In Monday’s (9/29) Daily Telegraph (London), Ivan Hewitt writes that British conductor Daniel Harding, principal conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, is launching Interplay, a series “which is Harding’s response to the question of how to liven up orchestral concerts…. He’s invited notable thinkers in a variety of fields to curate their own concert with the orchestra. After their concert they talk to the audience about their own discipline, and discuss the ways it can illuminate the musical experience. [Tenor Ian Bostridge] prefaces his concert of Satanic and savage music from Berlioz and Britten with a lecture on witchcraft…. Historian Simon Schama explores the inter-relationships between music, culture and power, before a performance of Britten’s War Requiem.” Marcus du Sautoy, a professor of science and mathematics at University of Oxford, spoke on September 11 about symmetry in music, “showing how the ‘golden ratio’—the mathematical proportion that makes everything from proscenium arches to the structure of a leaf aesthetically ‘perfect’—is buried deep in Mozart’s Magic Flute.… ‘Music [is] … implicated in our lives in so many different ways. I think when audiences become aware of that they’ll actually listen in a different way,’ says Harding.”
Posted September 30, 2014
