On An Overgrown Path

There is a rare chance to hear one of Eugène Ysaÿe's sonatas for solo violin on Future Radio this Sunday. My Overgrown Path programme takes a journey from Bach to Belgium and frames Ysaÿe's Sonata No. 2 in A Minor with Bach's Sonata No. 1 in G minor and mighty Partita No 3 in E major. The Ysaÿe Sonatas are inspired by Bach, and the juxtaposition of Ysaÿe's Second Sonata with the E major Partita in the programme mirrors the Belgium composer's statement and restatement of themes from the Bach work. Thomas Zehetmair plays the Ysaÿe and the two Bach works are performed by Mark Lubotsky from Brilliant Classic's invaluable Bach Edition which offers all the composer's works on 155 CDs at a very affordable price. Listen at 5.00pm UK time on April 27 with a repeat at 12.50am on April 28. Ysaÿe was born in Liège in Belgium in 1858, and after graduation became principal violin of the Benjamin Bilse beer-hall orchestra , which found a home in a disused roller-skati...

Interesting article in French over on ConcertoNet.com about twentieth century music in general and Alex Ross' new book in particular. (Flaky machine translation here .) The writer is sometime Overgrown Path contributor Antoine Leboyer who highlights some overlooked contemporary European composers, and particularly recommends exploring Philippe Boesmans (above right), Guillaume Connesson , and Pascal Dusapin . Connesson and Dusapin are both French, but Boesmans is Belgian. Today, Belgium has been without a government for 157 days, and as time ticks by the possibility of a permanent split between the country's Dutch and French speaking communities comes closer. It is a story that has attracted surprisingly little international media coverage, and that is not because Belgium is of little importance. It was the German invasion of the country in 1914 that caused Britain to enter the First World War, a conflict that changed the world political landscape for ever. Since 1831...

Georges Simenon, who walked with Varèse , was born in Liège, Belgium in 1903. César Franck was born in the same city in 1822. Liège is in the predominantly French speaking part of Belgium. Both Simenon and Franck moved to France to further their careers. Pupils of César Franck later founded the Schola Cantorum in Paris where Edgard Varèse studied for three years. Si Tu Dois Partir is a French-language cover of a Bob Dylan number by the English electric folk group Fairport Convention . In 1969 Herbert von Karajan recorded Franck's Symphony in D minor and in the same year Fairport released their influential album Liege & Lief . Unusually, Karajan's recording of the Franck Symphony for EMI was made in France with L'Orchestre de Paris . Fairport Convention's recording producer was Joe Boyd , who also produced Nick Drake and Boyd was at Newport in 1965 when Bob Dylan went electric . Playboy par excellence Karajan had a house in Saint Tropez, France and kept his yacht...

Classical music wants a new, wider, and younger, audience. Yet celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth this year are relying on unimaginative 'complete works' projects and quasi-scholarly diatribes extolling his humanity. Both of which preach to the converted and are unlikely to reach out to that vital new audience. The big win for classical music in 2020 would be connecting Beethoven and his peers to a wider public. But there has been very little discussion of how that can be achieved, and the few innovative projects shooting for that goal risk being consigned to the oblivion of contemporary entartete musik by the new classical elitists . There is a very large and young audience for electronic dance music; which is something that the increasingly reactionary classical industry needs to understand. If art music is defined by its ability to change consciousness , then electronic dance music is art music because its huge appeal lies in its power to l...

New music is alive and well in Belgium. Tomorrow (Dec 15) sees an Alvin Curran (photo above) premiere in Ghent played by pianist Daan Vandewalle (who featured in my Inner Cities webcast ) and cellist Arne Deforce . The new Alvin Curran work is called Malapromptus . This is the programme, and more details here : Anton Webern - Sonate 1914 (2') Anton Webern - Drei Stucke opus 11, 1914 (2') Morton Feldman - Durations II 1960 (5') Edison Denisov - Dr ei Stücke 1967 (6') Galina Ustvolskaya - Grand Duett 1959 (22') Alvin Curran - Malapromtus 2007 Hear Daan Vandewalle talking to me about Alvin Curran's music here . And a double bill of new Belgian music here and here . Photo credit Hannah Frenzel. 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 - overgrownpath a...

Youth was the musical 'must have' in 2007. Could marriage be the musical 'must have' in 2008? My favourite Christmas disc this year was Ton Koopman playing Christmas Carols on the baroque Van Peteghem organ in St. Martinuskerk, Haringe , Belgium. Wonderful music from Sweelink , Buxtehude , Bull and Bach , wonderful playing by Koopman on the 1778 organ, with wonderful sound from producer Tini Mathot, who just happens to be Mrs Koopman, and the CD really is a family affair as it is released on Koopman's own Antoine Marchand record label. Tini Mathot is a distinguished keyboard player in her own right, and she is seen above playing alongside her husband. I last heard them together several years ago playing the Art of Fugue on two harpsichords ago in the peerless acoustics of St George's Brandon Hill , Bristol. Tini Mathot and Ton Koopman are the latest in a distinguished line of couples who have worked together as performers and producers. There are Isabella d...

The all day John Cage Happening in Bruge, Belgium this Sunday (Feb 17) is a complete sell-out. On An Overgrown Path will be there and also at Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel two days before. Adventurous programming and new music is certainly pulling in the European audiences, and the next hot ticket looks to be the happening previewed below, and we will be there as well: spnm’s experimental music night The Sound Source returns to Kilburn’s Luminaire (see footer photo) on 12 March with an unusual and creative response to the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen . Headlining the event are Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle , who will perform Klavierstücke I-IV , and drummer and percussionist Chris Cutler , who will join him for a version of Kontakte . Electronic artist Scanner completes the line-up with some Stockhausen-inspired works. Rounding off the evening, the three will team up to perform a newly commissioned tribute to one of Stockhausen’s hidden gems, Stockhoven/Beethausen . The ...

It is pleasing that the very talented black cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason 's debut album has been released by Decca and is receiving the full attention of Universal Classics' spin machine . Sheku Kanneh-Mason's career has also received major support from the BBC: he was winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition and has made a well-deserved well-deserved BBC Proms appearance . So it is appropriate to revisit the BBC's role in the career of another very talented black musician. Those header and footer images of Rudolph Dunbar are stills taken from a 1962 film on the RTBF/Belgium website. Guyanese-born Rudolph Dunbar wrote the definitive text book on the clarinet and had a flourishing conducting career in the 1940s. 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...

Dear Pliable. Just to put things right: The reader who told you that Henri Pousseur's birthplace Malmédy was German speaking , is not quite correct. While Malmédy is part of the so-called East Cantons (which were originally German, but became Belgian after the First World War), and which are now part of Wallonia, it is officially a French speaking town with language facilities for the German speaking minority there. I promise this will be the last time I bother you with the Belgian situation. ;-) Great blog, by the way. Cordially, Ivo Swinnen, As , Belgium Ivo, please don't apologise. All this helps explain why Belgium hasn't been able to form a government for nearly six months. And this path took me to some wonderful graphics connected to Henri Pousseur. That's where my header image comes from, it's part of a portrait of Henri Pousseur by Maxime Godard . Thank you for helping us explore the labyrinth of serial music . Any copyrighted material on these pages is ...

Edith Cavell was born in 1865 in the vicarage of Swardeston in rural Norfolk, a few miles from where I write these words. She was an accomplished artist, and had a flair for French. After several jobs as a governess in England she was recommended for a post in Brussels in 1890. In 1895 she returned to nurse her father through an illness, and it was this experience that led Edith to take up nursing. In 1905 she returned to Brussels and was put in charge of a pioneering training school for lay nurses on the outskirts of the city. Edith often returned to visit her mother who moved to Norwich after her husband's death. While on a visit in 1914 she heard of the German invasion of Belgium, but she returned to her hospital without hesitation. In the autumn of 1914, two stranded British soldiers found their way to Nurse Cavell's training school. Others followed and were spirited away to neutral territory in Holland. An underground lifeline was established, masterminded by Prince and P...

Jacques Brel has sold more than 25 million records worldwide. His songs, including standards such as Ne Me Quitte Pas , have been covered by a Who's Who of performers from Scott Walker and Judy Collins to Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone. Musicians including Leonard Cohen and David Bowie have been influenced by Brel who is a revered figure in his native Belgium and in his adopted homeland of France. So a story about Jacques Brel at the peak of his career singing on a sex education record made by a notorious French war criminals guilty of crimes against humanity sounds like the stuff of an April 1 post. But this remarkable and little known story is true. Regular readers will know that France, monastic orders and Gregorian chant are a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . For as the incomparable Bernard Levin wrote : I sometimes think I would exchange all the music I have ever heard for real plainsong heard amid walls of stone. During my recent physical and virtual travels I stumb...

Jacques Brel's songs, including standards such as Ne Me Quitte Pas , have been covered by a Who's Who of performers from Scott Walker and Judy Collins to Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone, and his records have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. Musicians including Leonard Cohen and David Bowie have been influenced by Brel who is a revered figure in his native Belgium and in his adopted homeland of France. So a story about Jacques Brel at the peak of his career singing on a sex education record made by a notorious French war criminals guilty of crimes against humanity sounds like the stuff of an April 1 post. But this remarkable and little known story is true. Regular readers will know that France, monastic orders and Gregorian chant are a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . For as the incomparable Bernard Levin wrote "I sometimes think I would exchange all the music I have ever heard for real plainsong heard amid walls of stone". During my recent physica...

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...