Radio for insomniacs


Jonathan Lennie of Time Out and myself are discussing the BBC Proms on BBC Radio 5 Live at 12.00 (midnight) tonight, July 21/22. Webstream here, programme should be available on BBC iPlayer for seven days.

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Four great albums that are victims of clickbait correctness

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Clickbait correctness - if ain't clickable, don't hype it on social media - means some great albums are not receiving the attention they deserve. My recent rewarding listening has included the new Alice Coltrane release Kirtan: Turiya Sings . Kirtans are sacred Vedic chants, and  Turiya Sings  was originally released exclusively on cassette in 1982 for the students of Alice Coltrane's ashram at the The Vedantic Center, northwest of Los Angeles. For this cassette release synthesizers, strings, and sound effects were added to Alice Coltrane’s voice and organ. Although this mix was never commercially released, it achieved cult status as a bootleg recording. The reason for the absence of a commercial release remains unclear, but the most plausible explanation is that the complete master tapes were not retained, making quality remastering impossible. But in 2004 Ravi Coltrane , who is Alice’s son by John Coltrane and producer of this new release, discovered tapes of just Ali
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Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

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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
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If this had been a Deutsche Grammophon session.....

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Riccardo Muti is 80 and I am adding my birthday wishes to the fulsome tributes elsewhere. As balance is an essential skill of great maestros, I am contributing a little balance by republishing this little vignette which first appeared here in 2019. Back in the 1970s and 80s when sleeve design and liner notes came within my remit at EMI's International Classical Division , all the top artists had the right of artwork approval written into their contracts. Above is the sleeve for Riccardo Muti's 1979 debut recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra which was created on my watch. The venue for the photo shoot, the Philadelphia Museum of Art , was relevant, and in recognition of Muti's already super-sized ego we made sure not a hair was out of place. But the maestro ran true to form and hated the cover with a passion, and it took considerable persuasion and a very thick skin on my part before his approval was given. The recording venue was the old and decrepit Met Church b
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How to reach a big new post-COVID classical audience

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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
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Missing so much and so much.........

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Clickbait correctness - if ain't clickable, don't hype it  - means much great music is consigned to the virtual void . Chandos' traverse of Hamilton Harty's orchestral music gave me much pleasure when released on vinyl in the 1970s, and the label's 3 CD bundle  of those recordings continues to give me pleasure. Technology and the pandemic mean that today virtual listening - recordings delivered by streaming - is the predominant way music is consumed . This technologically enabled level playing field provides an ideal opportunity for the classical industry to exploit its rich recorded legacy. But that exploitation simply isn't happening. Instead our social media culture means great music can only see the light of day when given an outing by a 'hot' young conductor - just imagine the Twitter meltdown if John Wilson recorded Harty's Irish Symphony . While dipping into the virtual void and listening to the much-missed Bryden Thomson 's Chandos rec
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What the law of diminishing diversity tells us

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A quick scan of the online postings from classical music's cultural commentators proves the law of diminishing diversity. This law tells us that a commentator's commitment to true cultural diversity is inversely proportional to their social media presence. In this context cultural diversity does not mean the standard 'Mirga', 'Sheku', 'Brexit doom' and 'woman composer' box-ticking. It means reflecting the truly rich cultural diversity of art music at the expense of the holy grail of audience size.  The mechanism propelling the the law of diminishing diversity is easy to understand. Popularity in the form of readership numbers, audience size, site traffic and other social media metrics is now the end game for cultural commentators . So if a topic pulls eyeballs, you provide more of the same to generate more eyeballs, which results in cultural tunnel vision.  This dynamic of giving more of the same in the interests of audience size is multipl
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How classical music ignored the awakening electronic dream

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Eclectic Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has died at the age of 82. So I am reprising my 2019 post inspired by his brother Jurriaan Andriessen which ran under the headline 'Classical music is not connecting with its rewired audience '. Classical music's new audience is new not just because it hasn't yet learned to appreciate classical music: it is also new because it has different behaviour patterns and value systems to the traditional classical audience. It is an important but overlooked point that the traditional audience is also becoming 'new' as its neural connections are rewired by the extended use of new technologies. The defining characteristics of this rewiring are well documented: shortened attention spans, demand for instant feedback/gratification, decreased reliance on linear thinking, reliance on mobile technologies, increased visual acuity, multi-tasking capability, etc.   A typical American adult spends more than 11 hours each day interacti
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Berlin Philharmonic's first woman conductor

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In 2005 the appointment of a woman music director by a major American orchestra caused a storm of controversy . So, it is surprising to find that it was back in 1930 that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was first conducted by a woman, and even more surprising to find she was an American. But the story doesn't have a happy ending. Despite receiving critical acclaim, Antonia Brico found doors closed to her when she returned to the US, and was forced to form her own orchestras to continue her conducting career. She is seen above conducting in New York in 1945. (Image credit Dr. Ralph Weizsäcker ). Antonia Brico was born Wilhelmina Wolthus in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1902, and emigrated to California with her foster parents in 1908. She attended high school in Oakland where she gained experience as a pianist and conductor. She went on to study liberal arts at the University of California, Berkeley , and also worked at the San Francisco Opera as an assistant to the director,
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Classical music must face the facts - click bait pays

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Above are the latest accounts for SlippedDisc Limited, which has Norman Lebrecht as a director*. These accounts show that the profit and loss account surplus** increased in fiscal 2020 to £203,719, an increase of 41% over the previous year***. To put that £203,719 trading surplus into context, the average salary for a Metropolitan Opera musician converted into sterling is £138,990 , that of BBC Radio 3 Controller Alan Davey is £182,000 , and Boris Johnson earns £161,401 . Let's be clear at this point: the filed accounts fully comply with the requirements of Companies House and are in the public domain , and Norman runs a legitimate business. This post is not being driven by malice or sour grapes. On An Overgrown Path has never had commercial aspirations: I was well rewarded during my career in the music industry and I am very fortunate to have adequate pension provisions. This post is driven, like so many on my blog, by context and facts.  Regular readers know that, to put it mi
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Hoax that fooled music critics for 30 years

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The front-page headline in the New York Times on 8 February 1935 rang down the curtain on one of the longest-running musical hoaxes in history. Years before most of his fellow violinists had rediscovered the pre-Classical repertoire, Fritz Kreisler (right) had been in the habit of featuring a group of short pieces by seventeenth and eighteenth-century composers in his recitals. Critics and even a few scholars duly applauded his modest contribution to the early music revival. Little did they suspect that more than a dozen of the pieces by sundry 'old masters' that Kreisler had popularized over the years had been penned by the great violinist himself. Why did Kreisler dissemble? He explained, unapologetically, that he had needed pieces to fill out his recitals as a young man and adopted various pseudonyms because he considered it "impudent and tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the programmes" . Certainly he made only a half-hearted attempt to mask his fra
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