Category: Performers

  • Julius Asal on interpretation

    On the one hand, I believe that to connect tradition and innovation is the most important thing to me personally. On the other hand, to explore the score and be close to what the composer wanted is essential. There is a way to find your own language within the details that the composers left. Julius…

  • Julius Asal on pairing Scriabin with Scarlatti

    In 2024, Julius Asal released an album that interwove works of Scriabin and Scarlatti. He stated: …in finding a composer from another era who is totally different in style and aesthetics, then finding a new ‘room’ where they meet, I felt that perhaps they share an inner space through their miniature pieces and their quantity…

  • Julius Asal on the exploring darker emotions

    When I was younger I read a lot of Kafka and Büchner: I’ve always been drawn to the darker side of things, and I think that part of the beauty of what we do as artists is to dare other people to explore it too. I wish the listener to invest something. Showing up to…

  • Rachmaninoff practising slowly

    Abram Chasins visited Rachmaninoff in Hollywood: Arriving at the designated hour of twelve, I heard an occasional piano sound as I approached the cottage. I stood outside the door, unable to believe my ears, Rachmaninoff was practising Chopin’s étude in thirds [G sharp minor, Op. 25, No. 6], but at such a snail’s pace that…

  • On Artur Schnable’s playing

    Artur Schnabel is a pianist unlike any other. One is conscious in listening to him of a powerful and original mind revealing unsuspected meanings and complications in music as familiar as Brahms’s Intermezzi and Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. His tone is a rule dry in anything above a piano, but a sudden touch of the pedal…

  • Saint-Saëns defending virtuosity

    It is virtuosity itself that I want to defend. It is the source of the picturesque in music, it gives the artist wings with whose help he escapes platitudes and the everyday. The conquered difficulty is in itself a beautiful thing. Theódphile Gautier, in Émaux et camées, considered this issue in immortal verses. . .…

  • Rachmaninoff on the culminating point in performance

    This culmination may be at the end or in the middle, it may be loud or soft; but the performer must know how to approach it with absolute calculation, absolute precision, because, if it slips by, then the whole construction crumbles, and the piece becomes disjointed and scrappy and does not convey to the listener…

  • The role of an interpreter

    The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer’s intentions to the letter. He doesn’t add anything that isn’t already in the work. If he is talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn’t dominate…

  • Start from scratch every time

    Benjamin Appl on working with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: When people ask me about what I learned from Fischer-Dieskau, that’s what I always come back to: of course I could say a hundred things about technique and his reputation, but what I found most inspiring was how he created everything afresh. Whenever he was teaching he’d prepare…

  • Pieces to belong to performers

    “That’s what I find wonderful about music: there is always a secret left, pieces don’t belong to performers, you rent them!” – Joseph Moog, Pianist W. Boon, “Joseph Moog”, Pianistique, 5 November 2016, https://www.pianistique.com/home/english-interviews/15-interviews/75-joseph-moog, accessed 17 January 2022.

  • Music better than it can be performed

    Now I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a neverending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much. For instance, Chopin’s studies are lovely pieces, perfect pieces, but I…

  • Never use a score

    I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion? — Dimitri Mitropoulos, conductor Zographos, Achilleas (2017) Music and Chess. Milford: Russell Enterprises Inc.

  • Practice slowly

    “One must practice slowly, then more slowly and finally slowly.” – Camille Saint-Saëns Cited in: The Piano Quarterly, 1974, p. 24.

  • Jan Lisiecki on interpretation

    My approach is to sit with the score and make my decisions about what Andante means or what piano means in a certain context; often you go back to recordings and find that nobody’s ever really played it that way. You ask yourself ‘Why is that? Did I misread or misinterpret something? Or is this…

  • A performance can be greater than them

    I remember a few years ago being at a summer academy in the south of France, with Dominique Merlet. The whole atmosphere was great there, as we were a group of like-minded people, keen to learn, work and share ideas in the gorgeous setting of a little medieval French village. The concert at the end,…

  • A good performance

    A good performance is one that moves me. But it is not only the passion and emotion expressed in a performance that move me, it is also allowing the clarity of the structure, as well as the different characters, to shine through, a well-judged balance, a sense of architecture of the whole piece and, at…

  • Schnabel on recording

    Having spent five days recording five Beethoven sonatas and two concertos, Schnabel wrote to his wife: This week was an ordeal, a torture chamber. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche. Hopefully (probably) this is true. I had no idea of how outrageous a process the recording on discs could be. Like…

  • Bernstein on immersive performance

    It happens because you identify so completely with the composer, you’ve studied him so intently, that it’s as though you’ve written the piece yourself. You completely forget who you are or where you are and you write the piece write there. You just make it up as though you never heard it before. Because you…

  • Difficult music is the easiest to play

    Scriabin’s fiery D#-minor Etude, with its relentless triplets and huge leaps, used to just fall under my fingers, while the Lento final movement of the Copland Sonata was a minefield of wrong notes. Why is that? Is it just because we practice hard music 20 times as much as easy music, or is it psychological,…

  • Born for music

    “I was born with eyes closed listening to my heartbeat from my mother’s womb… There, without knowing it, I discovered that I would be born and would die for music…” – Alicastro Source: Peer Music.‘

  • Rachmaninoff on interpretation

    As the talented student grows older he must seek within himself his interpretation.  Does he wish to know how to play the cantilena of Beethoven or Chopin? He must feel it himself!  Talent is feeling, the feeling that every player experiences in his innermost consciousness… It takes years of work to understand and think out…

  • Schiff on Schumann

    "I know of no work by Schumann that is not wonderful and inspiring.  One must leave every note just as he wrote it and experiment in order to find the correct balance and equilibrium.  With Schumann there is always this burning inventiveness, this unbelievable inspiration." – András Schiff.  Cited in Julian Haylock ""The Music of…

  • Seeking challenges

    Pianist Artur Schnabel was asked at a public forum why his repertoire was so restricted: My answer is that now I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed.  Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a…

  • Perahia on Beethoven

    Murray Perahia initially found Beethoven hard to understand: “I was always working on Beethoven, but I couldn’t feel close to him.  For nearly ten years I didn’t altogether like his music because I felt it showed an aggressive, up-front personality.”  But after studying, performing, and recording Beethoven (Appasionata,op. 2, op. 101 and the Piano Concertos),…

  • Hoffman on technique

    Technic  represents the material side of art, as money represents the material side of life.  By all means achieve a fine technic, but do no dream that you will be artistically happy with this alone.  There is a technic which liberates and a technic which represents the artistic self.  All technic ought to be a…

  • The musician’s quest

    The violinist Ivan Galamian describes the musician’s quest for a goal greater than mere technical accomplishment: A complete technique .. implies the ability to do justice, with unfailing reliability and control, to each and every demand of the most refined musical imagination.  It enables the performer, when he has formed an ideal concept of how…

  • Half a sonata

    Sergei Prokofiev was once asked to give a piano recital. He declined, offering this explanation: “It would cost me half a sonata.” Source: Samuel, Prokofiev

  • Any room for me?

    “Arthur Rubinstein was standing in the lobby of a concert hall proudly watching the audience filing in to hear one of his recitals.  Finally, when the last one had gone in, Rubinstein made a move to enter.  An usher blocked his way.  ‘Sold out, mister’, he said, and to reinforce his words he pointed to…

  • The orchestra as a symbol of unity

    “You see behind me a symphony orchestra.  Every single one of the instruments has an entirely different background and history; they come from different places …; they’ve had different developments; they sound different… And so, the next time your soul sings, assailed with some sort of horrid indication that people can’t get along together, please…

  • Love your music

    When I was 19 years old I joined Columbia Artists in New York.  It was my first management and a momentous event in my life.  All of a sudden here I was, part of what was perceived to be one of the most prestigious such organizations in the country.  It was a big time and…

  • Hogarth on Chopin

    “He accomplishes enormous difficulties, but so quietly, so smoothly and with such constant delicacy and refinement that the listener is not sensible of their real magnitude.  It is the exquisite delicacy, with the liquid mellowness of his tone, and the pearly roundness of his passages of rapid articulation which are the peculiar features of his…

  • Stokowski as a sound engineer

    The conductor Stokowski (who was the conductor of Disney’s Fantasia) was a pioneer of orchestral recording.  This was not without its problems: Stokowski was moving more and more toward what is recognized as his most significant achievement – the broadening of popular interest in serious music.  He developed a firm conviction that radio, recordings, and…

  • A conductor’s hair style

    In Halina Rodzinski’s book Our Two Lives she describes how on the very first day Artur Rodzinski came to assist Stokowski in 1929, his boss immediately restyled his hair without a part and combed straight back from the brow.  “That’s how a conductor should look,” said Stokowski, pointing Rodzinski at a mirror in his dressing…

  • Ringo Starr

    Is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world? He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles. Reporter and John Lennon. Source: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Witt.  London: Ebury Press, p.257.

  • Pavarotti

    “Pavarotti is like someone who has swalled a Stradivarious.” – Peter Ustinov Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury Press, p. 203.

  • Part of the bigger picture

    Leopold Stokowski conducted the American premier of Berg’s opera Wozzeck in 1930 (a joint effort of The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phildelphia Grand Opera, and Curtis Institute).  Abram Chasins recalls a rehearsal: I attended his second rehearsal with the orchestra in the pit and singers on the stage.  After some twenty minutes of singing and acting,…

  • Stokowski’s rehearsal process

    Abraham Chasin performed the premier of his Second Piano Concerto with the Philharmonic Orchestra in March 1933.  It was conducted by Leopold Stokowski: At the first one [rehearsal], as I walked to the piano I was surprised to see Stokowski’s assistant, Artur Rodzinski, on the podium; Stokowski was sitting in solitary elegance in one of…

  • Stokowski rebukes

    The conductor Stowkoski was always in complete control of his orchestra: He never lost his tempoer with the orchestra, never raised his voice.  On the contary, he would lower his voice for a subtle rebuke or a sarcastic comment. Schwar recalled Stokowski saying, “Second clarinet, don’t play notes – sing them.”  To the first violist,…

  • Stokowski’s first rehearsal with the Philadelphia Orchestra

    On Stokowski’s first rehearsal with the Philadelphia Orchestra: From Oscar Schwar, a fellow faculty member at Curtis who became my friend, I heard the details of Stokowski’s first contact with the orchestra.  He would never forget, he said, that Monday morning of October 7, 1912, when an amazingly young and handsome Stokowski, wearing a light…

  • Review of Pablo Casals

    A Review written in El Alcance of the cellist Pablo Cassals: His bow, sometimes sweet as a voice from heaven, at other times vibrant and robust, produces such a sonorous combination of voices and tones that it seems that the body of his violincello is the magic secret of sublime harmonies capriciously transformed at the…

  • Give music to those who love it

    “Music must be given to those who love it. I want to give free concerts; that’s the answer.” -Sviatoslav Richter, pianist Bruno Monsaingeon: Introduction to Sviatoslav Richter — Notebooks and Conversations p. XX. Cited at: Wikipedia

  • Richter on small concerts

    “Put a small piano in a truck and drive out on country roads; take time to discover new scenery; stop in a pretty place where there is a good church; unload the piano and tell the residents; give a concert; offer flowers to the people who have been so kind as to attend; leave again.”…

  • Up close and personal with Glenn Gould

    A film has been made of the personal side of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould: During his lifetime Gould was often portrayed less as a real person than a collection of tics — perhaps even more so in the many books and films about him that have been issued since his death. At times he has…

  • Dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-splat

    “I also like to play the famous tunes because there’s nothing like inspiring a whole bunch of kids who are struggling to play these pieces on flute.  And then they see me ripping through them.  They all want to play Flight of the Bumblebee when they’re 11 years Old.  And it goes something like “dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-splat!”…

  • The juggling jazz musician

    “A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” – Benny Green, British saxophonist Benny Green (1975) A Reluctant Art: The Growth of Jazz.  Books for Libraries Press, p. 16.

  • Bringing classical music to the people

    “Most performers pretty much ignore the audience – they play and go off … Don’t get me wrong. I worship these guys! But what will make someone who hardly knows about classical music listen to to Grigory Sokolov for two hours straight, and in total silence? you have to work your way up to that…

  • The soloist will get his way

    Pianist Freddy Kempf on the recording process: Solo recording is the most indulgent type … it’s 90 per cent down to me. The producer can shout at me all he likes, but if I am set on doing it my way, there’s few people who can stop me! – Freddy Kempf, in an interview with…

  • Everything affects music making

    ‘”…turning 40 and new fatherhood have other effects: ‘It opens things up emotionally’, he says.  ‘I find that my whole perspective on life and my whole emotional range generally has changed.  I laugh more easily and cry more easily.  And that probably has an impact on the music making in one way or another.  Everything…

  • Golden rules for an orchestra

    ‘”There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.” – Thomas Beecham, conductor.  Cited at: Quotationsbook

  • Popular classical music is great too

    “A lot of what you call the great repertoire is popular, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great work. I mean, come on. Rachmaninoff 3 is great. There shouldn’t be ‘If this work is so popular, then don’t do it.’ In the art world it is only what you feel right to perform.” Lang…

  • The life of a pianist

    My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom … punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure …perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with…

  • The technique of conducting

    “Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.” – Leonard Bernstein, conductor, composer and pianist. Cited at QuotationsBook.  

  • Applause

    “Applause is a receipt, not a bill.” – Artur Schnabel, pianist Cited at Aphorism.ru. Cited 30 March 2013. 

  • Music and time

    “There is also in this [nineteenth-century romantic] music an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time; a moment will be held still as if suspended, and then released with a rush. Einstein has told us that time is relative, flexible and elastic; I have noticed these qualities whenever I have tried to play…

  • Hilary Hahn on technique, practise mentality, and performance

    Violinist Hilary Hahn on practice and technique: I’ve always worked hard at my technique … But I’ve worked hard at my musicality as well. When I was doing my etudes my teachers always made sure I didn’t go onto the next until I had the first really good. But it wasn’t good unless it was…

  • Nikolaj Zainder performs Elgar’s Violin Concerto on the original violin

    In 2010, Violinist Nikolaj Znaider performed Elgar’s Violin Concerto on the same 1741 violin in which Kriesler premiered the work on a hundred years before. Znaider was not worried about comparisons to Kriesler’s original performance: “he way I think of music is that it really is something that is played in the moment – it’s…

  • Hilary Hahn on the “story” behind the music

    I think the back stories [behind the creation of a work] are interesting … But for me the first aim is to look at the notes, and see how I might interpret them … No offence to the media, but I’ve seen stories told about people I know – and about me – that are…

  • Liszt’s account of a performance by Chopin

    Franz Liszt described one of Chopin’s concerts in the Gazette musicale, May 2 1841. Last Monday, at eight o’clock in the evening, M. Pleyel’s rooms were brilliantly lighted up; numerous carriages brought incessantly to the foot of a staircase covered with carpet and perfumed with flowers the most elegant women, the most fashionable young men,…

  • Piotr Anderszewski on interpretation

    To me it’s all about how you read and translate the music you play: the most important thing is to reach the point where you feel you understand what happened in the composer’s mind before he actually wrote it. Musical notation is a very sophisticated yet imperfect system; it was the only way for the…

  • Glenn Gould on recording

    Pianist Glenn Gould discussed the recording process with Yehudi Menuhin completing the playback of a Bach gigue: Now, Yehudi, you’ve got to admit that you would not be likely to encounter a sound like that in the concert hall… The point is that, if I were to play that piece in a concert hall, as…

  • Ashkenazy on Richter

    Pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy on his colleague Sviatoslav Richter: Richter magnetized me, like he did so many others, and I wouldn’t have missed his concerts for anything. I think he communicated more than anyone else complete devotion and sincerity to his art. When I look back, this is what attracted me most to him…

  • The importance of reading

    “Whoever wishes to play well must not only practice a great deal, but must also read a great many books.” – Johannes Brahms. Cited in: Goss, Madeleine (1943). Brahms: The Master. New York: Hery Holt & Company, p.157

  • The delicate nature of Chopin’s pianism

    Chopin gave a recital in the Gentlemen”s Concert Hall, Manchester, on 28 August 1848. The audience of 1,200 people was the largest Chopin had ever performed to, but Chopin’s delicate playing was not really suited to such a large venue. Conscious of this fact, Chopin requested that another pianist, George Osborne, who was also performing…

  • Chopin’s pianistic style

    While in London, Chopin frequently gave performances at soirées and matinées where he performed Nocturnes, Waltzes, Mazurkas and the Berceuse George Hogarth reported in the Daily News (10 July 1848): He accomplishes enormous difficulties, but so quietly, so smoothly and with such constant delicacy and refinement that the listener is not sensible of their real…

  • Many an Orpheus and Arions make up a Bach

    Johann Matthias Gesner was a colleague of Johann Sebastian Bach at St. Thomas’ School, Leipzig. He later worked on a commentary of the Roman author Quintilian (c. 35-100 A. D.). He included a comparison of Bach with the Classical lyre player: All these (outstanding achievements) … you would reckon trivial could you rise from the dead and…

  • Remembering J. S. Bach

    Carl Philip Emanuel Bach recalled his father’s (Johann Sebastian) talents as a musician: The exact tuning of his own instruments, and of the whole orchestra, had his greatest attention. No one could tune and quill his instruments to his satisfaction; he did it all himself. The positioning of an orchestra he understood perfectly. He made good use of…

  • Arthur Schnabel

    “Artur Schnabel is a pianist unlike any other. One is conscious in listening to him of a powerful and original mind revealing unsuspected meanings and complications in music as familiar as Brahm’s Intermezzi and Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata. His tone is as a rule dry in anything above a piano, but a sudden touch of pedal…