Benjamin Britten slated


It is worth reading the review in Slate of Neil Powell's Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, and not just because it links to and quotes from my related post.

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Scott Ross and the paradox 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 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
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How to reach a big new post-COVID classical audience

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Bruno Walter's 1938 Vienna Philharmonic interpretation of Mahler's Ninth Symphony still has the power to move and enlighten, despite the technical limitations of the recording. Similarly Wilhelm Furtwängler's Berlin Philharmonic concert recording from 1949 of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony still reminds us that beauty is more powerful than hatred, again despite considerable technical limitations. Today, blowing 866 million euro on a not quite acoustically perfect concert hall is the go-to solution for saving classical music, which means a celebrity conductor can  throw his batons out of the pram  when he is not rewarded with a blinged-out new hall. So why, given these contemporary priorities, can great recordings from the past touch us so deeply when heard through the technology equivalent of a tin shed concert hall?  The answer lies in the little-understood but vitally important process of listening . There is no such thing as perfect sound , or historic sound, or bad
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Because we will never again sow division

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We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried. That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Extract is from poem recited by Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of US President Joe Biden. Report on civilian collateral casualties caused by Coalition airstrikes in Iraq via this link . When will they ever learn ? New Overgrown Path posts are available via the link at the top of the page. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
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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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I'm a big fan of Marin Alsop . But last night her BBC Prom performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra playing her own sequence of the suites from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was strangely unsatisfying. Tempi were pulled around, and rather than adding to the tension the wayward performance weakened it. When it finished I wanted some 'in your face' music making that was over the top, but which really worked. So as Marin Alsop was a pupil of Bernstein's I put on his 1971 recording of his own Mass , a work I don't listen to very often. Is Mass Bernstein's unrecognised masterpeice? Or is it a failed experiment in using the vernacular and exploiting street chic? (But wasn't the 'parody mass' a legitimate renaissance musical form which exploited contemporary music such as L'homme arme ?) My view used to be that Mass was simply a failed experiment, but I have to confess I am slowly moving towards the view that it may be a misunderstood
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A child prodigy fêted by Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, performed by five leading American orchestras while still a teenager, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic at age 16, ranked alongside Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, mourned with a Pontifical Requiem Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and the rumoured subject of a Hollywood biopic. That is the executive summary of an American musical legend who was born eighty years ago tomorrow. Child prodigies, anniversaries and even executive summaries are the common currency of classical music today. But there are several reasons why the story that is going to be told On An Overgrown Path over the next two days is important. The first is that the legendary figure was a woman who had a black father and white mother. The second is that she experienced the barriers to musicians of colour that still linger on today. And thirdly, despite her legendary status, until the second part of this feature appears tomorrow h
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'To those who see nothing to worry about in the cheapness of recordings, I'd like to point out that without a sensible stream of revenue the whole process of making recordings will be compromised - if indeed it is not already. Naxos, for one, pays very, very little to its freelance production staff. I can say from personal experience, that not only does the current economic climate make it almost impossible to earn a living wage as an independent classical music engineer or producer, it also has the inevitable knock-on effect of dumbing-down production standards: it's now almost impossible to invest in new equipment. Quite obviously this impedes qualitative improvements for which classical recording engineers are traditionally renowned. But who cares about quality anymore? Naxos among others blithely and inaccurately claim that their audio streams offer 'Near CD quality', which at 128k/sec is little more than 10% of CDs 1141Kb/sec. Anyhow, you won't need those
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