Lost in explanation


Can you imagine music without explanation?

Elmediator is a multi-genre and multimedia performance venue in Perpignan, France. This post is also available via Facebook and Twitter.

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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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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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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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Young Mahler - encouragement worthwhile?

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A charming and previously unpublished reminiscence of an 11-year-old Gustav Mahler (photo above) comes to An Overgrown Path from Elissa Minet Fuchs former ballerina with the Ballet Russe and the Metropolitan Opera. Mrs. Fuchs (see photo below) is the widow of conductor and composer Peter Paul Fuchs who was the subject of two tributes here when he died last year. A reader drew Mrs. Fuchs' attention to my articles and she has very kindly supplied me with material, including previously unpublished photographs, on her husband for a full appreciation to be published here on the first anniversary of his death next week. Among the material was this memory of a young Gustav Mahler. Peter's grandfather on his mother's side, Alois Rusicka, was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia not far from the Austrian border. He was a law student - pursuing his degree and an amateur musician, a cellist. On one of his visits home, he was approached by a tavern keeper. He was asked to meet ...
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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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Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

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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 the harpsichordist's 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 d'Assas, Scott Ross 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 b...
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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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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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A massive hope for the future

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I am one of those boring old farts who laments the demise of the CD and its eclipse by ephemeral streaming . So it is very pleasing to report that one of the major players in the media industry has found a valid and valuable strategy for prolonging the life of the venerable CD format.  Warner Classics are remastering and reissuing CDs of classic recordings in massive 'binge boxes'. Latest release is the 79 CD box of Sir Adrian Boult's complete EMI stereo recordings . (Perversely, the box is titled 'Complete Warner Recordings', because although Warner acquired the EMI classical catalogue, competitor Universal Music owns the EMI trade mark.) The legendary team of producer Christopher Bishop and engineer Christopher Parker produced the majority of the recordings in the box, and the original mostly analogue master tapes set a benchmark in sound quality. However many of EMI's original first generation CD transfers in the 1980s compromised the reproduced sound. So ...
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