Coming up tonight on BBC Radio 3, and streamed throughout the coming week on site, is the Lebrecht Interview with one of the most self-possessed artists I have ever encountered. Hilary Hahn, last year's Grammy winner for the Schoenberg concerto that hardly anyone else dares to play, puts neither a note nor a hair out of place. We eyeballed for an hour in a studio in Liverpool, the shutters slamming down whenever the conversation touched on private life. I don't pretend to have got the … [Read more...]
Another view of Mahler’s Ninth
July 26, 2009 By
Fiona Maddocks, the thinking person's critic of choice, attended the same performance as I did, formed some parallel impressions (down to one telling detail) and wrote an account of it in today's Observer that could hardly be more different if it were in another language. Read it here. Now some may regard the difference between us as glass half-full, half-empty syndrome, others as a pair of irreconcilable philosophical perspectives. Fiona and I, it should be noted, have … [Read more...]
Night thoughts on Mahler’s Ninth
July 21, 2009 By
Watching Bernard Haitink at the BBC Proms last night, I experienced my usual frustration at his suppression of emotional contrast, his flat dynamic line and his fussy accentuation of peripheral detail. There was much to admire, as well, not least the tension that Haitink creates at the opening phrase and sustains to the last. But in more than thirty years of watching Haitink I have never been convinced by his approach to Mahler and the Ninth he gave last night with the London Symphony Orchestra … [Read more...]
Student abuse in music – someone speaks out, at last
July 20, 2009 By
The new Lebrecht Interview series starts tonight on BBC Radio 3 with an unbuttoned conversation with William Christie, early-music pioneer and the American who revolutionised the culture of musical performance in France. 'Am I being indiscreet?' he says, at one point. Yes, he is. We talk for 45 minutes, no holds barred and all names named, about how great musicians abuse their students, how public funding gets distorted by political vanity and how an individual with tunnel vision … [Read more...]
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