Ida Haendel
  "How
to haendel it?"
According to Celibidache the world's first violin virtuoso,
Ida Haendel is talking about philosophical aspects behind the artistic
life. The child prodigy of the thirties is the ageless master of music
in our time. Nothing can stop her.
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José Serebrier
 In
Rome we met the great conductor and significant
composer José Serebrier. Born in Uruguay in 1938
from a Russian father and a Polish mother, he came
as a young man to the USA where Leopold Stokowski
conducted his music. Later on he was assistant of
Dorati in Minneapolis and of Stokowski in Philadelphia,
as well as composer in residence of George Szell's
Cleveland Orchestra. He spoke with us about his
remarkable carreer, and he told us a lot of superb
anecdotes about the great people he met. He answered
our questions about his compositions and their motivation
and he told us why he doesn't want to take a permanent
post. We followed him with our cameras during the rehearsals with the
new founded Orchestra Sinfonica Giovanile di Roma playing Beethoven's
Egmont Overture and Sibelius' First Symphony. Of course, we all had a
wonderful time in the eternal city.
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John Corigliano
 John
Corigliano is one of the most interesting and
successful composers of the United States today. He
won all the important prizes like Pulitzer, Grawemeyer,
Oscars etc. His compositions show a virtuosic and original handling of
form and orchestration. We first talked with Corigliano before the Mannheim
performance of his
new work ‘The Mannheim Rocket’. Then we met him in
his home in NYC and documented his work with the pianist Juan Chuquisengo
and the Corigliano Quartet.
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David Del Tredici
 David
Del Tredici started his career as one of America’s
most gifted pianists who played with conductors like
Leopold Stokowski. As a composer he was interested in
avantgarde but turned away from it. He had a long obsession
with Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ that
resulted in enthusiastically praised works such as the
very tonal ‘In Memory of a Summer Day’ and ‘An
Alice Symphony’. Recently Del Treedici uses all
his musical reputation to write music of a ‘homosexual
character’. In the two interview sessions he tries
to explain what he means by that, he talks about his
biography and plays some of his music with irresistible
charm and skill on the piano in his illustrious flat.
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Peteris Vasks
 Peteris
Vasks is the leading Latvian composer of our time. In
his musical language elements of the avantgarde are connected
with pure remarkable melody and sonorous harmony into
an expressive dramaturgy of form. In his interview he
talks about his biographical background under Soviet
suppression and about his spiritual message as a composer.
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Detlev Glanert
 Detlev
Glanert is one of the most prominent German composers
of the Henze school. As an opera composer he had some
great successes. His orchestral style is very personal
and highly elaborate. Despite the very complexity of
his scores he doesn’t belong to the experimental
avantgarde. He talks about his access to musical form
and about the human relevance of his musical output.
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Gabriel Saab
 After
he had finished his professional life as an agricultural
commissar for the United Nations Gabriel Saab turned
to his lifelong passion for composing. He had been one
of the closest friends of the great German conductor
Carl Schuricht and many other famous musicians like Wilhelm
Furtwängler, and he gave financial support to many
history making musical projects. The Carl Schuricht Edition
of the german label Archiphon profited from his generous
aid and advice. His First Symphony Opus 1 that was written
after the age of 65 was released on CD. It is tonal,
clearly constructed music in a style that may be compared
with Sibelius or Vaughan Williams. The more Brucknerian
Second Symphony will be first performed this summer.
Gabriel Saab talks about his relation with his great
musical idols, about his own musical ethos and about
the composers he likes the most
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György Sándor
 György
Sándor was one of Béla Bartók’s
closest pupils. He played the world premiere of Bartók’s
Third Piano Concerto, recorded all the Bartók
piano works several times on CD and recently edited the
score of Bartók’s own version of his Concerto
for orchestra for piano solo for the first time. We met
Sándor in his flat at NYC’s Central Park.
He spoke about his approach to music, about his time
with Bartók and about other interesting subjects.
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Carl Schachter
Carl Schachter is one of today’s most interesting
musicologists. There is probably no-one who went deeper
into understanding Heinrich Schenker’s fundamental
theories about musical structure. He doesn’t use
these theories in an academic way. Everything is verified
by the listener’s perception. In this direct way
the structure of music is explained in the most possible
lively manner, as a dynamic process. Schachter discusses
mainly with the pianist Juan Chuquisengo who took some
lessons with him. They both demonstrate the relevance
of the progressed Schenkerian method on the piano. |
Jean-Yves Thibaudet
The French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet has made an impressive
international career. He is a very virtuosic player with
a wide range of colours and some experience in jazz.
He talks about his teachers (mainly Ciccolini) and idols,
about his musical criteria and the human aspect. |
Gustav Kuhn
 Gustav
Kuhn ranks among the most prominent Austrian conductors
of our time. He is feared among his colleagues for his
clear-cut and fearless statements about the decadent
state of the classical music world and therefore made
himself a symbol of credibility. He must be considered
an outsider now,
as he was able to build up his wonderful Accademia for singers near Lucca
and to establish an extraordinarily popular festival in the Austrian
village Erl. Today he is one of the leading conducting teachers all over
the world and propagates his ethos of quality and independence, of resistance
against the abysses of commercialism. The first interview is a good introduction
into his way of looking at the world (including the famous box on the
ear episode), the second interview concentrates on his approach to Wagner’s ‘Ring
of the Nibelungs’ that has been recently released on CD.
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