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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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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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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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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Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

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That photo of Sir Malcolm Arnold and Julian Bream appears on the late composer's website . Ten years ago I was literally very close to Sir Malcolm's music. He spent his final years being tended by his carer Anthony Day in Attleborough just a few miles from where I live in Norfolk. I managed Sir Malcolm's website and one of my first posts  about his music dates from that time. Following Sir Malcolm's death in 2006 I never lost my appreciation of his music, but it featured less frequently in my listening. However, recently I have returned to his symphonies, and listening to them again has raised some important questions. His nine symphonies are the product of a master craftsman. They move forward from Mahler and Shostakovich, yet should be immediately accessible to contemporary audiences saturated in the music of those two composers. But, despite this, Sir Malcolm Arnold's symphonies remain unknown outside a small circle of admirers. Why? Let me make it clear ...
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Third rate music on Naxos' American Classics?

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I'll be interested in American readers' reactions to the start of this review by the Guardian's Andrew Clements - ' Considering how much third-rate music has been included in Naxos's American Classics series, Elliott Carter has so far been poorly served by the budget-price label. But in the year of the composer's 100th birthday, this - the first of two discs that will include all five of Carter's string quartets - could be the start of a major addition to his discography.' Andrew Clements then goes on to write a glowing five-star review of Naxos' new CD of Elliott Carter's String Quartets Nos 1 and 5 performed by the Pacifica Quartet . I'll agree whole-heartedly with his verdict on the Carter Quartets, I bought them last week and they are superb performances of superb music. But I am not so sure about his other views. That judgement of 'third-rate music' raises the interesting point of should a critic focus primarily on the interpr...
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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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Exclusive - David Munrow on the record

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My Future Radio programme on Sunday December 30th takes an exclusive look at David Munrow on the record . In the early 1970s the scores for the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elisabeth R brought David Munrow’s music to millions. His Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years, he presented a successful TV series, and wrote the scores for several major feature films including Ken Russell’s The Devils and the film version of HenryVIII (sleeve below). David Munrow's interest in early music started when he taught in Peru before going up to Cambridge. He combined reading English at Pembroke College with independent studies of Renaissance and medieval music, and went on to form his famous Early Music Consort of London. Under his leadership the Early Music Consort became best-selling recording artists, and David Munrow’s records were considered so important that copies of them were sent to Saturn on board two NASA spacecraft in 1976. ...
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Best music of any late-20th century composer?

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Conlon Nancarrow (above) died on August 10 1997. György Ligeti rated him as the most important composer of the second half of the twentieth century, saying: "For me it's the best music of any living composer today". Personally I have found the new MDG Scene releases of Nancarrow's Player Piano Studies recorded on a Bösendorfer Grand with a 1927 Ampico Player Piano Mechanism very rewarding, and my header photo from 1950 is taken from volume 1 of that excellent series. There is an fine biography of Nancarrow by Jürgen Hocker, but it is, alas, only available in German. The extraordinary jazz-like music of Conlon Nancarrow will be familiar to many of my readers. But if you don't know it there is a real discovery awaiting. Follow these two paths to Kyle Gann's Nancarrow web resources and book , and then watch a video by Tal Rosner . This uses Nancarrow's music arranged for two pianos by Thomas Adès , who is video artist Tal Rosner's partner . Any co...
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Critical Mass

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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 m...
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John Cage's crazy creativity

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Crazy wisdom, as exemplified by the celebrated but controversial  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche , is wisdom gone wild. It is wisdom expanded beyond conventional intelligence and beyond the concept of ordinary people. Similarly, crazy creativity is creativity gone wild, and the importance of the threatened art of crazy creativity is seriously underestimated in today's  algorithmically flattened culture .  Social psychologist and scholar Donald T. Campbell   has proposed that dependence on random mutation does not just apply to human evolution, but also to creative evolution. So no random mutation in the creative process means no development. All creativity depends on taking old ideas and combining them in new, unusual, and sometime wrong ways. Without this vital mutation there would be no variability, meaning all art would become nothing more than a replica of the preceding art.  John Cage's pioneering work is one outstanding example of crazy creativity combinin...
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