On An Overgrown Path

So what does it take to re-ignite the passion of a 75 year old classical nut whose cynicism has been fuelled over the years by the vacuous hype and talent-light celebrities of today's classical world? Over the years harpsichord maestro Scott Ross has featured On An Overgrown Path many times. Back in 2005 I wrote in praise of his ground-breaking recording of the complete Scarlatti keyboard sonatas, my post  Master musician who experienced the pain of genius   is still frequently read four years after it was written, and that post was inspired by my 2013 pilgrimage to Scott's house in Assas, France. There has even been a post featuring a possible member of the great Assas music lineage, a black and white cat . The ancestry of that cat may be debatable, but another part of the Assas lineage is indisputable, and it is this which has re-ignited my passion. French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau 's CD Vertigo - Rameau & Royer was recorded in the Château d'Assas wher...

Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...

In June and July 1945 Yehudi Menuhin performed at camps for “displaced persons” – Holocaust survivors – including outside where the demolished Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had stood. He was deeply shocked by what he saw; yet in 1947 he returned to Germany to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by the recently de-Nazified Wilhelm Furtwängler. Menuhin was the first Jewish musician to perform in post-World War II Germany, explaining that he did so in order to support the rehabilitation of German music and to help heal the spirit of the German people.  My header photo shows Menuhin playing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 in 1966 with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the  now fashionably-reviled Herbert von Karan. The Jerusalem Cinematheque - Israel Film Archive describes that collaboration as an example of how "how music can still contribute to reconciliation today". Coincidentally, or possibly not, both Menuhin and Karajan were yoga practitioners. Menu...

Marketing is now an accepted tool for trying to reach classical music's elusive new audience. In the world of marketing there are two separate entities, the product and the brand. Classical music's product is the music itself. Fortunately there is very little that can be done to damage the product. The transcendental genius of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and their peers across the ages will continue to shine for decades and centuries to come. But the classical music brand is a different matter.  One definition is that a brand is the personality of an organisation, communicated through an identifying.....voice and tone. So what is the personality, voice and tone that the classical music brand is communicating today? The self-styled 'world's most-read cultural website' is  Slipped Disc . This high-profile face of the classical music brand enjoys the full support of the classical music industry. Yet for years Slipped Disc has leveraged tribalism through its on-line lync...

That photo was taken by me a few days ago in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains . My soundtrack for time spent at altitude was the reissue Music of Morocco recorded by Paul Bowles as archived in the Library of Congress. As my photo shows Morocco still has a unique ambience in the mountainous areas. But overall Morocco was a very different country when Bowles made his recordings in 1959. As the Italian writer and traveller  Tiziano Terzani  explains in  A Fortune Teller Told Me :    A country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officers of the UN and half the world's governments and passionate prophets of 'development' at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American General in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied v...

Much spin surrounded the launch of BBC Verify which fact-checks and counters disinformation in external sources. So let's hope the same forensic analysis is applied to the BBC's own contributors .