Composer and Conductor Quotes

[mahler10th]

That's a fascinating story, Brian. Even without an actual story.

  LOL

[Dundonnell]

We must presume that Brian-like a good writer-is still checking his sources and that the delayed punchline will follow in due course

[mahler10th]

Even more Ormandy

"I was trying to help you, so I was beating wrong."

"I told him he'd have a heart attack a year ago, but unfortunately he lived a year longer." -- On the death of David Oistrakh.

"Suddenly I was in the right tempo -- but it wasn't."

"There was confusion since I stood here 35 years ago."

"I can see none of you are smugglers; that's why it's so loud."

"We can't hear the balance yet because the soloist is still on the airplane."

"With us tonight is William Warfield, who is with us tonight. He is a wonderful man, and so is his wife."

"I never say what I mean, but I always manage to say something similar."

[Dundonnell]

Where are you getting all this stuff, John? Seems like it could be a good read

[Christo]

Anyway....back to quotes... and one from VW himself-

"No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong. But it's right."

Great story indeed, and very typical of Vaughan Williams. I recall the little story as follows. When rehearsing his Fourth Symphony in F minor (1934), a clarinettist [!] questioned the score. RVW took a closer look and said,: "No, it's a B-flat. I know it looks wrong, and sounds wrong, but it is right."

On another occasion, asked what his new, rather agressive symphony "was about", Vaughan Williams drily replied: "It is about F minor". 

[RebLem]

Somewhere around here, I have a rehearsal record with Sir Thomas Beecham recording the Haydn Military Symphony in Paris.  And of course, Beecham was noted for taking, uhmmm, shall we say, liberties, with composers' scores, especially those of Handel and Haydn. 

At one point, if memory serves, Beecham says, "Very remiss of Haydn, I should think, to have written a Military Symphony with no tympani.  We shall have to do something about that before the day is through."  LMAO.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Never look encouragingly at the brass - Richard Strauss

[karlhenning]

Well, it may be that I am unusual in finding interest in the Shostakovich quotes (and a composer learns early on to be content with being a little unusual).  I find them more piercingly illuminative (and, for myself as a composer) far more instructive than the Vaughan Williams quote (which may be abbreviated for anecdotal effect, or may have been thus blunt at the time).

In both cases, you have fellow musicians feeling they had musical reason to second-guess Shostakovich;  indeed, in Mravinsky's case, you have a conductor who feels that an "error" is involved.  In both cases, the end result was that they played the music as notated (and indeed intended), and Shostakovich handled the situation in a way which did not humiliate his fellow musicians.  These are musicians he built relationships with, after all, performers who went on to 'create' (as they say) many of his subsequent scores.