Barenboim and Boulez in The Times

[Sylph]

RM Which was the more difficult orchestra, the BBC Symphony or the New York Philharmonic?
PB Oh, New York, definitely. All the violinists in that orchestra think they are better than the concertmaster. In London you have five orchestras, so if players don't like a conductor they can move to another orchestra. In New York there is really only one.

The Times

[MDL]

Shame you have to subscribe to read this. Or buy The Times, of course. Perhaps you could cut and paste the whole article... 

[mc ukrneal]

Shame you have to subscribe to read this. Or buy The Times, of course. Perhaps you could cut and paste the whole article... 

And not to take a tangent, but what a stupid website. They don't even let you browse the headlines! How do they expect to get new subscribers? And I am not even talking about reading articles. Showing the front page only seems like a poor approach.

[Sylph]

RM I'm fascinated that you two are collaborating on the Liszt piano concertos. I wouldn't have thought they were your tasse de thé, Pierre.
PB Well, at one time people were very snooty about Liszt's orchestral pieces. But that response was undeserved.
DB In my youth there were two sorts of pianists: the serious ones, like Schnabel, who played Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert; and the virtuosi who played Liszt and Chopin. My teacher was my father, and he wanted to make me a serious musician. So I never played Liszt. But then I conducted Claudio Arrau playing the Second Piano Concerto, and he opened my eyes to the depth of Liszt's music and its relationship to Wagner. In fact, he told me to conduct the whole work like a Wagner scene. And that's right. It's a great symphonic canvas with a piano obbligato.
RM Where are you performing your concerts?
DB We go to Vienna, Berlin and then London.
RM So you are starting in the lion's den, in front of all those fastidious Viennese critics?
DB Oh, come on! If you call Vienna the lion's den, what do you call London?

Barenboim and Boulez perform the Liszt concertos as part of the Shell Classic International series at the Festival Hall (0844 8479910) on Mon

[mjwal]

Barenboim was born a year before me: 1942. He claims "In my youth there were two sorts of pianists: the serious ones, like Schnabel, who played Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert; and the virtuosi who played Liszt and Chopin." Doesn't he mean "in my father's opinion"? He mentions Arrau, a serious pianist if ever there was one, who was playing Beethoven etc and Liszt, Chopin etc all through Barenboim's youth. Gieseking played Liszt as well as Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann etc. Solomon played Liszt, as did Lipatti. The most serious pianist of all, the quasi-discoverer of Schubert's piano sonatas (still their most insightful interpreter in my opinion), Eduard Erdmann, attended masterclasses by Ansorge, a Liszt pupil, and played Liszt himself. He was a part of the innovative musical culture scene in Berlin circa 1920 grouped around such figures as Busoni, Jarnach, Schnabel, Scherchen etc.

[Taxes-]

Schnabel too, played Liszt but only in his youth. He dropped it later on to focus on the repertoire that we know him for.