In the September issue of the online magazine 21cm, Allan Kozinn writes that during a 1978 interview, the pianist Abbey Simon asked, “ ‘When [former New York Times chief music critic] Harold C. Schonberg walks down the aisle of Carnegie Hall and takes his seat, what does he expect? … He’s thinking, “OK,” ’ Simon suggested, spreading out his hands, “Move me.” ’… It was a clarifying moment for me…. There is not a single Right Way to hear music…. Schonberg, who admired the great romantic pianists, scorned Bernstein’s excesses. But for my generation, Bernstein was The Man.… There are absolutes and boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. But if you listen long enough, you’ll hear a good many of them crossed after all, sometimes simply for the sake of rejecting an earlier generation’s rules.… We are looking, always, for a performance that gives us a sense of freshness, originality and discovery. It might be an uncommonly insightful account of a Bach lute work, a Beethoven symphony or a Schubert song, or it might be an entirely new work that ventures into new realms.… What we secretly hope for, night after night, is a concert that will make us want to remap our musical universe.”
Posted September 25, 2015
