Tom Service > Quotes

“there is a famous bit of musical apocrypha that has Mravinsky cancelling a concert because he had already achieved the best possible result in the rehearsal.”
― Tom Service, Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras

“The best conductors work in such a way that the orchestra doesn’t understand why it plays how it does – they just have no room to think about what they are doing. The process is almost a little bit mystical: you just – you are emotionally involved, and you know, it just happens.”
― Tom Service, Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras

“(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his ‘pomposity’ and ‘oily pathos’,”
― Tom Service, Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras

“counterintuitive notion that to best realise your musical intentions as a conductor, you have to set the frame of how the players work together – and then get out of the way. ‘That’s the hard thing,’ Rattle says, ‘that you have to learn to allow them to listen, and that means being less rather than more precise in your gestures.’ Just as the players infused themselves with Thomas Adès’s music, this is a process that comes from the ground up, from the roots of the music they’re playing, rather than being imposed on them by a stick-wielding technocrat. It’s a process that explains why the Berlin Philharmonic does not have a reputation as the most precise orchestra in the world. Rattle admits:”
― Tom Service, Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras