About
“Von Herzen – Möge es wieder zu Herzen gehen!”
“The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.”
There was Beethoven, who used to say that music must speak from the heart to the heart. And I am convinced that every pulsation of classical music speaks to what is most beautiful in human beings. Then there are the places, opera houses, prestigious concert halls, works of art. And there are the artists, the stage directors. Classical music is beauty, the universal language, a way of speaking to the mind as much as to the heart, and of realising that dream of a synthesis of the absolute.
Those who attended the concerts of the late, the unforgettable Claudio Abbado in Lucerne, those moments of resurrection, those moments of a return to life, know what I mean. These concerts were of course full of life, but they were also crossed by the shadow of an awareness of the finitude and fragility of the human condition. That is what creates the pulsation, the emotion of music and of art, the idea of a universal conscious of its fragile greatness. And it is precisely the memory of Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony that has stayed with me since 2007, and that makes me want to pass on this passion for concerts, for recordings, for exceptional performers and places.
P. R.