Rare photo of Carl Nielsen discovered


From BBC Radio 3 website. More on the cult of the presenter here.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Pliable said…
This sketch on YouTube sums up the new and accessible BBC Radio 3 very neatly -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y
2:30 pm
Philip Amos said…
Oh, ye Gods. This comes also within the ambit of the sense of history, the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it, the apprehension and comprehension of it. I've said elsewhere that the failure any longer to teach history and teach it well is a catastrophe (back in the news last week) and my thoughts on it are not just the bletherings of an ageing history professor. Here we have an example of the preponderant ignorance and dismissal of history, and beyond a doubt there are now people wandering around thinking that's what Nielsen (whose concertos I was listening to on the weekend by chance) looked like.

Here we have an example of the failure to show visually whence came our music and how the whole of it came to be. A small matter, of course, for young people now go out into the world almost nescient about how the world as we know it came to be and how they themselves might find a place in it, for they were never properly taught such in the years of their 'schooling'. I'm an ex-pat retired historian who sometimes dreams of the A-Levels of yore (my yore). I kid you not that one september three decades ago, I started the first tutorial of a first-year European history course
by asking someone, anyone, to tell me what they knew about Hitler and Nazism. Nothing - not one could tell me anything at all.

I hope no one is asking what the hell that photo has got to do with history, for it has everything to do with it, including the fact that there are now people thinking Nielsen looked like an avuncular, bearded Scot with a shirt and photographer way ahead of their time.
8:59 am
Pliable said…
On a related point, further "improvements" to the BBC Radio 3 schedule, in particular changes to the breakfast programme, have caused considerable controversy recently.

The description "Radio 2.5" has achieved widespread currency in connection with this and other changes. When I read that description while travelling last week I had a feeling that it originated On An Overgrown Path some years ago. My feeling has been confirmed by a poster on the independent BBC Radio 3 forum -

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?3294-Brian-Sewell-joins-the-throng!/page2

Here is my 2006 post, which was somewhat ahead of its time -

http://www.overgrownpath.com/2006/12/bbc-is-performing-badly.html
11:46 am
Pliable said…
Do I have the doubtful honour of providing the Daily Mail with a headline?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039794/BBC-Radio-3-Breakfast-Radio-2-5-say-listeners.html
1:47 pm
Philip Amos said…
I do believe you do have that dodgy honour, Bob. One might say it puts you in dubious company, but so does everything these days, up to and including getting a knighthood, musical ones not excepted.
2:17 pm
Pliable said…
Philip, musical ones most definitely not excepted -

http://www.overgrownpath.com/2008/01/great-music-making-doesnt-need.html
2:27 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

Image
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
Read more

Great musicians deserve more than twenty-four hours of fame

Image
We live in a Snapchat culture where the medium is the message, and the message deletes after twenty-four hours. This Snapchat culture has permeated through classical music. A great symphonic composer of the stature of Malcolm Arnold receives his twenty-four hours of fame with a BBC Proms performance of his Fifth Symphony. But with that anniversary box neatly ticked will we have to wait another twenty-seven years to hear one of his symphonies at the Proms?  Snapchat culture also means dead composers are only click bait for twenty-four hours after their passing, So the death of the great multi-faceted Mikis Theodorakis was marked by clips from Zorba the Greek and quickly forgotten. But that sentence should read "not quite forgotten". Because reader David had added this thoughtful comment to one of my tributes to Mikis Theodorakis :  'I have always been attracted to composers and musicians who declare a strong Left Wing political adherence such as Hans Werner Henze or
Read more

Why is the classical music industry anti-vax?

Image
Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc receives the unequivocal support of the classical music industry in the form of advertising, exclusive news and interviews, advertorial partnerships, and complimentary concert tickets and CDs. Yet  Slipped Disc  repeatedly publishes unmoderated misinformation about Covid vaccines - see just two examples above and below. Therefore the classical music industry is supporting potentially deadly anti-vax misinformation. (Follow this link for more on Dr. Luc Montagnier's alleged warning.) It pains me to hold Facebook up as an exemplar. But even that tainted social network banned misinformation about vaccines months ago: as the Guardian reported in February , Facebook "will remove posts with false claims and groups with repeated violations will be shut down". This is not about free speech. It is, like libel laws, about stopping irreversible damage by misinformation .  Slipped Disc , supported by the classical industry, regularly demonises
Read more

'I dig Strauss and Wagner – those cats are good'

Image
That photo shows Jimi Hendrix headlining at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. In his memoir The Last Great Event about the Festival, its co-founder Ray Foulk reveals that during the planning for the event there was a meeting with Harold Lawrence  who was then General Manager of the London Symphony Orchestra. Harold Lawrence was responsible for the high profile appointment of André Previn as Principal Conductor of the LSO in 1968, and Ray Foulk's vision was for the LSO to appear at the Festival "not only to accompany some of the acts, but also to give their own performance of music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and other suitable works" . But the LSO's busy schedule combined with doubts about the final venue for the Festival meant that, sadly, the LSO did not join Hendrix, The Who, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Joan Baez, the Moody Blues , and Leonard Cohen on the Isle of Wight. Ray Foulk's brave attempt to involve a symphony orchestra is a reminder of how in 1970 the
Read more

Watch this classical music movie or forever live in darkness

Image
It is surprising, or perhaps a comment on the current state of classical music , that my most penetrating classical experience in recent weeks came via Netflix. Chaitanya Tamhane 's 2020 Marathi-language film The Disciple portrays the journey of a Khyal singer - played by musician turned actor Aditya Modak  who is seen above - through the treacherous waters of commercialised art music. This exquisitely directed and musically very satisfying movie won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2020 Venice Film Festival and also won the International Critics Prize.  Some readers will doubtless be enraged that the 'classical music' referred to in my headline originates from the city of Gwalior in central India, and not from Symphony Hall Birmingham or Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie . But these myopists are missing the movie's powerful message that the  virus of click bait has morphed into the highly transmissible and dangerous global variant of audience bait . And, incidentall
Read more

Mikis Theodorakis' Songs of Freedom

Image
Mikis Theodorakis has died aged 96. In his memory I am republishing two Overgrown Path articles from 2007. The accompanying post  The Political Dimension of the Artist can be read via this link . The role of the artist in a society where human rights are denied is a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . As I write Maria Farandouri sings To Yelasto Pedi from Mikis Theodorakis’ sound track for the 1969 film Z (poster above). This legendary film was a barely fictionalised account of the assassination in 1963 of the Greek socialist politician Gregoris Lambrakis MP, and the film and its soundtrack, became an international symbol of opposition to the Greek military junta . This dictatorship savagely suppressed human rights until its overthrow in 1974, and brought tanks onto the streets of Athens, as is shown below. The junta was established in April 1967 when right wing army colonels led by George Papadopoulos seized power under the pretence of preventing a communist takeover. The
Read more

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

Image
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
Read more

Classical's elusive young audience wants chewy music

Image
In his biographical overview Klaus Schulze: Electronic Music Legend Greg Allen explains that: 'I have long thought that when people in the future look at the 'classical' music of our time (mid-20th century through early 21st century), they would view Klaus Schulze's music as the classical music of this era, just as we view Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky as the 'classical' musicians of their eras'. Although this can be dismissed as needless hyperbole, the links between Klaus Schulze and classical music cannot be ignored, as this extract from his notes for the album "X" shows.  'Richard Wagner could also have been part of these musical biographies on “X”. Wagner is particularly close to me because for me he was the first to create a synthesis of the arts. For instance he demanded for a composition a separate theatre where the orchestra could disappear in the pit. Therein I see an analogy to the synthesizer. Here the actual instrumen
Read more

Making the case for Wagner-lite

Image
My interview last year with James Blachly who masterminded the premiere recording of Ethel Smyth's The Prison reached a gratifyingly wide audience . So in view of this and of my early championing of female musicians , it is pleasing to see Dame Ethel's The Wreckers being staged at Glyndebourne next year . However I have previously expressed concerns about  gender replacing merit  in classical music. So, without questioning the undoubted merit of The Wreckers, I want to make the case for just one of the many meritorious works sunk by the social media wreckers . Engelbert Humperdinck's masterful Wagner-inspired Hänsel und Gretel has won a place in the classical repertoire and in the hearts of many listeners, including the author's *. But another meritorious example of Wagner-lite has singularly failed to gain traction. Rutland Boughton's The Immortal Hour was premiered in a piano reduction at the very first Glastonbury festival in 1914. This powerful and ori
Read more

Less Mahler is better Mahler

Image
In 1980 I was fortunate  to be peripherally involved in Simon Rattle's 1980 recording of Deryck Cooke's performing version of Mahler's uncompleted Tenth Symphony. There was much to admire both in Deryck Cooke's scholarship and Simon Rattle's performance. But, for me, the various interpretations of  that particular reconstruction never reached the emotional depths of the transcendental Ninth Symphony . So it came as something of a shock when I was bowled over by another completion of the Tenth, bowled over to the extent that I found myself comparing the performance to Bruno Maderna and John Barbirolli's sublime accounts of the Ninth. BIS' recording of John Storgårds conducting the Lapland Chamber Orchestra in the completion and arrangement of Mahler's sketches for his Tenth Symphony by the Maltese musicologist, conductor and singer Dr. Michelle Castelletti  was responsible for my epiphany. This completion is scored for single woodwind (flute doubling
Read more