On An Overgrown Path

Just received - a press release announcing that Pierre-Laurent Aimard (photo above) will succeed Thomas Adès as Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival for three years with effect from 2009. As the Independent commented following his BBC Prom earlier this year: " At 50 , the French pianist-conductor still has the eager simplicity that induced Messiaen to make him his protégé at 12, and the luminous brilliance that persuaded Boulez to install him at 19 as resident pianist for his brand-new Ensemble InterContemporain . . . .” Pierre-Laurent Aimard explained: “It was a big surprise to receive Jonathan Reekie's proposal to become Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival. It was only after long reflection that I realised it was the right and possibly natural progression for me in terms of musical challenge and engagement. I love the exploration of musical confrontations and the encounter with various creators and performing partners - embracing the literature of differ...

Thomas Adès' opera The Tempest is being broadcast by BBC Radio 3 from Covent Garden at 18.30 BST on Saturday 23rd June, follow this link for the webcast. Staying with Adès, if you find Elgar too romantic and pastoral try Adès' first string quartet Arcadiana . It was commissioned for the Cambridge Elgar Festival in 1994, and has a sublime tribute to Sir Edward in the form of seventeen bars in E flat, the key of 'Nimrod'. Not what you would expect from Adès, and quite delicious. Thomas Adès' Arcadiana is on the EMI CD of his music Living Toys , available at budget price. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Over the years On An Overgrown Path has argued the case for classical music embracing the visual as well as the auditory, with one post arguing with tongue only half in cheek that sleeve artwork changes the sound of CDs . Classical music's de facto spokesperson Norman Lebrect has turned textual click bait into an Olympic sport . Yet Slipped Disc , which is supported by all the major classical labels and is acknowledged as the state-of-the-art classical website, has decidedly amateurish graphics - see typical example below. As the information age morphs into the experience age , visual cues are playing an increasingly important role in the overall experience. To quote an authoritative source : The human brain can process images seen in just 13 milliseconds... Given that most information transmitted to our brain is visual, and the brain processes images faster than text, it is crucial that websites, blogs, and social media posts, use effective visuals, images, and graphics, ...

This path leads from music education in Norfolk England to Thomas Adès in New York. Members of the Britten Sinfonia are seen here working as part of the In Harmony project which uses music to bring positive change to the lives of young people in some of the most deprived areas of England. I took the photos this morning at Larkman Primary School and the young musicians seen in them will be joining violinist Pekka Kuusisto and me for a pre-concert event in Norwich on February 25th at which they will play Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky and Pachelbel. After their performance Thomas Adès conducts his Concerto for Violin, felicitously subtitled Concentric Paths , with Pekka Kuusisto as soloist, and music by Couperin, Ravel and Stravinsky. The Norwich concert is part of a Concentric Paths tour by the Britten Sinfonia, Thomas Adès and Pekka Kuusisto; the other venues are Dijon (Feb 11), Cambridge (Feb 20), Lincoln Center, New York (Feb 22), London, Queen Elizabeth Hall (Feb 27), and Dublin (Fe...

The big change in Thomas Adès' own emotional life is his relationship with Tal Rosner; they became civil partners at start of 2006. "It's nothing so banal as you get married and everything changes, but if you're truthful, then everything in life contributes to what you are, what you write," he says. "So maybe now I'm allowing certain feelings or spaces in one's soul or heart which before I wouldn't have recognised or even known were there. I do feel that sense of opening and completion, and all of these things have to be tied up with the music I write. But then, if you're an artist worth your salt, you're transforming all the time." Tom Service interviewing Thomas Adès (photo above) in today's Guardian as the Berlin Philharmonic give the first performance of Adès' new orchestral work Tevot. Service is a fan, and describes: 'the sheer expressive impact the piece makes. Of any piece of new music I've heard at its premi...

Contemporary music is flourishing in Aldeburgh. Thomas Adès is the Festival's artistic director, innovative programming is pulling in new audiences, traditional musical boundaries are disappearing, and an inspirational £14m ($28m) creative campus will make new music available to future generations. Teamwork has played a vital role, but much of the credit for this success must go to Aldeburgh Music's chief executive Jonathan Reekie, who came to Suffolk in 1998 from Almeida Opera . The photo above shows Jonathan (left) talking to Bob Shingleton at Snape during this exclusive interview for On An Overgrown Path : BS - What is 'Aldeburgh Music', and what is its remit? JR - Aldeburgh Music was founded by the composer Benjamin Britten and singer Peter Pears in 1948, when they set up a Festival based in their home town of Aldeburgh . It’s remit draws on the original principles they established. These were to nurture talent by mixing established musical stars with emer...

Overgrown Path's web logs over the past few days showed little uplift in traffic to my wide range of Herbert von Karajan articles . Most of the increase that happened came either from searches for the conductor's political and sexual predilections or from Japan, which has always had a special love affair with him. This analysis was mirrored in the mainstream media where, despite strong promotion from Deutsche Grammophon and EMI and some unashamed puffery from Simon Rattle , there was little interest in the Karajan anniversary other than tabloid-style trash from Norman Lebrecht and Ivan Hewett . The music industry loves an anniversary and two years ago we celebrated Shostakovich to death . So why did Herbert's birthday party fall so flat? Many will say it was because of Karajan, but I disagree. Love him or hate him Karajan was a very high profile conductor who has never struggled in the past for column inches . Nobody came to the party this week-end because our love a...

Nicholas Kenyon has been Director of the BBC Proms from 1996 to 2007, he takes over as managing director of the Barbican Centre arts complex in October, and today delivers the Hesse Lecture at the 2007 Aldeburgh Festival . His subject is 'changing tastes and changing programmes over 60 Aldeburgh Festivals and 80 years of BBC Proms, the story of the post-war Festival movement, and the unprecedented changes that now challenge all aspects of classical music.' Although tastes and programmes have changed, Aldeburgh remains a great international music festival. It is still personal, distinctive and inclusive, and those are the very characteristics that defined the seasons of the great Proms directors such as William Glock and John Drummond . Aldeburgh eschews fads and composer anniversaries , and instead challenges with the best new music. Aldeburgh ignores the touring brand-name orchestras with their jet-set maestros and tired war-horse programmes , and instead commissions in...

Frank Gehry's temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavillion , seen above, is currently the hot thing in London high art. It opens on July 19 with a concert by another priest of high art, Thomas Adès . Despite the photo on the Gallery's website of Adès with baton in hand the event is, in fact, a chamber music recital. The music by Adès and Conlon Nancarrow should be stunning. But high art comes at a price - the cheapest seats are £45 ($90). For which concert goers are warned 'The Pavilion is an open structure, so please dress accordingly. Due to the unique architecture some tickets may have restricted sightline'. High prices - best music by any twentieth century composer ? Picture credit Serpentine Gallery © Gehry Partners LLP 2008. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - ...

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK, when we remember all those who lost their lives in the struggle for peace and freedom. Remembrance Sunday has many musical connections, ranging from Benjamin Britten through Arvo Pärt , to George Lloyd, who was himself traumatised in action . Next Saturday I will be at a performance in Norwich Cathedral of Herbert Howell's 1936 Requiem . This is an economic, intense and moving work that lasts for little more than fifteen minutes, and is scored for SSAATTBB and organ. There is an excellent recording of it on Naxos by the Choir of St Johns' College, Cambridge directed by Christopher Robinson. The CD also includes Take him, earth, for cherishing , the motet composed by Howells to mark the assasination of President John F. Kennedy. We will be remembering that sad event just five days after the Norwich Cathedral performance of Howell's Requiem . My footer photo is a reminder of one of the more obscure musical connections to Remembrance ...

A late night performance of Stimmung is one of the highlights of the 2008 Aldeburgh Summer Festival. It will be sung by London Voices as part of the Faster Than Sound experimental music festival within a festival. The evocative photo above was kindly provided by fellow blogger Richard Friedman . He took it at the October 1971 performance of Stimmung in the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris by the group that commissioned it, Collegium Vocale Köln. Richard is also a fellow webcaster, check out his Music From Other Minds on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco. The footer photo was taken by me at the 2007 Faster Than Sound . Stockhausen's music is just one of many delights at the 2008 Aldeburgh Festival which runs from 13th to 29th June, here are some of the others: * World premiere of a new opera An Ocean of Rain by Yannis Kyriakides directed by Cathie Boyd . * Featured composer György Kurtág and his wife Marta in recital. * Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays The Art of Fugue and conducts the Brit...

"My ideal day would be staying at home and playing the harpsichord works of Couperin - new inspiration on every page" said Thomas Adès , and François Couperin is a major influence on the music of Adès, including his Sonata de Caccia , a trio for baroque oboe, horn and harpsichord. If you don't have a harpsichord at home all is not lost. Michael Borgstede (photo above) has recorded the complete harpsichord music of Couperin . The performances are excellent, and the the sound captured by engineer Peter Arts in three different Dutch churches is very good. The 11 CD box is on the Brilliant Classics label, and that means it's at budget price - I paid £30 ($62) in the UK. Michael Borgstede's background is interesting. He lives in Tel Aviv, and is the Middle East correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung as well as being a highly regarded harpsichordist and organist. Follow this link for a wide range of MP3 downloads from his website. No excuse...

Violinist, conductor, composer, and improviser Pekka Kuusisto recently announced he would pausing his professional engagements in the United States in the following message: I’ve decided to stop working in the United States for the time being.  I want no pressure placed on any of my colleagues to come to the same conclusion.  Love and solidarity Predictability his decision was greeted by an outpouring of bile on the classical music industry's online resource of choice Slipped Disc . Just as the decision of respected American composer John Luther Adams to relocate to Australia  was greeted with similar bile . Here is just one comment posted in response to Pekka Kuusisto's decision: Sanctimonious piece of shit. Never going to another one of his concerts. The US didn’t kill Iranian school girls for performative violence. This false accusation is disrespectful to the US military which gives Pekka his freedoms. Online forums always attract nutjobs. But this thread is a conti...

Reader responses to Friday's post emphatically confirm that I am not the only one that does not ‘get’ Paulo Coelho. Which is reassuring, but we should not be complacent, because intellectual superficiality can be found much closer to home in classical music’s love affair with the über cool TED movement. TED stands for 'Technology Electronics & Design' and is the brand of the privately owned not-for-profit Sapling Foundation whose main activities are networking conferences dedicated to "ideas worth spreading". The TED movement originated in Silicon Valley, California and its events are now held around the world, with the global spread helped by the TEDx outreach programme. Central to the TED format is a strictly enforced 18 minute duration for presentations, and there is a queue to join Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin who have spoken at the conferences over the years. Classical musicians a...

The BBC’s privileged position as broadcaster, promoter, orchestra manager and new music commissioner guarantees maximum media coverage for their Promenade Concerts . The Proms may be the biggest music festival in the world, but it is not the only show in town. Some of the other festivals can teach the BBC a thing or two about innovative programme planning – here’s a taster of the events I will be attending, and writing about, in the coming month: Norfolk & Norwich Festival May 4 ~ Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Paul Hillier, Kedrov, Pärt, Kreek and Rachmaninov ( All-night Vigil excerpts ), at Norwich Cathedral. May 6 ~ afternoon, Monteverdi: 1610 Vespers , Eastern Early Music Forum conducted by Philip Thorby ( not part of the official festival ), evening, Bobo Stenson Trio at Norwich Playhouse May 13 ~ Matthew Halls harpsichord, Bach Goldberg Variations at King of Hearts Aldeburgh Festival June 12 ~ morning, Luigi Nono portrait, a performance of Hay que c...

Prince Charles has commissioned a piano concerto in memory of the Queen Mother. It is a great time to commission new music in the UK with Mark-Anthony Turnage , Thomas Adès , Judith Weir , the Queen's own Master of the Music Peter Maxwell Davies and many other contemporary composers just waiting for the royal command. So who did our future king choose? Well .... Nigel Hess actually. Here, from his publisher's website , is an extract from Hess' resumé: He has worked extensively as a composer and conductor in television, theatre and film. His numerous credits include A Woman of Substance, Vanity Fair, Campion, Testament (Ivor Novello Award for Best TV Theme), Summer’s Lease (Television & Radio Industries Club Award for Best TV Theme), Maigret, Classic Adventure (‘Music from the Movies’ Award for Best BBC Theme), Dangerfield, Just William, Stick With Me Kid for Disney, Wycliffe for HTV (Royal Television Society Nomination for Best TV Theme and ‘Music from the Movies’ ...