Music critic deplores dumpy sound at Aldeburgh Festival

The following night’s choral event took us back to the juvenile excesses of the Sixties, as the a cappella group Exaudi sang Antoine Brumel’s sublime ‘Earthquake Mass’ with progressively deafening electronic accompaniment representing an aural simulation of a quake. The earplugs handed out at the door seemed to suggest that even the management had belatedly realised this was not a frightfully clever idea.
That is Michael Church - of dumpy soprano fame - resisting paradigm shifts in the Independent.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Photo via Russell Haswell. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Comments

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

How to reach a big new post-COVID classical audience

Image
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
Read more

What the law of diminishing diversity tells us

Image
A quick scan of the online postings from classical music's cultural commentators proves the law of diminishing diversity. This law tells us that a commentator's commitment to true cultural diversity is inversely proportional to their social media presence. In this context cultural diversity does not mean the standard 'Mirga', 'Sheku', 'Brexit doom' and 'woman composer' box-ticking. It means reflecting the truly rich cultural diversity of art music at the expense of the holy grail of audience size.  The mechanism propelling the the law of diminishing diversity is easy to understand. Popularity in the form of readership numbers, audience size, site traffic and other social media metrics is now the end game for cultural commentators . So if a topic pulls eyeballs, you provide more of the same to generate more eyeballs, which results in cultural tunnel vision.  This dynamic of giving more of the same in the interests of audience size is multipl
Read more

Classical music must face the facts - click bait pays

Image
Above are the latest accounts for SlippedDisc Limited, which has Norman Lebrecht as a director*. These accounts show that the profit and loss account surplus** increased in fiscal 2020 to £203,719, an increase of 41% over the previous year***. To put that £203,719 trading surplus into context, the average salary for a Metropolitan Opera musician converted into sterling is £138,990 , that of BBC Radio 3 Controller Alan Davey is £182,000 , and Boris Johnson earns £161,401 . Let's be clear at this point: the filed accounts fully comply with the requirements of Companies House and are in the public domain , and Norman runs a legitimate business. This post is not being driven by malice or sour grapes. On An Overgrown Path has never had commercial aspirations: I was well rewarded during my career in the music industry and I am very fortunate to have adequate pension provisions. This post is driven, like so many on my blog, by context and facts.  Regular readers know that, to put it mi
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

How classical music ignored the awakening electronic dream

Image
Eclectic Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has died at the age of 82. So I am reprising my 2019 post inspired by his brother Jurriaan Andriessen which ran under the headline 'Classical music is not connecting with its rewired audience '. Classical music's new audience is new not just because it hasn't yet learned to appreciate classical music: it is also new because it has different behaviour patterns and value systems to the traditional classical audience. It is an important but overlooked point that the traditional audience is also becoming 'new' as its neural connections are rewired by the extended use of new technologies. The defining characteristics of this rewiring are well documented: shortened attention spans, demand for instant feedback/gratification, decreased reliance on linear thinking, reliance on mobile technologies, increased visual acuity, multi-tasking capability, etc.   A typical American adult spends more than 11 hours each day interacti
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

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

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
Read more