Top conductor feels the pain


Are top musicians sharing the financial pain? Apparently so: in today's Guardian conductor Jonathan Nott, seen above, talks about, and I quote, "working in Europe, and his other passion, his Lamborghini". More drive time music here.

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Is this the concert hall of the future?

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Classical music is irrevocably and fatally tied to place. Geocentricity dictates that the only place to hear classical music is an acoustically perfect concert hall . It dictates that this concert hall must be in a city centre , and also mandates that city centres are the only place to hear classical music. And geocentricity dictates that the only music to hear in the acoustically perfect city centre halls is from the European classical tradition. New technologies have created a mobile generation - mobile computing, mobile communications, mobile listening , and mobile workplaces. Yet classical music remains wedded to immobility and geocentricity.  In his memoir Silences So Deep John Luther Adams explains how "I began to feel that my music was no longer about place, but had in a real sense become a place of its own". Aspects of the recent Arts Council England proposals may be wrong-headed. But the underlying message of the proposals was profound and, predictably, overloo
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
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This photo shows John Cage and Daisetz Suzuki in 1962. Now playing is Cage's 36 Mesotics re and not so re Marcel Duchamp which is dedicated to the Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota and includes this quote from the Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki: 'There is no difference between life and death'. In the Harmonia Mundi recording the text is sung by Paul Hillier and spoken by Terry Riley . More on Daisetz Suzuki here and here. Cage Talk, dialogues with and about John Cage is available from Boydell Press . Photo credit Yashuiro Yoshioka. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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