Meet the maestro
Yes, in this context that means me
LA based violinist Lindsay Deutsch has a foundation called Classics Alive dedicated to encouraging young people’s participation in music and they’ve set up a fantastic kids website and newsletter. Their newest feature is Meet the Maestro- last month it was Borris Brott, who all my Canadian friends know well, and this month it is me.
Click here to go directly to the interview I did with a fascinating panel of young musicians and here to go the kids home page.
Categories: A view from the podium, Music and Media
This was a really great fun interview!
…Part of the art of being a performer is learning to make your mistakes not detract from the overall performance. Trust me, the greatest musicians all make mistakes, they just cover their tracks more artfully…
Blame iTunes for these expectations of perfect performance
What great questions the young musicians posed, and fine answers.
Better than the questions Robin had from a group of young people after a Hill/Wiltschinsky concert:
1) Why are your shoes shinier than his?
and
2) Did you pay for your guitars by credit card?!!!!
The free-wheeling piano story is terrifying. Did it go over the apron and crash to the auditorium floor? I have this vision of the soloist pushing down on the damper pedal and having the instrument just take off…
“The free-wheeling piano story is terrifying. Did it go over the apron and crash to the auditorium floor? I have this vision of the soloist pushing down on the damper pedal and having the instrument just take off…”
I’m not a piano expert, but my understanding is that the left pedal is a clutch and the middle one is a brake. Why didn’t the pianist just press the middle pedal? Are they licensed to play in the state of Oregon?
On Yamahas the center pedal is the mechanical brake while the left pedal flashes the high beams. Very confusing.
Hey Anna-
Worst ever question from a kid was at a YP concert in front of 1,000 6 year-olds, when a little boy said “did you know your show is untied/” Worst was that it wasn’t- he just wanted to make me look, so he howelled with laghter until the teacher dragged him off.
The dark side of that kind of situation was when I worked in Arkansas and Missouri with the Taliesin Trio doing outreach concerts for the NEA. For some reason, teachers loved to show us their various paddles, whips and clubs before we started, so we’d know there “won’t be any misbehavior.” More than once, we saw abusive teachers just looking for an excuse to beat a child, and once we even stopped the show because we didn’t think we could go on knowing a child was being hit with a wooden paddle. This was in the 1990s!
KW