On an overgrown path
On an overgrown path is an example of a personal blog that a classical music fan updates daily. The blog is produced using Blogger and uses one of the built-in blogger templates – anyone can use these simple tools to publish a blog. The articles provoke thought and the comments are very illuminating and mostly from people who clearly know their music. The list of links to radio stations that provide Webcasts of live concerts is most useful as well!
The article on Furtwangler and Forgotten New Music provides a valuable counterbalance to the usual image of Wilhelm Furtwangler as a conductor of Beethoven and Bruckner. The comments provide some history for the forgotten composers featured in the list of performances.
The article on a recent visit to Dresden – featuring photos of the rebuilt Frauenkirche – told me that Shostakovich’s 8th Quartet records the composer’s response to a post war visit to Dresden, and that the piece was written in three days. The comments include an account of a performance of the Messiah by the Bach Choir from London in the newly completed church, and an extract from the diary of an RAF pilot who was on the bombing raid…
“We went to Dresden with the usual sinking feeling of personal fear, suppresed by busying ourselves with our technical tasks, in the usual ignorance of why our masters chose this target and briefed on the matter only so far as was relevant to destroying what they wanted to destroy”
The blog does not always clearly mark quoted text – you have to realise that the authors are quoting from the context. Safari has difficulty resolving the Unicode accented letters – Firefox deals with these fine.