Sir Simon Rattle | |
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![]() Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2006 | |
Born | Simon Denis Rattle 19 January 1955 Liverpool, England |
Citizenship |
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Alma mater | Royal Academy of Music, London |
Occupation | Conductor |
賽門·拉圖將所獲奬金
挹注到他創立的古樂團陳漢金
去年曾率領「巴伐利亞廣播交響樂團」到台灣演出數場的英國指揮家賽門·拉圖(Simon Rattle),新近獲頒德國「西門子(Siemens)藝術獎」,獲得一筆數目不小的奬金。據說那是「音樂界的諾貝爾奬」。
拉圖獲此殊榮,雖然是實至名歸,錦上添花,不足為奇。看到這則消息後,令我覺得有意思的是,這位「柏林愛樂管弦樂團」的前指揮,居然把獲得的奬金,全部用來資助他不久之前剛創立的一個古樂團,供該團添購樂器。這個開始於2023年的古樂團叫做「巴伐利亞廣播古樂團」(BRSO hip, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Historically Informed Performance),附屬於他目前帶領的「巴伐利亞廣播交響樂團」(BRSO),也就是去年來台演出的那一團。
身為最知名交響樂團指揮之一的拉圖,不只不反對古樂潮流,還熱愛古樂,甚至不惜「潦落去」,創團推古樂,看起來好像會令一般人跌破眼鏡,然而對熟悉拉圖的人,卻已經是不足為奇,因為拉圖早在將近二、三十年前,他先後擔任「伯明罕交響樂團」、「柏林愛樂管弦樂團」時,已顯示出他對古樂風潮的非凡興趣。2002年他繼阿巴多成為「柏林愛樂」的指揮後,更鼓勵這個「天團」演奏巴洛克音樂。據說有一次,他想要指揮演出拉摩的歌劇《波雷亞德人》(Les Boréades),拿到總譜後,卻儍了眼,不知要如何指揮演奏才好,因為巴洛克時期的歌劇音樂記譜,經常是「速記式的」、不完全的,奏、唱者在演出之時,必須「即興的」增添許多樂譜上沒有的裝飾音、層次變化,否則唱奏岀來的效果會很單調、呆板。拉圖趕緊跑去找一些古樂大師們請益,從做中學;逐漸的,他自己也成了古樂專家。
拉圖不只推古樂,他更推現代音樂、當代音樂。他陸續主導幾個樂團,都經常演出二十世紀以後至今的曲目,並經常委託當代作曲家,為他所帶領的樂團演出,創作樂曲。早在1996年,他帶領「伯明罕交響樂團」錄製的一套七片錄影「遠離家園 - 二十世紀的管弦樂」,在當時曾經傳播廣遠。即使到了幾年前我退休前,在教「現代、當代音樂史」的課程時,還經常使用這套錄影當做輔助教材,聽、看拉圖本人現身說法,介紹現代音樂。
拉圖深刻的沈浸在古樂與現代音樂之中,事實上造就了他在指揮演出古典、浪漫、後浪漫曲目時,獨樹一幟的詮釋方式。這或許是今年度「音樂界的諾貝爾奬」會落到他身上的主要原因吧!期待有朝一日,拉圖也將帶領他的古樂團到我們這邊演出。
“One fatal remembrance — on sorrow that throws/its bleak shade alike o’er our joys and our woes —” said composer Hector Berlioz about Beethoven’s Allegretto from his Symphony No. 7. Watch it performed by the Orchestre de Paris under maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen, now available in full on medici.tv.
https://bit.ly/3U528sg

Spotlight:
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Giuseppe Verdi |

Quote:
En garde! Why France was the duelling capital of Europe
For centuries, it was common for French gentlemen to defend their honour on the duelling ground, despite a government ban on the tradition.
― from THE MEMOIRS OF HECTOR BERLIOZ (1870) by Hector Berlioz
在本期《MUZIK 古典樂刊》中,白遼士一生的情愛紛擾,我們就輕輕帶過,轉而聚焦於他的處境與他的音樂。希望讀者朋友們捧著雜誌,重新聽過他的作品,會覺得白遼士又更親近了一些。
略讀《法國浪漫主義時期的音 樂與文學》
L Guichard - 1963 - Paris: Presses Universitaires de France
“Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.”
―from THE MEMOIRS OF HECTOR BERLIOZ (1865) by Hector Berlioz
****'Music is a whole world'
It took Elliott Carter almost 50 years to find himself as a composer. Now the 97-year-old is one of the greatest of modernists - as even his fellow Americans are beginning to agree. He talks to Andrew Clements
Tuesday January 3, 2006
The Guardian
![]() | ![]() Elliott Carter in 1973. Photograph: Henry Grossman/Getty/TimeLife |
He may be the greatest composer the US has produced since Ives, but Carter's outlook has always been at least as much European as it is American, and it was audiences on this side of the Atlantic who first recognised the importance of his knotty, demanding music. Carter is a New Yorker: he was born there in 1908, and the city has remained his home throughout his life; he lives now in an apartment on the edge of Greenwich Village. But since childhood he has made regular visits to Europe, and expects to be in London once again next week - a 90% chance, he says - for the BBC's celebration of his music at the Barbican.
Carter's connections with Europe are deeply ingrained. He learned to speak French before he could read: "My father was an importer [of lace] from France, and he took me there many times when I was a child, so I am almost as familiar with Paris as I am with New York." Though Carter was given piano lessons (which he found boring at the time), his parents had no musical ambitions for their son, and expected him to make his career in the family business. It was not until his late teens, when he heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring for the first time in 1924, that Carter realised what he really wanted to be was a composer.
Another European city he visited in the 1920s with his parents was Vienna, where he bought copies of the latest works by Schoenberg and other members of the Second Viennese School. Back in New York an enlightened music teacher took him to contemporary music concerts and, crucially, introduced him to Charles Ives ("He was not as isolated a man as he is sometimes made out to be," Carter says). Ives gave the schoolboy copies of the Concorde Sonata and the collection of his songs that had been privately printed, and became the guiding spirit behind Carter's first efforts at composition.
Nevertheless, when he became a student at Harvard University, Carter studied English, having decided the music department there was hopelessly conservative. He concentrated on composition only as a graduate student, when for one semester his teachers included Gustav Holst, whom he remembers as a rather melancholy old man. But by the time he left university he was still nowhere near to becoming the composer he wanted to be. "I tried to write the music that I wanted to write but couldn't do it, and I then realised those composers had a classical training, and so it was easy for me to be convinced that I should do that, too."
So in the 1930s, Carter spent three years in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger. He arrived in 1933, at the time of the Reichstag fire, and found the city full of refugees from the Nazis, and "a very sad place". Boulanger's rigorous harmony and counterpoint exercises took him back to first principles, but also imbued him with the disciplines of neoclassicism, which ran counter to the much wilder, expressionist pieces he had got to know and tried to imitate in New York. "She wasn't encouraging if you wrote very dissonant music," Carter says. "But, meanwhile, the world of music had changed. It wasn't hard to think when we saw pictures of Hitler that it was expressionism that had gone on and produced such a terrible result in Germany, that it was a working out of that kind of extravagance that had become terrifying. So we thought that it was time to be more orderly and more consciously beautiful, and neoclassicism did seem to have a perfect logic about it."
The lessons he absorbed during his years of study with Boulanger remain paramount in his music today. With her he learned to write counterpoint in up to eight parts, and the virtuosity with which he was to invent the teeming lines of his greatest pieces, in which individual instruments often acquire a dramatic character of their own, was a direct result of his training. "To Nadia notes mattered a great deal, everything had to be justified. It was a whole world in which you had to think how every note fitted in; we were concerned not just with the detail of things, but with the total effect."
The music Carter composed when he returned to America was more or less faithful to the neoclassical ethos. But in his crucial pieces of the immediate postwar years - beginning with the 1946 Piano Sonata and culminating in 1951 in the arching sweep of the First String Quartet, the work that really established Carter's international reputation ("In this country you play it and people walk out, but in Europe it made a big impression") - he began the journey of self-discovery towards writing the music he wanted to compose. It was a process that lasted until 1980, during which period new works emerged with almost painful slowness. "Every one of those pieces is a new sort of thought. This was the way I was developing, until finally I felt that I had found my vocabulary and there was no longer any need to experiment."
During that period, too, it was his supporters in Europe rather than the US who championed Carter's music. The composer and conductor Pierre Boulez was an early convert, and, in Britain, William Glock, controller of music at the BBC from 1959 to 1973, was a fervent supporter. "William played all my music on the radio at one time or another and that was very influential, and I also taught at Dartington Summer School when Peter Maxwell Davies and Harry Birtwistle were students there." Stravinsky publicly admitted his admiration for Carter's 1962 Double Concerto for piano and harpsichord, proclaiming it a masterpiece, and the two composers became good friends. His mind, Carter says, is now filled with memories of Stravinsky: of the older composer's kindnesses to him and his wife, of having dinner in a New York restaurant when Frank Sinatra approached Stravinsky for his autograph, and of one of his last meetings with the composer in New York a couple of weeks before Stravinsky's death in 1971, when the only music the old man wanted to listen to was Mozart's Magic Flute.
Carter's music is still more highly regarded across Europe than in the US, yet he has always been in an important sense an American composer. He has regularly drawn inspiration from US writers such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery and Hart Crane; the new song cycle he is working on uses texts by Wallace Stevens. And Carter maintains that his musical language has always been intrinsically American: "I've always thought that in some very important way my pieces came from jazz - with a regular beat background and improvisations on top of that." But first and foremost he remains an unrepentant modernist, backing up his uncompromising stance with a cast-iron classical training. His music has its own cast-iron integrity, too, a fierceness and emotional power that is sometimes hard to square with the genial man one meets; great composers aren't supposed to be so courteous, and so charming, as Elliott Carter unfailingly is.
最後同意作者說的
莎士比亞對Berlioz影響大
不過他只是利用
Ariel 的話 就姑且如此一記
等待
他人
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