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Lebrecht/ DE HEL volgens Lebrecht / Why conductors have great sex / Conductors of the New Century / Reactie / De hel, volgens Norman Lebrecht, 12.05.07 Why conductors have great sex, By Norman Lebrecht / April 17, 2002 Eat your entrails, Mick Jagger. The idea that rock stars enjoy the best sex is a popular myth that can be doubly disproved. First, they don't seem to enjoy it much and, second, I know a different breed of artists who are having, and giving, a much better time. Evidence in this arcane area can be unreliable, but there is a growing body of neutral testimony and first-hand documentation. The serene Joan Baez once described to me how, while touring America with The Beatles, she watched their roadies line up a nightly parade of girls, four of whom would be nodded at by the moptops as they came off stage, then serviced and dispatched. There was no intimacy, no mystery. John Lennon spoke of sex with fans as a part of his public duty, so to speak. He offered to add Joan to the beneficiaries; she politely declined. Compare the sterile functionality of rock sex to the standard chat-up line of an orchestral conductor who, meeting a young lovely before going on stage, whispers that he is about to perform the Pathètique "just for you". It seldom fails. Conductors have the liveliest, longest and most rewarding sex lives of any human organism. Sir Georg Solti, weeks before his death in 1997, discussed sex with me as an active combatant. He was 84. Other seniorities have told me that they will carry on conducting until they droop, as if their musical authority is somehow dependent on their sexual virility. Take the celebrated Andrè Previn, who turned 73 last week. After the collapse of his fourth marriage - or was it his fifth? - to a nice Home Counties secretary, he formed a close friendship with the long, blonde bassoonist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, before redirecting his mail recently to the fax address of Anne-Sophie Mutter, the slinky German violinist. The widowed Mutter is slightly over half Previn's age. Rumours abound of wedding bells. Whatever the outcome, congratulations are in order. The Letters of Arturo Toscanini is to be published next month by Faber and Faber. Toscanini, who died in 1957, weeks short of his 90th birthday, permitted no cracks in his privacy. He never gave an interview and left no memoirs. Even biographers with access to his papers were left groping in the dark. His letters, wrote Harvey Sachs in 1978, "are relatively few and uninformative". Barely had these words appeared between hard covers than correspondence began tumbling out of bottom drawers where they had been tenderly stored by former lovers and their heirs. One mistress kept 1,000 letters and telegrams from the peripatetic maestro, some of them filled with detailed anatomical endearments. Another woman flitted in and out of his arms for years, winding up as his wife's best friend. From the letters that Sachs has now assembled, it appears that Toscanini felt he could not perform at his best on the podium without a grand physical passion awaiting in the wings. The line he gave his lovers was that sex with his wife, Carla, had ended after the death of a child in 1906. Some of his affairs were flagrant. La Scala was scandalised by his fling with Rosina Storchio, the first Madame Butterfly, who fell pregnant; their child was stillborn. In 1915 he stormed out of New York after Geraldine Farrar, America's operatic darling, demanded that he marry her. His closest and most secretive liaisons were with musicians' wives. Elsa Kurzbauer, an Austrian, was married to the composer Riccardo Pick --Mangiagalli, who divorced her when he found out. Ada Mainardi's husband, Italy's ace cellist, was more compliant. In both affairs Toscanini regaled his lovers with explicit, even pornographic, accounts of the pleasures they shared. "My lovely and loving Elsa," reads a typical missive in half-decent English, "I long to finger every sensible and hidden doted spot of you. I will pass all over you like a river of fire... I feel something swelling and cooking. Where is your hungry mouth?" He enjoyed oral sex in all varieties and liked to ensure that his partners were equally satisfied. In a Mediterranean culture where women's sexual rights were traditionally secondary, and a man giving oral sex is still regarded as a weakling - witness the most hilarious of the Sopranos episodes - Toscanini was a sexual revolutionary. He once told Ada that an old Parma farmer who had known Verdi had assured him that the great composer also gave "a certain kind of kissî. That, somehow, bestowed the benediction of genius on his indulgence. Prurience apart, the letters of Toscanini draw the clearest possible line between conductor love and rock-star sex. Toscanini loved to give as much pleasure as he took, and he lasted long and well into a lascivious old age. For the supreme maestro, sex was not so much a reward as a repayment. Match that, Mr Jagger. zie ook http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrechtindex.htm Back to Top  Als u zelf andere verhalen kent, mag u ons die natuurlijk altijd bezorgen via ons contactformulier Conductors of the New Century, By Norman LebrechtTen years ago, I finished writing a book called The Maestro Myth, which argued that the 'Great Conductor' was a thing of the past. A reckless pursuit of power and wealth had destroyed the mystique on which their authority was founded. Easy-come, easy-go maestros with posts on three continents and a chalet in Gstaad no longer commanded the awe of musicians or the spiritual aspirations of dwindling audience. The fame of a Leonard Bernstein and the fortune of a Herbert von Karajan would never be seen again; conductors, in future, would occupy a more modest niche on the margins of cultural awareness. Barely had the book appeared than a crisis of confidence smashed the shop window through which conductors displayed their abilities. With the deaths of Karajan and Bernstein, major labels slashed their schedules. The cry went up from industry chiefs and ignorant hacks that things ain't what they used to be, the talent was not up to the mark. The more painful truth is that the past decade has produced a prodigiously gifted set of conductors who are struggling to break through a nimbus of media rejection. There are at least a dozen maestros under the age of 50 who have the ability to lead music into the new millennium. Most (or so they tell me) have read The Maestro Myth and taken the point, working assiduously with one orchestra or opera house, avoiding one-night stands and Caribbean tax-havens. Their idealism is refreshing and their ideas original, but will they - without regular recording and broadcasts - ever get the opportunity to make an impact on the world at large? Ask players in the top European orchestras for their conductors of choice and three names crop up with clockwork regularity: Simon Rattle, Mariss Jansons and the whirlwind St Petersburg director, Valery Gergiev. Rattle is 46 and Gergiev 47. Both have displayed single-minded devotion to a cause. Rattle spent 18 years nurturing Birmingham from post-industrial wastage to cultural eminence before capturing the Berlin Philharmonic. Gergiev seldom spends more than a week in any one spot, but every foreign foothold he gains is used to sustain the Kirov Theatre, which he has headed since 1988. Jansons, 56, is a late developer with a dicky heart who has imprinted his own distinctive sound on the Oslo Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony orchestras - ever the mark of a remarkable conductor. These three made the grade before recordings receded. Two others - Riccardo Chailly, 46, in Amsterdam, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, 42, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic - share their plateau. Chailly's technique is sharp as a brain-surgeon's; Salonen, when head-hunted by a Big Five Us orchestra, clarified his position by making a personal 100,000-dollar donation to the new Los Angeles concert hall - a token, he said, 'of gratitude towards my orchestra.' Such gestures, along with other resurrected values, are providing the ground-rules for the new generation. In Hamburg, for example, Ingo Metzmacher, 42, has taken charge of both opera and concert seasons, spending seven months a year at his post. 'My father played cello in the orchestra at the end of the 1930s when Eugen Jochum was music director,' he says, 'and Jochum conducted everything. That's the way it should be.' Metzmacher has set a contemporary agenda, which includes new operas this year by Thomas Ades and Peter Eotvos. He startled some older Hamburgers by wearing a silver-lame jacket and jumping up on stage in the middle of Weill's Mahagonny to join in the mayhem. For younger citizens, he has imported an education scheme from BBC Wales to help them get more out of music. His zeal has caught the attention of the London Philharmonic, Philadelphia and several other crack outfits which he regularly guest-conducts, mostly, he says, 'to bring back home the higher standards that I find elsewhere.' He has pledged himself to Hamburg for another five years. 'Both I and the players have a long way to grow,' he says. Among German specialists, Metzmacher is matched by the bluntly ambitious Christian Thielemann and the silkily ascendant Franz Welser-Möst. Thielemann, 41, quit Berlin's Deutsche Oper after a row with its next administrator but was hailed as 'a young Karajan' by an influential senator and is now blue-eyed boy at Bayreuth, entrusted with the next Ring. Only his penchant for reported right-wing indiscretions can stem his vertical prgress. Franz Welser-Möst, 40, survived turbulent beginnings at the London Philharmonic to manifest a massive competence at Zurich Opera. Next year he takes charge in Cleveland, the only Big Five orchestra so far to have settled its future. Welser-Möst will spend at least 18 weeks a year in Cleveland, twice as long as his predecessorsl. The Italian podium is also hotting up. Daniele Gatti, 39, has in three years raised Bologna almost to La Scala standards. Equable and studious, Gatti is the antithesis of the ragaing-bull maestro personified by Toscanini and Riccardo Muti, yet his music lacks neither passion nor precision. When I asked him recently about long-term ambitions, he looked down from his hill-top villa and laughed. 'I live here, I walk 20 minutes to my opera house, I dedicate myself to Bologna.' More devotedly, he has stood by the struggling Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, winning them this year's pre-Last Night of the Proms, playing Verdi's Requiem. 'The RPO was helpful to me at a certain time in my life,' says Gatti, 'now I can help them.' London also awaits Antonio Pappano, who was pressured by his record company, EMI, into becoming music director at Covent Garden. Pappano, 41, earned his spurs at the Monnaie, in Brussels. Few conductors are better at handling divas, having helped his father from the age of ten to coach recalcitrant sopranos. Should the ROH flounder, Pappano is valued at Bayreuth and coveted in America. The most fertile source of new batons is Finland, where Jorma Panula's course at the Sibelius Academy has yielded - apart from Salonen and the less-settled Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a diversity of talents. Sakari Oramo, 35, has proved an intriguingly intense successor to Rattle in Birmingham, enriching the string sound and playing virtuosically with Symphony Hall's adjustable accoustics. He hardly ever visits London, let alone the US. 'This orchestra is all I want right now,' says Oramo, 'I won't bother to conduct opera until I'm 40.' His fellow-Finn Mikko Franck, still only 21, set a buzz around when he conducted in Stockholm three years ago -'like an old master,' the players said. His temperament remains unproven. This season he cancelled English National Opera after a production disagreement and a New York Philharmonic concert on grounds of ill-health. His debut recording - Sibelius, naturally -reveals precocious tempo controls, but Franck has yet to deliver on a major stage. Ahead of him, by several strides, runs Rattle's diminutive protege, Daniel Harding, who at 25 has scored notable successes in Berlin and on record. At Bologna, Gatti has nurtured Vladimir Jurowski, newly named music director at Glyndebourne. Across the Baltic, shoots of the St Petersburg hothouse are striking new roots. Yakov Kreizberg, 41, formerly of Bournemouth, should soon land his first US orchestra; the Latvian-born Paavo Järvi, son of the Detroit conductor Neeme Järvi, recently captured Cincinnati. Järvi, 38, declares that he has no time for the star soloists that stultify American programmes. He aims to introduce young artists in off-beat repertoire. His kid brother Krystjan Järvi, only 28, is even more iconoclastic, forming the 18-member Absolute Ensemble in New York, that plays Schoenberg alongside Carla Bley. If the Järvi boys get their way, Middle America is in for a good ear-wigging. The notable absentees from the conducting future are Americans and women. Kent Nagano, 39, has moved furthest ahead, claiming an orchestra in Berlin and the Los Angeles Opera, without convincing everyone of his head for greater heights. Robert Spano, a muscular Brooklyner, has landed Atlanta. As for women, the path to podium glory is still impeded by prejudice; Simone Young, 39, at Australian Opera is the only holder of a prominent position. These, then, are the conductors on whom the musical future depends. Not all have the stardust of charisma and some may take another decade to develop leadership skills. But their innate ability is acknowledged by some of the world's toughest musicians and their outlook is engagingly outward looking. The new conductors know that it is no longer enough to announce a season and expect the public to attend. They need, like unknown restaurant chefs, to awaken an appetite and catch the eye. They want to engage with social and political issues, and they long to break down the barriers between aging concerthall patrons and their own generation which seldom crosses the threshold. These are enormous challenges - a universe apart from the ecology inhabited by Karajan, Bernstein and Solti in the era that ended with the 20th century. In effect, every new conductor is required to reinvent his profession. But the more I meet the new generation, the more I find that they are putting the podium to rights. A simple litmus test demonstrates the distance we have travelled in the past ten years. A decade ago, most conductors liked to be addressed as 'Maestro'. Today's conductors dismiss the title and deride the sycophants who utter it. No more 'Maestros' is not a bad omen for a new millennium. zie ook http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrechtindex.htm Reactie 17 may Jeffrey Biegel (sharpnat@aol.com) Please present this to Norman Lebrecht--I congratulate him on his birds-eye view of the music business and would like to offer him my web site www.cyberecital.com. Trained in the traditions of Josef Lhevinne and Artur Schnabel, my vision has extended the traditional vogue. |