The art of the CD label


With MP3 downloads you don't have to imagine there's no artwork. This CD by the Tashi Lhunpo monks featured in Wagner and the Tantric orchestra.

Featured CD was purchased by me. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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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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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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Young Mahler - encouragement worthwhile?

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Centenary of a legendary record producer

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Walter Legge was born on 1st June 1906, and worked for EMI from 1927 to 1964. He was a legendary record producer, talent spotter, and entrepreneur. The great artists he worked with included Wilhelm Furtwängler , Arturo Toscanini , Herbert von Karajan , Maria Callas , Thomas Beecham , Otto Klemperer , and Dinu Lipatti . Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was both one of his artistes and his wife. The photograph above shows me discussing Legge's legacy with Schwarzkopf a month after his death in 1979, the occasion was an exhibition I created in his honour at the Royal Festival Hall in conjunction with the Philharmonia Orchestra . Legge founded the orchestra as a vehicle for his recordings, and later capriciously abandoned it. Today there are many record company executives that can rival him for ruthlessness, but none that come within a million miles of his artistic vision. Image credit and copyright - On An Overgrown Path . Any copyrighted material on these pages is includedin "fair use...
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Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich all sound like film music

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In a typically thoughtful contribution to my post Why not play the premier league composers more often? Richard Bratby - who is professionally involved in classical music - mused "speaking solely from my own experience - there is a very noticeable falling-off in ticket sales when a symphony orchestra programmes pre-Beethoven repertoire, irrespective of the quality of the performance or the music, or the energy with which it is marketed. But why?" Now Kea has answered Richard's question with the following comment: Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc, all sound more or less like film music (or -- more accurately -- film music sounds more or less like recycled bits of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc) and therefore don't require any intellectual involvement or serious effort to listen to. Understanding the music of Bach, Mozart or Haydn, etc (or for that matter Schumann, Brahms, Webern, Cage, etc) actually requires people to listen actively rather than being pulled alo...
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Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

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No music is ever finished; only abandoned

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That is E.J. Moeran (left) in the photo with John Ireland on the Norfolk Broads. I have been spending time recently listening to the Sketches for Moeran's Symphony No. 2 as realised and completed by Martin Yates in the recently-released recording on the Dutton Epoch label . Leonardo da Vinci declared that "No work of art is ever finished; only abandoned." Some music compositions are abandoned at a later stage in their gestation than Moeran's Second Symphony, which was abandoned as no more than fragments when the composer died in 1950. But every composition, even if considered completed by the conventional definition, is not finished but simply abandoned to the musicians who perform it. And those musicians do not finish the work, because they in turn abandon it to the audience. And when the audience leaves the hall the work is not finished; because the musicians and audience are again abandoning it to all those participating in the next performance. It is an endle...
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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 vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
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