Call to prayer


That adhan scene was captured on the rooftop terrace of our rented apartment in the medina at Essaouira, Morocco. More on this path in I thought I saw a Sufi cat.

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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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The act of killing from 20,000 feet

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Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the tow
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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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Philippa Schuyler - genius or genetic experiment?

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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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The truth about those French orchestras

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My article reporting Claudio Abbado’s negative views on French orchestras certainly generated a lot of attention, including a response from Parisian Antoine Leboyer which corrected the myth that Abbado hadn’t actually conducted a French orchestra. Too much attention is given to British and American orchestras here On An Overgrown Path and elsewhere, and I was delighted when Antoine offered to give an inside view on the musical health of the French capital. So here is a guest blog from Paris with the truth about those French orchestras that Claudio Abbado and Daniel Harding love to hate: Let us put things in perspective with a few words on French orchestras. Abbado may not have had the best of experiences, and he may still not find it perfect today but things are improving. Paris has many orchestras (I do not know those outside Paris well, and cannot comment on them; I do have regards for the Lyon Orchestra which played some great concerts when David Robertson was their music direc
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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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Quite simply glorious music - and what is wrong with that?

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Classical music in the UK has become a silly and dangerous boxing match. In one corner are the virtue signallers who advocate any music which ticks the right boxes, irrespective of its merit . In the other corner is the growing anti-woke movement feeding off the click-bait power of alt-rightism . And enthusiastic support for this unseemly struggle comes from the blame-everything-on-Brexit claque . I was reminded of how this leaves much glorious and moving music relegated to the sidelines when listening last night to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's recording of Bach's Motets BWV 225-230 with his Concentus musicus Wien and the Stockholm Bach Choir. All the emotional power of the Passion's is contained in these relatively brief and overlooked masterworks. Great music like this can speak so eloquently when it is not drowned out by the unhelpful outpourings of our cultural commentators.  New Overgrown Path posts are available via RSS/email using the link at the top of the page. An
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Thoughts on Simon Rattle's socially distanced Schubert

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When listening to BBC Radio 3's broadcast of Berg's Violin Concerto and Schubert's Ninth Symphony with Simon Rattle, the London Symphony Orchestra and soloist Leonidas Kavakos, I was struck by how engaging the sound was. Engaging is not the same as life-like, and the sound captured in LSO St Luke's - a repurposed 18th century Hawksmoor church - was not what would be heard in a conventional concert hall. But the separate voices - both sections and soloist - within the orchestra could be clearly and separately heard, without compromising the overall integrity of the sound picture**. If I can find a word to describe the sound it was 'commercial'. In this context I am not using commercial as a pejorative; but as a description of a sonic experience likely to engage ears attuned to recorded sound from beyond the classical world - and that is classical's target market. If classical music wants a wider audience, it must engage new listeners. So it is difficult
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Sound is what matters most in classical music

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What matters most in a classical performance, whether in concert or recorded, is not the age of the audience, the hype surrounding the musicians, the gender of the conductor, the number of Facebook 'likes', the backstory of the composer, or the many other next big things manufactured by the marketeers. What matters most is the quality of sound, which must pass a threshold of acceptability for the message of the composer and performers to be effectively communicated to the audience. The rishis who composed the Vedic Hymns nailed it when they declared nada brahma - sound is god ( Shatpatha Brahmana X.20.43). The overriding importance of sound is recognised in the search for the perfect concert hall. The results of this obsessive search include the 'acoustically' perfect' Elbphilharmonie - or perhaps not so perfect . It also triggered Simon Rattle's demand that the perfectly serviceable Barbican Hall in London should be abandoned and an 'acoustically per
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When Alfred Brendel's Steinway played jazz

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After Alfred Brendel  retired from the concert platform in 2008 the Berlin Philharmonic Foundation decided to auction the Steinway d-524780 piano kept for his appearances at the Philharmonie. The successful bidder was Siggi Loch , who after a successful career in producing and managing rock acts reached the position of President of WEA Europe. But in 1992 he moved away from rock music to fulfill his dream of creating his own independent jazz label. Over three decades ACT Music has become one of the most important and respected global jazz labels, and has nurtured the talent of many musicians including Nils Landgren and the sadly-departed Esbjörn Svensson . It is notable that ACT have not succumbed to the 'smooth jazz' virus. Instead, guided by Siggi Loch, the label has continued to probe the cutting-edge of jazz with, for example, Sufi Jazz  and Islam Blues CDs; this was the first World Music project that integrates the classical music of the Ottoman Empire with Western jaz
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