriness - dukkha (Pali) - is at the core of Buddhist teachings. It describes an inherent sense of unease, incompleteness, or imperfection underlying all worldly experiences. Which, unfortunately, pretty well sums up Be The Sky .  Dukkha sets in from the start of the first track Snowy Mountains which features  the choir of the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala . Tenzin Choegyal's dranyen (3-stringed Tibetan lute) is far too prominent and the mix is skewed heavily to the left channel. As on Heart Strings , which was the stand out track on The...
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What price the BBC Proms?

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My life was changed by a Henry Wood Promenade Concert on 4th August, 1975. In the second half Sir Adrian Boult gave us Vaughan William's Fifth Symphony , and the blazing intensity of that performance remains unmatched, in my experience, in the concert hall or on record. Sir Adrian's 86 years had no relevance to his music making. Music, not age, was what mattered then. In the summer of 1975 punk was at its peak and the Vietnam War had ended after Communist forces took Saigon in the spring. Back with classical music, Pierre Boulez was in his last season as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which was at the top of its game , while William Glock's golden period as BBC controller of music and Proms administrator still informed music making in London. Your life could be changed for £1.30, which was the price of a balcony seat in the Albert Hall. All of which set me thinking, what price today's BBC Proms? In 2009 Promenade Concerts are one of few remaining...
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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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New music for old instruments

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There is a neat inversion of yesterday's theme of modern orchestras being influenced by baroque performance practices in the double CD above. About Baroque features the unusual combination of contemporary music and period instruments. It was the product of an innovative funding initiative by the Siemens Arts Program that brought together the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and five leading young composers in a series of workshops and rehearsals that allowed the composers to understand the sonic potential of period instruments. The output from the programme was five new works from Michel van der Aa , Juliane Klein , Rebecca Saunders , Benjamin Schweitzer and Nadir Vassena written specifically for the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. These were captured in concert performances and released on About Baroque in 2006. Let's make one thing clear, About Baroque is not ersatz early music. It is very contemporary music written for a leading period instrument ensemble. And how well it wo...
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A fresh face in the house of Wagner

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Today's Guardian reports - The 29-year old great-granddaughter of the German composer Richard Wagner will face a crucial moment in her young career tonight when her production of the nation's most controversial opera is staged for the first time. The critical success or failure of Katharina Wagner's (above) Bayreuth Festival debut will not only decide on the future of what is arguably one of the most important musical extravaganzas in the world, but also on who takes pole position in the Wagner dynasty. Everything depends on the reactions to her production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - from the critics and from those of her father and festival head, 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner. If the opera is thought a success, she is likely to be chosen by the Wagner Foundation as the successor to the Richard Wagner throne. The 2007 Bayreuth Festival performances, including today's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , are being webcast on Polskie Radio Dwoja , Warsaw. Click here ...
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Our politicians face the music

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1. Tangled Up In Blue , Bob Dylan 2. Ernie , Benny Hill 3. Wish You Were Here , Pink Floyd 4. On Wings of Song, Mendelssohn, Kiri Te Kanawa and Utah Symphony Orchestra 5. Fake Plastic Trees , Radiohead 6. This Charming Man , Smiths, 7. Perfect Circle , R.E.M, 8. All these Things that I've Done , The Killers If the Conservatives win tomorrow's general election that list will be the musical tastes of our new prime minister, David Cameron. He chose those tracks in 2006 for the BBC's long running Desert Island Discs programme. It prompted a wonderful rant from Peter Maxwell Davies who described it as 'musical garbage' . Gordon Brown appeared on the programme back in 1996 and his choices were only marginally more inspiring: at least there was no Benny Hill and there was Bach, albeit predictably the Suite for Orchestra No 3 in D major. When Nick Clegg appeared on Michael Berkeley's Private Passions programme on BBC Radio 3 in 2008 his selection was notably eclectic ...
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An international cultural exception?

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EMI's record - in more ways than one - £1.75 billion loss raises important questions. There is now a real possibility that the company will breach its loan agreements at the end of March, causing control to pass to financial conglomerate Citigroup . Which means many of the great classical (and rock) recordings of the 20th century could be in the hands of American bankers. This may only be marginally worse than leaving them with EMI's current owner Guy Hands , but it is, nevertheless, a terrifying prospect. English Heritage operates an invaluable listed buildings scheme which recognises that - From Stonehenge to the mills of the Industrial Revolution, and from Norman castles to the site of the first TV transmission: in each generation, a small number of exceptional places mark and celebrate human architectural achievement, define an era, mark an important struggle or push new ideas to the limit. It is appropriate and necessary to make careful decisions about the future of the...
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Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig...
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Most music is only meant for a certain group of people

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Back in 2016 I recounted how I was impressed and moved by Anna Thorvaldsdottir's In the Light of Air . Recently I have been similarly impressed and moved by her Archora and Aion performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eva Ollikainen. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music combines the two essential of being both accessible and challenging. And, sadly, it is that challenge that probably explains why her music has failed to gain the traction it deserves in todays comfort zone-delimited culture .    Today it is perfectly acceptable, no praiseworthy - for classical music and other great art to be tailored to the needs of the lowest common denominator. It is less acceptable - no politically incorrect - to echo Benjamin Britten's credo that " Music demands ... some preparation, some effort ". So, at the risk of once again being politically incorrect, I reprise the words of another great under-appreciated woman musician, Alice Coltrane . This quote comes from...
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