He may have been the last man alive to see Mussolini and his mistress hanging by their heels in Milano and the stage of La Scala a mound of rubble. At least, that’s the story he liked to tell and I believed him as he told it to me.
He was evasive about many other things, conservative in his artistic and political views to the point of being almost reactionary, wealthy beyond words and decadent with it – living like a Roman consul in modern times in a villa full of statues and mosaics.
Still, I treasured every moment I spent with him and remember his every word.
‘I think hasty decisions have been made. In addition, I find it worrying that suddenly everyone disappears from the leadership. Gatti gone, director Raes gone, it’s a complete sale. I understand that some of the musicians now want to take charge of the matter. I welcome that, because if the cliché of the cynical orchestra musician does not apply anywhere, it is in Amsterdam. But an orchestra is never unanimous and then you might get thunder again. I especially hope that the artistic quality does not fall. ”
What do you advise?
‘Find a capable director who coordinates well. I have suggested a few names of people I know and trust. The ability of the musicians is great, but they are the tip of an iceberg. There is a lot of work under water that they cannot do themselves.’
Do you have tips for a new chef?
‘I actually think that the job of chief conductor is becoming obsolete. The famous names from the past, Willem Mengelberg and Eduard van Beinum, spent a lot of time in Amsterdam. These days chefs constantly travel from one orchestra to another.’
The venerable Elisabeth Leonskaja has completed her recording of the complete Schubert piano sonata with a late flourish.
In the second volume she includes an extraordinary rare video of her 1993 Moscow four-hand recital with Sviatoslav Richter.
Here’s a sampler.
The iconoclastic Hanna Hartman, 58, is to be composer-in-residence at the next Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival this November.
Here’s what they can expect.
Slipped Disc’s diarist Anthea Kreston has a new podcast spot at Berlin’s Boulezsaal.
For her opening dozen podcasts, she chats up some of the world’s top string quartets.
Listen here to the Jerusalem Quartet talking about their love of Yiddish.
From the cellist’s commencement address to Dartmouth College:
I’m sure that in the course of your lifetime, including the last four years, you have witnessed power and its abuse. When you were young, you probably saw it on the playground. You’ve seen it on this campus. We certainly have all seen it in our nation, and around the world.
In my own lifetime, I’ve seen too many people make decisions that put themselves before their community, before society, before the health of our planet. I’ve seen too many people who choose to build walls rather than bridges.
Sometimes it’s because of the arrogance of their certitude, or because of simple, blissful unawareness. Sometimes it’s because of their ego, or self-deception, and sometimes it’s a deliberate act of revenge. Other times, it’s the primal, addictive pursuit of conquest—conquest of all kinds.
What’s worse is that we come up with a lot of excuses for this behavior. We tell ourselves that we’re making decisions based on efficiency, on the balance sheet, on superior intelligence or unique talent and understanding. We tell ourselves it’s for the protection of our tribe or our trade. But by reducing decisions to these standards, we are forgetting about the empathy we are born with, about the trust others have put in us, and about the obligations to one another as human beings.
That is why culture is so important. Culture resists reduction and constantly reminds us of the beautiful complexities that humans are made of, both individually and collectively. The stories we tell; the music we make; the experiments and buildings we design. Everything that helps us to understand ourselves, to understand one another, to understand our environment—culture.
But, it’s not just the culture we learn about in textbooks or see in a museum. It’s the arts and sciences; all the different disciplines that ask us to try, to trust, and to build. It’s culture that inspires deep learning and curiosity, that makes us want to seek the universal principles that drive everything.
