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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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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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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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Messiaen and Xenakis - Oiseaux Exotiques

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This photo shows Olivier Messiaen pinning the award of Chevalier de la légion d'honneur on Iannis Xenakis in his Paris apartment in 1977. Xenakis was a pupil of Messiaen and I will be playing music by both of them on my Future Radio programme on Sunday April 13 at 5.00pm UK time (repeated 12.50am April 14). The programme opens with Xenakis' Komboi and closes with another award winner, Angelin Chang , John McLaughlin Williams and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony's Grammy winning recording of Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques . The two works are separated by music from a composer who shared Messiaen's deep Catholic faith. Hildegard of Bingen is the earliest composer with a detailed biography and her music drama Ordo Virtutum is considered to be the prototype of the art form that became opera and eight centuries later came full circle in Messiaen's massively underrated Saint François d'Assise which only had its U.S. premiere in 2002. I will be playing the ...
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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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When the sound really mattered

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Back in 1971 the first 'serious' loudspeakers that I bought after I left university and joined the BBC were the legendary Acoustic Research AR-7's. I would have bought a pair of the Rogers LS3/5A monitors that were used in the BBC studios, but these were well beyond my budget. The more affordable AR-7s were bookshelf sized speakers with amazingly dense cabinets that produced a bottom end that belied their small size. There was a downside however, when compared with the ultra-transparent BBC monitors, the AR paper coned drive units gave the mid range a signature nasal (transatlantic?) twang. But the AR-7s captured the music of that time beautifully, and I nearly wore them out listening to my first Mahler LP, the superb interpretation of the Fourth Symphony by the grossly under-rated Ukrainian born Jascha Horenstein and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This was produced by John Boyden and released on the budget Classics for Pleasure label decades before Naxos were acc...
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Requiem for grandson of Hitler’s pianist

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My recent article on Ernst Hanfstaengl, court composer and pianist to Hitler, and Harvard alumni, attracted a lot of readers. But the final paragraph left a mystery unsolved: Peter Conradi's excellent life of Hanfstaengl (right) ends with his death. But there is a fascinating coda to this extraordinary story, where fact is often far stranger than fiction. On the penultimate page of Conradi's book the author writes: '(Hanfstaengl) took great pride in his grandchildren - especially Eynon, the eldest, who had inherited his grandfather's musical talent, taking an impressive twenty-fourth place in the prestigous Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1974.' The pianist career of the junior Hanfstaengl seem to have been obscured by the mists of time, and my researches found no further information on this. But tantalisingly my search found a German German film actor and writer called Eynon Hanfstaengl . One of his acting roles was Count Durkheim in the 1972 movie Lud...
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In memoriam Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

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The photo above is of me talking to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at the Royal Festival Hall , London in 1979 (you can date it from my hairstyle). Schwarzkopf’s husband, and recording legend, Walter Legge had died the previous month (the lady to the left is Miss Jane Withers, Legge's long-serving secretary). The Philharmonia Orchestra , which Legge created as a vehicle for his recording activities, had asked me to create a tribute exhibition at short notice. Some of the material was taken from my own personal collection. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was delighted with the tribute, but was far less impressed with my description of Legge as an ‘entrepreneur’. When the photo was taken I think I was trying to explain to her that ‘entrepreneur’ was a complimentary description. But I am afraid she was not persuaded (or was I distracted by those pearls?). Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the greatest soprano of the post-war period, died yesterday aged 90. A re-evaluation of her career here. Image copyright On ...
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Is classical music asking the right questions?

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What will have more impact on the future of classical music? Roberto Alagna’s latest “squeeze”, or our ability to organise, search and access digital music files? My view tends to the latter, which is why in a comment on a recent post I said “It has long puzzled me as to why the subject of metadata about music recordings is so neglected”. Now reader Mike has responded with the following comment which justifies a post of its own: Music metadata has been a small bugbear of mine ever since I started digitising music in the 90s. In particular the metadata databases used by Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Media Players are quite awful when you move out of pop/rock music to classical/jazz/world. I don't let either bit of software touch my collection, especially as you can't trust either to honour their metadata settings, and the penalty for them breaching the trust is the loss of hundreds of manhours of labelling. It's also sad that a great many digital downloads ...
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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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