what do you hear? you hear a bit of beethoven, you hear a bit of bruckner, and you hear heavy metal and you hear indian ragas and you hear rap songs. it s a mix. this is our language today, the mix, whatever comes to you from the car radio. this is the musical language of the present generation. if a symphony orchestra only provides a small segment of that, it will not survive. it has to open the repertoire into many directions, and this is what we try to do step by step. for example, we have a group in our orchestra who play baroque music on original instruments. we have another group who play transylvanian folk music, for example, we sing like a chorus. and we open these boundaries
to have an orchestra where the creativity of the individual is encouraged, rather than suppressed. do you sometimes wish that classical music was a little less rigid, a little less formal, because you ve talked about the dangers of the form becoming too tied to frozen rituals and to an older audience. and ijust wonder whether in the course of your career you believe you ve been able to change that a little bit. the works we perform, they are sometimes much more exciting than they seem in this ritual, what you said. for example, if i may take an example, beethoven s choral symphony, which everybody knows. when beethoven composed it, he probably thought
The Cape Symphony will conclude its season-long tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday with perhaps his best work, “Beethoven’s 9th: Ode to Joy” on Saturday and Sunday, May 14
no, i think we have to reform. the idea that you mentioned earlier, playing beethoven s ninth, i mean, to take that as just one of the best known pieces of music in the world, everybody really thinks of it as completely timeless, that as long as there is human civilisation, there will be beethoven, there will be bach, there will be mozart. are you saying maybe we re wrong? if you sit in your car and you open the radio, what do you hear? you hear a bit of beethoven, you hear a bit of bruckner, and you hear heavy metal and you hear indian ragas and you hear rap songs. it s a mix. this is our language today, the mix, whatever comes to you from the car radio. this is the musical language of the present generation. if a symphony orchestra only provides a small segment of that, it will not survive.
the works we perform, they are sometimes much more exciting than they seem in this ritual, what you said. for example, if i may take an example, beethoven s choral symphony, which everybody knows. when beethoven composed it, he probably thought that the last movement, when the human voice enters a symphony, it s a great surprise, because we have three movements with an orchestra playing, in the last movement people start to sing. it s a revolution. now, in our normal ritual, it s not a revolution, because what do you see? you see an orchestra and you see a chorus waiting there for their entry. where is the unpredictability? where is the surprise? so, i think sometimes