Interview with Lorin Maazel / League of American Orchestras

[Neytiri]

Interview with Lorin Maazel

Man For All Seasons

On the verge of his final days at the New York Philharmonic, and with a new summer festival up his sleeve, Lorin Maazel chats with Nancy Shear at Steinway Hall.

Lorin Maazel first waved a stick in front of the New York Philharmonic in 1942, at the jaw-dropping age of twelve. His preternatural talent for leading musicians had been noticed and mentored in two of the cities where he lived as a boy, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and the dramatic result was his appearance at Manhattan’s Lewisohn Stadium, then the Philharmonic’s summer venue. By the time Maazel took over the orchestra’s podium 60 years later, in September 2002, he had already conducted the Philharmonic in performance more than 100 times. He came to New York after holding two other high-profile American music directorships—at The Cleveland Orchestra (1972-1982) and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1988-96)—as well as top conducting posts at the Vienna Staatsoper and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Maazel has now logged more than 5,000 concert and opera performances, conducting upwards of 150 orchestras. This spring he steps down from the Philharmonic after seven seasons as music director, a tenure that caps one of the most remarkable conducting careers in American history. As he says farewell to the Philharmonic Maazel is looking ahead to a new venture: He and his wife, Dietlinde Turban-Maazel, are launching what they intend to be a two-week annual festival of opera, concert music, and educational activities at Castleton Farms, their 550-acre estate in Rappahannock County, Virginia; the inaugural Castleton Festival is scheduled for July 4-19, 2009.

At the start of his penultimate season with the Philharmonic, in October 2007, Maazel sat down with veteran music publicist and broadcaster Nancy Shear at New York’s Steinway Hall. She interviewed the conductor before a live audience under the auspices of Music For All Seasons, a nonprofit organization that brings live music to non-traditional audiences. In the course of their wide-ranging conversation, excerpted here, Maazel spoke of his feelings for orchestral musicians; the conductor’s historical shift from “maestro” to colleague; his own experience as a composer, most recently of the opera 1984, which the Royal Opera premiered at Covent Garden in 2006; and the urgent need to build appreciation for classical music among young people in the United States to a level found in many other parts of the world.

—Chester Lane


Read it here.

[bombasticDarren]

Thanks Neytiri...I enjoyed reading the interview

[Neytiri]

NP! Glad you enjoyed it!

[moldyoldie]

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[jbuck919]

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Same here. Maybe that's why Darren enjoyed it so much.

[bombasticDarren]

http://www.americanorchestras.org/symph ... aazel.html

[Neytiri]

It's the same link as above, it didn't work for a day or so, but now they brought it back up.

[Lance]

Yes, thank you. I enjoyed reading it as well.