On An Overgrown Path

2016 was not one of the Almighty's better efforts. Disquieting political developments dominated the news on both sides of the Atlantic, and the arts' world lost too many of its luminaries. But at this moment the impacts of the US presidential election and the UK's EU referendum remain hypothetical, and many of those that we lost from the creative community had led long and productive lives . Absolute evil is the evil inflicted by man on man, and the real tragedy of 2016 was the continuing violence in the Middle East and elsewhere, and in particular the Syrian civil war which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, many of them young people who had their lives in front of them. The selfless bravery of Mohammad Alaa Al Jaleel in his work with both children and cats in Aleppo - seen above and below - showed our mealy-mouthed politicians how actions speak so much louder than words . Of course human lives matter most. But thank you Alaa for reminding us in a yea...

That is Michel Petrucciani in the photo; he made his first appearance On An Overgrown Path eleven years ago and in 2016 I derived many hours of listening pleasure from the 7 CD anthology Michel Petrucciani: The Blue Note Albums . Despite suffering from the genetic disorder bone disorder osteogenensis imperfecta which limited his height to 3' 0" [ 0.91 m ], Michel Petrucciani became a renowned jazz pianist. Originally influenced by Bill Evans and to a lesser extent Keith Jarrett, he went on to develop his own unique voice - watch a full length concert video via this link . Michel Petrucciani died in 1999 aged just 36 and is buried alongside Frederic Chopin in Paris' Père Lachaise cemetery. Michel Petrucciani's resting place acknowledges the close links between jazz and classical music, and there are notable examples of the influence of jazz. George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was originally commissioned for solo piano and jazz band by Paul Whiteman, and on...

This is the season for album of the year listings . By convention these lists are dominated by new releases, and it is now time to question that convention. Promoting new recordings at the expense of the old is a longstanding practice. But in the past the recorded catalogue was not so comprehensive and technology developments were delivering genuine improvements in recording quality. Whereas today's new releases all too often offer lacklustre accounts by celebrity musicians of a limited repertoire - Mahler, Shostakovich etc - recorded at concert performances in compromised sound . Which is why it is many years since I bought a Simon Rattle album, and why I have never bought one by Gustavo Dudamel. Judgements of merit have been replaced by the commercial imperative of the new. Dead musicians do not earn big commissions for management agents , record company and retailer margins are slim on budget reissues, and Arturo Toscanini and Pau Casals cannot brief their to place Guardian ...

'When we are caught in notions, rituals, and the outer forms of the practice, not only can we not receive and embody the spirit of our tradition, we become an obstacle for the true values of the tradition to be transmitted. We lose sight of the true needs and actual suffering of people, and the teaching and practice, which were intended to relieve suffering, now cause suffering. Narrow, fundamentalist, and dogmatic practices always alienate people, especially those who are suffering' ― Thich Nhat Hanh writing in Living Buddha, Living Christ Photo of the Enlightenment Stupa in Benalmádena , Andalucia was taken by me a few weeks ago. This is the largest Stupa in the West, and was built by the members of the Karma Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. The Benalmádena Stupa is filled with sacred objects including a clay relief attributed to the Tibetan saint Milarepa . Any copyrighted material is included critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(...

Pierre Boulez once famously declared :"I hate Tchaikovsky and I will not conduct him... but if the audience wants him, it can have him". But much that I admire Boulez I have to disagree with him this time. There are many reasons why I do not hate Tchaikovsky , and Warner's new reissue of André Previn's 1970s recordings of the three great ballets is one of them. Tchaikovsky's ballets fit André Previn's style of music making like a glove, the recordings were made in the mellifluous acoustics of the Kingsway Hall (Nutcracker and Swan Lake) and Abbey Road Studio 1 (Sleeping Beauty) by the legendary EMI production team of Christopher Bishop and Christopher Parker , and the sound on these latest CD transfers simply confirms that as technology has advanced , so recorded sound quality has gone backwards . When Previn's Sleeping Beauty was first transferred to CD by EMI two numbers were cut so that it would fit onto 2 CDs. Somebody at Warner Classics cares, b...

I spent Christmas evening with the other doctors and the sick. The Commanding Officer had presented the letter with his last bottle of champagne. We raised our mugs and drank to those we love, but before we had had a chance to taste the wine we had to throw ourselves flat on the ground as a stick of bombs fell outside. I seized my doctor's bag and ran to the scene of the explosions, where there were dead and wounded. My shelter with its lovely Christmas decorations became a dressing station. One of the dying men had been hit in the head and there was nothing more I could do for him. He had been with us at our celebration, and had only that moment left to go on duty, but before he went he had said: "I'll finish the carol first, O du fröhliche !" A few moments later he was dead. There was plenty of hard and sad work to do in our Christmas shelter. It is late now, but it is Christmas night still. And so much sadness everywhere." During the bitterly cold Christmas of...

Philip Glass , Karol Szymanowski , John Tavener and Jonathan Harvey are among the composers who have set the poetry of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī . Books of Rumi's poetry as reimagined by Coleman Barks have sold more than half a million copies, and in 1994 Publishers Weekly announced that Rumi was the bestselling poet in America. But the marketing of Rumi to Western audiences all too often severs him from Islam, and Stephen Schwarz has lamented the reduction of the Sufi master's metaphysics to the idiom of a gift card. Other less sanitised settings of Rumi that have featured On An Overgrown Path over the years include Ali Reza Ghorbani's Songs of Rebirth , the Firebird ensemble's L’Oiseau de Feu , Doulce Mémoire's Laudes , Ali Keeler's Ruh , Sheikh Hassan Dyck's The First and the Last and Trio Chemirani's Dawâr . Rumi is, of course, celebrated as the founder of the Mevlâna Order of Whirling Dervishes. My header photo shows Julien 'Jalal...

Guyanese-born Rudolph Dunbar wrote the definitive text book on the clarinet and had a burgeoning conducting career in the 1940s during which he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra and in 1945 became the first black conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But a 2007 Overgrown Path post profiling him explained how in the post-war period Dunbar's high profile career went into mysterious decline and how in 1988 he died in obscurity in London. Subsequent posts based on contributions from those who knew him suggested that intrigue inside the BBC ended his career . Now a remarkable video of Rudolph Dunbar talking in 1962 about his professional denouement has become available from RTBF/Belgium. The brief video from which the two still images are taken is in French, so a translation* is provided below. The video** can be viewed via this link . Please watch it even if you do not speak French; because it is an important and moving testament to the institutionalised discrimination that mo...

All these photos are from a collection of negatives held at the the Eastman Museum Rochester, NY, the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives. I first came across them when researching an Overgrown Path post in April 2005 . The 41 contact strips were identified as the 'Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection', but the Eastman Museum web site then attributed them to 'An unknown Nazi photographer', and still does so. My interest was piqued because Siegfried Lauterwasser was Herbert von Karajan's personal photographer , so reader Carol Murchie in the States researched the provenance of the photos for me. Carol was able to confirm that the photographer was indeed Siegfried Lauterwasser, and uncovered a lot more valuable background from Andy Eskind who had researched the collection at the Eastman Museum. My posts of April 19 and April 29 2005 quote in detail Andy's commentary on the photos, but the ...

Yesterday's Observer reports on the laudable plans of Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra to play in every abandoned synagogue in Hungary in memory of the expunged Jewish communities. In the article Fiona Maddocks describes Fischer as a fearless and outspoken campaigner. He is clearly on good terms with the United Arab Emirates' government; because in 2015 he took the Budapest Festival Orchestra to the UAE capital Abu Dhabi and received the Abu Dhabi Festival Award - see above. So hopefully he will now use his campaigning powers to persuade the UAE to end its refusal to recognize Israel as a state; which would help the Jewish community by allowing Israeli passport-holders to legally enter the Emirates. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

UN Human Rights Day on December 10th prompted a Guardian article by Daniel Barenboim headlined "It will take more than tolerance to protect human rights". Barenboim's invaluable work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the Barenboim-Said Akademie is quite rightly held up as a glowing example of the role of the arts in protecting human rights. But that must not stop discussion of how far an artist should compromise in pursuit of their goal. Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra have visited Abu Dhabi twice . Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a federal nation with a lamentable human rights record, as independent monitoring organisation Human Rights Watch reports : The United Arab Emirates (UAE) often uses its affluence to mask the government’s serious human rights problems. The government arbitrarily detains, and in some cases forcibly disappears, individuals who criticized the authorities, and its security forces face allegations of ...

That photo shows me putting my body where my mouth is and experiencing Nāda yoga - sound yoga - at the hands of radiesthenia practitioner Heidrun Kimm on Crete. Radiesthesia is the interaction between the vibrational fields of the human body and external objects, and the photo first appeared in a post last year which discussed what John Luther Adams describes as ""the strange power of noise". An earlier post had highlighted the little-understood importance of ultrasound, the sound at frequencies above the upper frequency limit of the ear, while another post described how medical research has shown that audiences become what they listen to . On the same path, my tribute to Jonathan Harvey last week touched on quantum field theory and postulated that the vibrating energy of music can transform the brain and, as a result, can transform lives. Just five days later the BBC ran a story reporting that doctors at a leading London hospital have used non-invasive ultraso...

Gustavo Dudamel, Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim, Jordi Savall and Joyce DiDonato are among the leading musicians who have performed in the Gulf States in recent years, and the the inaugural BBC Proms Dubai festival takes place in March 2017. So, given classical music's ongoing love affair with social media, the launch of the 140 Characters website deserves a heads up. This is the work of Human Rights Watch , and in recognition of Twitter’s 140-character limit, the interactive website profiles 140 prominent Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Omani, Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati social and political rights activists and dissidents - see images above - and describes their struggles to resist government efforts to silence them. All 140 have faced government retaliation for exercising their right to freedom of expression, and many have been arrested, tried, and sentenced to fines or prison. Dubai, which is hosting the BBC Proms, is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, and Abu Dhabi, which ha...

Catalonia is a creative powerhouse: Pau Casals *, Joan Miró, Antoni Gaudí, and Salvador Dalí were all proud Catalans, and today Barcelona is a vibrant centre of the arts . Jordi Savall is just one of the contemporary Catalan musicians who has had a global impact, and modern modal master Ross Daly 's Crete-based music co-operative has an annual Labyrinth in Catalunya outreach workshop. My recent plea for the composers in the photo above taken at the summer workshop of the National Youth Orchestra of Catalonia in 2000 to be identified has been answered by Santi Barguñó of Neu Records  with help from Ramón Humet who is in the photo. They are from left to right: Benet Casablancas ( bio & music ), Marcos Bosch ( bio  & music ), Josep Maria Guix ( bio & music ), Carles Tort, Moisés Bertran ( bio & music ), Ramón Humet ( bio & music ), Enric Riu ( bio & music ), Joan Guinjoan ( bio & music ) and Jonathan Harvey . I have added links to biogra...

The demise of professional arts criticism is, quite rightly, receiving the attention it deserves . But its murder by what is known in the media industry as user-generated content is receiving less attention. Prime examples - in more ways than one - are the user-generated reviews on Amazon. The authority of a professional critic is determined by the number of reviews written by her/him, and their subject matter and critical perceptiveness. With professional critics being axed as user-generated contributions replace paid for content, there is no reason why the same criteria should not be used to judge the authority of user-generated reviews. Here is an example. A classical music related book was recently promoted on social media by drawing attention to its seven five star Amazon reviews. The identity of the book is not relevant to this discussion; but the authority of the reviewers as measured by number of reviews, and their subject matter and critical perceptiveness - all of which...

Jonathan Harvey 's daughter Anna has posted via Twitter the new to me photo above of Jonathan outside IRCAM where he created among other seminal pieces Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco . In the Music Machine electronic music anthology Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco is highlighted, together with Désintegrations by Tristan Murail and Digital Moonscapes by Wendy Carlos , as an outstanding example of a composition using spectral analysis, and Jonathan's composition is cited as - and here comes the money quote - evidence that esoteric technology can produce music that appeals to a wider audience. There is a valuable spoken introduction in French to Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco from Pierre Boulez and others at IRCAM on YouTube . My 2013 post ' Britten looking forward ' told how Jonathan met the young composer Ramón Humet at a summer workshop for young composers organised by the National Youth Orchestra of Catalonia, and how Jonathan went on to endorse the 2007 recording of Humet...

  BS : Staying with global cultural influences, in 1966 you set a poem by the Sufi saint and mystic, Mawlānā Rumi. ' How could the soul not take flight ' is inspired by the ecstatic vision of Sufism, and that’s far removed from the contemplative Christian text you set fifteen years earlier in your ' Passion and Resurrection '. Can music cause spiritual elevation? And taking the discussion further, into the esoteric realm – and in fact I think you touched on this, when you were talking about Rudolf Steiner – can music transform matter? JH : Yes, let’s, first of all, look at spiritual elevation – I think I’ve always believed that, even in ' Passion and Resurrection ', the resurrection music is for me a new sort of music that I wrote, which is not bass dominated, it’s sort of centred around the middle and it floats from the middle, either side of this middle structure. And that for me represents the change of the world, at the time of the Resurrection, and the e...

This post leads down a path with the kind of salacious side turnings usually found on more click bait oriented music blogs . But there is a serious purpose to retelling the story of Olivier Greif, whose tragically short career and truncated talent have many disquieting parallels with another underrated composer of the late 20th century, Claude Vivier . Olivier Greif was born in Paris in 1950, his father was a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz. Greif's musical talent was identified when he was three and he entered the Paris Conservatoire aged ten to study piano and composition. He went on to study composition with Luciano Berio in New York where he moved in the same circles as Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Leonard Bernstein. All the accompanying photos, with the exception of my header montage, come via the Olivier Greif website and include images of Greif with Dali - whose lost opera prompted another path - and Bernstein; see photos below. In 1970 Olivier Gr...