Category Archives: Interviews

Simon Rattle on Gustav Mahler

Do you remember when you heard the music of Gustav Mahler for the first time?

I am not sure. I grew up in Liverpool when they were doing what was actually the first European Mahler-cycle with the same orchestra and conductor. It’s extraordinary to think of that – this was the middle of the ‘60s. But no-one in Europe had played all the symphonies with the same conductor at this time. It had only been done in Utah, by the Utah Symphony Orchestra. And look – one forgets how off-centre Mahler was at this time, before Bernstein, before etc. etc. Berthold Goldschmidt had only just performed the Mahler Third for the first time in Britain; that was in 1962. I have still a magnificent tape of that. So, Sir Charles Groves and the Liverpool Philharmonic, they did two a year for five and a half years, because they also did Das Lied von der Erde, they also did the early version of the completed Tenth. And I can remember, because I was studying: violin with one player in the orchestra, percussion with another, and they said: “Ah! We’re on our twice-yearly struggle with Mahler”.

Read the full interview here.

UE Mahler Interviews: Simon Rattle from Universal Edition on Vimeo.

James Rhodes interview: this clown can play Beethoven

No cheesy crossover, no TV ad favourites, but Bach partitas, Beethoven sonatas, Chopin études and wild, sprawling piano fantasies by the crazed 19th-century composer Charles-Valentin Alkan.

And he’ll be playing them live, too, in venues where classical music has never been heard: the Latitude festival, for example, a sort of highbrow, right-on Glastonbury held on the Suffolk coast in July. Next Wednesday he performs in the Udderbelly, a tent in the shape of an upside-down purple cow on the South Bank.

The cover of Rhodes’s second album (the last before Warner snapped him up) shows him dressed like a mime artist at a psychedelic rave: face slathered in white make-up, a smear of scarlet lipstick, plastic trousers – one leg red, one blue. When it came out, I wrote a blog post asking: “Why does this clown think he can play late Beethoven?”

Read the full interview in The Telegraph here.

Interview with Antonio Pappano

We are having an early lunch. Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera House, has blocked off the afternoon for a recording session at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in north London, and needs to be there by 2.30pm. The restaurant where we are to meet is five minutes away, but the choice is not purely one of convenience. L’Aventure, I discover during lunch, is Pappano’s favourite London dining place. He held his 50th birthday party there last December.

The midday sun is out and so are the tourists. Abbey Road, in the leafy suburb of St John’s Wood, has long been a place of pilgrimage for fans of the Beatles, who made most of their recordings there. The tourists are busy snapping pictures on the pedestrian crossing immortalised on the cover of the group’s 1969 album Abbey Road. But the studios’ status owes just as much to the great composers and conductors who have worked there since the 1930s – a tradition Pappano will continue at his recording session after lunch.

Pappano holds one of the most powerful positions in classical music. At Covent Garden, where he became artistic supremo in 2002, he controls the choice of operas and singers. Since 2005 he has played a similar role in Rome, as music director of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Italy’s premier concert ensemble. He is also one of a dwindling number of conductors to have a recording contract. His recent EMI versions of Verdi’s Requiem and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (which this week each won a Classical Brit award) have set a benchmark for modern interpretation of these works.

Read the full interview in The Financial Times here.

Sam Stander interviews Laurie Anderson

On a sparsely furnished Zellerbach Hall stage, armed with her skeletal violin, Laurie Anderson looked like the last player left after the orchestra had wandered off. But on Saturday, as she orated and played her way through her latest performance piece, “Delusion,” she exuded nothing but accomplished mastery.

Commissioned for the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, the work develops Anderson’s career-long fascination with language and persona. Since before her 1982 debut record Big Science, she’s been fusing spoken-word storytelling with singing and experimental electronics. Here, she recounts dreams and treats various broader themes, switching between her natural voice and a booming masculine vocal filter named Fenway Bergamot.

“Delusion” shares some content with her upcoming album, Homeland, but it began its life in play form. “I thought, I’m going to try to write a play,” she recalled, speaking a couple days before the performance, “because I was working with a lot of sort of jump-cut type material, and I thought, how is that going to sound as a language where two people aren’t quite connecting as a conversation?”

Read the full article and listen to the interview in The Daily Californian here.

Michael Tilson Thomas interview in The Washington Post

Michael Tilson Thomas is a conductor — he heads two orchestras (the San Francisco Symphony and the New World Symphony), has won 10 Grammys and led the YouTube Symphony at Carnegie Hall — but he comes from a family of actors. His grandparents were major stars of the Yiddish theater a century ago, creating Yiddish versions of everything from “Hamlet” to Wagner’s “Parsifal.” And he is keenly aware that acting is in his blood.

“As a conductor,” he says, sitting over breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel, “I’m not interested in telling people, ‘Play the first three notes loud, the next three of them slower, the next two of them shorter . . . ‘ No director would say to an actor, ‘Say the first three words slow, and then wait a beat, and then say the next five more trippingly on the tongue.’ You wouldn’t, because the actor has to become the person. The actor must be the role.”

Tilson Thomas, or MTT, as he is widely known, has become the role himself. A notably boyish 65, his lean, handsome face framed with gently grayed hair, he’s grown into his trademark air of aggressive precociousness; at his age, he’s allowed to be the person in the room who knows the most about everything and to visibly expand when the focus of the conversation is himself. On the day of his Washington visit last month, he’s scheduled to accept the National Medal of Arts from President Obama — one of the country’s highest artistic honors. (He’ll be back in town Wednesday with the San Francisco Symphony when it performs at the Kennedy Center, courtesy of the Washington Performing Arts Society.)

(…)

Tilson Thomas’s eyes are brighter, his skin more aglow than in some earlier incarnations (particularly an infamous bad-boy period in the 1970s). Now, he’s a passionate cook, and fresh off a stint at the Pritikin Center: For more than two months he’s been living without salt, fat, caffeine, alcohol and sugar. “I feel so much better,” he says. “I have more energy. I’m kind of eating the diet my ancestors ate in the Ukraine. Kasha and oat groats, whole grains. I sound like the most boring food faddist,” he says, ever self-aware. “We’ll see how long this lasts.”

Read the full interview in The Washington Post here.

Yo-Yo Ma: Cellist in chief

In 1961, Pablo Casals played for John F. Kennedy at the White House. The concert could be seen as a symbol of the importance of the arts to the Kennedy administration, or as a gesture of honor to a great cellist.

But there’s no question, when the concert is re-created next year as part of the Kennedy Center’s tribute to the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s inauguration, about who will represent Casals. When there’s a commemorative event that calls for classical music, Yo-Yo Ma is almost sure to be the person playing it.

“My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there’s a place for culture,” Ma said in a recent interview over breakfast near his home in Cambridge, Mass. And one of music’s accepted roles is a commemorative one. “Weddings, bar mitzvahs, funerals, an inauguration,” Ma says, “those are the moments when it serves a moment.” And Ma is happy to make music wherever it’s needed. After all, it helps get the message across.

Read the full interview in The Washington Post here.

Wolfgang Rihm: the musical omnivore

The taxi driver knows immediately who I’m going to see when I tell him the address I need in Karlsruhe. “That’s Professor Rihm, right?” I’m a wee bit bemused that someone I’ve never met in this beautiful, stately town near Germany’s French and Swiss borders knows that I’m here to meet its most famous musical resident – Wolfgang Rihm, one of the most brilliant, inventive, and prolific composers alive today. “We pick him up all the time. He doesn’t drive, so he knows us all pretty well. He’s a really nice guy.”

Rihm belongs to Karlsruhe. He was born and raised here, he sang in the city’s choirs, played the church organs, and now teaches at the conservatoire. The flat where he lives is a stone’s throw from his first family home.

Rihm, 57, is a big, hearty, and big-hearted man. “Let me show you my whisky collection,” he says five minutes after I arrive. He’s proud of a handful of rare single malts that have probably never been in the same drinks cabinet together, and we share an astonishingly good 1982 Glenfarclas at his work desk. The desk is the only clear space in Rihm’s rooms, each of which is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. On the floor are piles of CDs and manuscript paper. A Steinway grand piano groans under the weight of scores, books and yet more CDs. It’s an orderly chaos, I suggest. He smiles. “That’s the combination I need. The one corrects the other, so it achieves a kind of equilibrium. Like in my music.”

Read the full interview in The Guardian here.

Why Simon Rattle is fed up with Britain

So you think the mood in Britain is gloomy? The view from Berlin looks even more apocalyptic, it seems. “If I were not British,” says Britain’s most celebrated conductor, “I would say that this old country of ours is going through a kind of endgame.”

The remark is so startling that I stare open-mouthed at Sir Simon Rattle. Does he mean that Britain is finished? “Well, that cannot be true, can it?” he goes on. “And yet what I read about the country at the moment is totally depressing.”

Will he vote in the election? “Let’s put it this way: every time I read about what Wagner was like, I wonder why I am performing his music. And every time I read about what British politics is like, I wonder why I should vote. But I suppose I’d better get my act together and support someone on the day.”

The Tories? A vote for change? Rattle laughs, as if I’ve suggested that he conduct a Lloyd Webber medley at his next Berlin Philharmonic concert. “Look, how long have you known me? You can’t really imagine me voting Conservative, can you? If I knew myself who I was voting for I would tell you.

Read the full interview in The Times here.

Read another interview in Telegraph here.

Anne-Sophie Mutter in United Arab Emirates

“Excuse my English,” Anne-Sophie Mutter says with a laugh. “I know it’s rather flowery, but that’s as good as it gets.” As it turns out she speaks it better than I do; her German must be a model of rhetorical control.

Still, it’s clear why, as one of the finest violinists in the world, she might feel her second language ranks poorly as a mode of expression. It is our good fortune in Abu Dhabi that we’ll get to hear her fingers do the talking when she comes to the Emirates Palace to play a trio of violin trios this weekend as part of the Abu Dhabi Classics season.

For now it’s only worth noting that, in music as in speech, Mutter seems to have been reconciling herself to floweriness.

Read the full article in The National here.

Corigliano speaks out on ‘Darkness’ rejection

Last week, MovieScore Magazine published the news about Howard Shore replacing John Corigliano as the original score composer on the upcoming Mel Gibson thriller, Edge of Darkness. Today, we have a lot more information for you – from Corigliano himself! One of the most respected and acclaimed composers of contemporary concert music in the world, Corigliano had written three feature film scores prior to Edge of Darkness, with The Red Violin earning him the Oscar ten years ago. The rejection of his Edge of Darkness score was met with great disappointment among fans of his music and in the film music community, and the reasons behind the switch of composers has been somewhat unclear.

MovieScore Magazine can now present to you a revealing interview with John Corigliano himself on his music for Edge of Darkness, and the events that ultimately led to the rejection of the score. Why was it replaced? What did it sound like? Will he ever score another film? Moviescore Magazine asked.

Listen to The Red Violin Caprices on Spotify here.