Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-02-11 03:08
As a teenager, I played the Mozart concerto twice in the Royal Albert Hall, and in Berlin, Leningrad and Stockholm as a soloist with the National Youth Orchestra. Later, I played it with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the Festival Hall, with the Academy of Saint-Martin-in-the Fields throughout Europe, with the London Sinfonietta and subsequently as a guest with many other orchestras around the world. I even recorded it.
AFTER all of that, I suppose around 30 years ago, I was brought up short by the realisation that PERHAPS I had been construing the slow movement 'the wrong way round'.
And that changed how I thought about the movement, the piece... and then the whole of Mozart.
Though I have no particular regard for Benjamin Zander, I understand what he is trying to get at with this particular student. It's a difficult issue, because what you're interacting with is what Richard Taruskin called, 'what we have built into our [musical] spines'. It's just OBVIOUS to us that the music goes the way we have always construed it.
So, Zander was doing his not very good best to turn her around.
Subsequent to that, what I see here on this list, as so often, is a few people – in a way, they're sophisticated, but in another way they're totally ignorant – parading their lack of understanding of the issue.
Of course I know, after something like fifteen years of trying here, that my saying all this means nothing to y'all. You have these very many years of Tabuteau/Bonade/etc to contend with.
Plus, and more importantly, your own strongly held and carefully nurtured opinions.
Tony
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