Escaping Netflix

That is Alma Mahler in the photo. In July 1940 she fled from unoccupied Marseille in France across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain in an escape masterminded by American Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee. She escaped with the Czech writer Franz Werfel , and in her luggage were several Mahler manuscripts, among them Das Lied von der Erde and the the score of the first three movements of Bruckner's Third Symphony. 

Netflix docudramas are not my thing. But I watched the first episode of the strangely titled Transatlantic as I am familiar with the story of Varian Fry on which the series is very, very, very loosely based. I will say no more about Transatlantic, except that I won't be watching the other five episodes. 

For those who prefer the facts over screen bait, there are two Overgrown Path posts about the Varian Fry era. Walking the walk with Alma Mahler recounts my retracing of the route taken by Varian Fry's escapees, and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is my tribute to Walter Benjamin - the subject of some really dreadful ham acting in the Netflix series - after visiting his memorial in the town where he died after failing to cross the border. Sorry, but unlike Transatlantic, there is no nudity, clandestine affairs or gay liaisons in my posts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
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...
Read more

With or without AI we are facing a pandemic of slop

Image
In his new book  A Trick of the Mind   experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist  Daniel Yon   provides a thought-provoking take on AI. He proposes that the borders between human creativity and AI are more porous than the dominant narrative suggests , explaining that  there is a close symmetry between what happens in AI's artificial neural networks, and what happens in the networks of our own minds.  Human evolution depends on random variability. Without genetic mutation there would be no variability and humans would never change, meaning every child would be an exact copy of their parents.  Daniel Yon expands the work of social psychologist and scholar  Donald T. Campbell   to propose that this dependence on random mutation does not just apply to human evolution but also to creative evolution. So no random mutation in the creative process means no development. All creativity depends on taking old ideas and combining...
Read more

More Slipped Disinformation

Image
On Slipped Disc Norman Lebrecht crows that "BBC Radio 3 bounces back after summer disp... Radio 3 has risen again to 1.91 million, a quarterly increase of 106,000 listeners". This is misinformation. Because comparing the autumn/winter Q4 (Oct to Dec) figure of 1.91m with the summer Q3 (July to Sept) 1.81m is deliberately misleading. It does not take into account the seasonal change in radio listening: more people listen to the radio in autumn/winter than in the summer. The meaningful analysis, which is omitted from Norman's puffery, is the audience movement from the same quarter the previous year. BBC Radio 3's audience in Q4 2024 was 1.952m and in Q4 2025 was 1.912m. So, in fact, rather than bouncing back, Radio 3 showed a small - 40k - drop in audience year on year. For those preferring facts to misleading spin, the two relevant RAJAR reports are reproduced here - Q4 2025 above, Q4 2024 below.        
Read more

The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

Image
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...
Read more

Those are my principles....

Image
Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc and   Lebrecht Weekly, 12/05/2023   "Why I cannot, in good conscience, review this record I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter....Christian Thielemann, in the recent film ‘Music under the Swastika’, claimed that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s complicity in the Third Reich was justified by his legacy of extraordinary recordings.  Leonskaya’s presence in Putin’s Russia is not dissimilar. What are we to make of them?... The performances, per se, have nothing to do with the present situation. And yet, everything.I cannot review them". . ..and if you don't like my principles... well, I have others . Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc , 19/11/2025 "The Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven has cancelled a December 4 concert by the Russian-Georgian Jewish pia...
Read more

You are looking at the future of classical music journalism

Image
Quite rightly there is much lamenting about the enforced departure of New York Times music critic Allan Kozinn. Quite wrongly the lamenting is being led by Norman Lebrecht* , who single-handedly has pioneerd the audience whoring click baiting school of tabloid music journalism that has made the informed writing of Allan Kozinn and others redundant. Quite hypocritically the classical music establishment is lamenting the demise of erudite critics and journalists while at the same time throwing its weight behind tabloid music journalism . * All links to Slipped Disc are indirect to avoid swallowing click bait; the cited reference should appear at the top of the Google search results. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain 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 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...
Read more

A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

Image
2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
Read more

Critical Mass

Image
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 m...
Read more

Great recordings without the spin

Image
This wonderful Christian Steiner portrait of Charles Gerhardt(1927-99) featured in my 2007 post LPs were like the force of gravity . Gerhardt's important contribution as a conductor, producer and champion of twentieth-century composers such as Howard Hanson , whose Second Symphony is the main work on the disc above, has never been fully recognised. So I was delighted when David Cavlovic sent me a link to a wonderful appreciation of Gerhardt's work . Reading Robert E. Benson's memories of Gerhardt prompted me to dig some of his great recordings out of my collection, and to write my own appreciation below. Charles Gerhardt was a champion of the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold , and collaborated with the composer's son George on recordings of his film music. One result was the 1972 LP seen above conducted by Charles Gerhardt and produced by George Korngold, which is a true sonic and musical delight. At one time it was available as a Chesky CD transfer, but I can find no...
Read more