Influences
Leon Barzin (for Barzin's biography click here)
I had the great privilege to be Barzin’s last student, living and studying with him during the summers he spent in Europe from 1993 until 1998. Aged 93, music still gave him the energy of a twenty-year-old. My first lesson lasted for seven hours without a break! The keyboard was only rarely used, the voice he felt was the ideal instrument for teaching conducting. For lessons, every note of a score had to be learnt from memory in order to comprehensively grasp the music’s structure. He would often stop me in mid movement and say something like “sing the second clarinet part here…..now sing what it had in bar 56….what is the structural relationship between these bars?”
His approach came through absorbing the work of both Toscanini and Furtwängler, and later through conversations with Einstein. He was particularly concerned with the relationship between gravity, space and time and how the conductors gestures, if free of personality quirks and ego difficulties, could naturally convey this relationship. When conducting, one felt that he could look right inside you, physically and mentally and see what needed to be fixed for you to reach a higher level of understanding. The most remarkable teaching of anything I have ever encountered!
Technique was taught (apart from some basic warm up exercises) only in relation to sound and expression. His warm ups would include freeing the whole body from the toes upwards to make sure every joint was flexible, mobile and free to react to the music. Flexibility and balance were tremendously important to him (his mother was a prima ballerina). The next stage of warming up involved developing a natural relationship with gravity. A variety of circles or“orbits” with the baton were explored. Over time my awareness of gravity changed radically. I will never forget the day in 1997 when it all clicked into place. Difficult to put into words, it is a kind of awareness of the context of musical time: of all of the pulses in and around us, and how time moves through them and binds them all together. In recent years I have found a direct parallel to this experience in my work with Ravi Shankar and other leading Indian musicians.
Click here for a biography and discography of this amazing man- largely unknown to the general public but acknowleged by fellow conductors and soloists as one of the very greatest conductors of the twentieth century.
Two further crucial influences are:
