Words matter. These are the best Charles Hazlewood Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony I’m really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour.
Somerset is the first proper country county you come to in the West, which isn’t dependent on London and isn’t full of commuters. Somerset is full of the most fantastically interesting people.
Mozart, Beethoven – how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.
Somerset desperately needs more high-end music making on its doorstep, so the chance to share great music spanning genres as diverse as orchestral classics, trip hop and jazz, in the utterly relaxed and cathartic environment of a Somerset field, is for me the fulfilment of a long-term dream.
I most definitely would not buy the ‘Daily Mail,’ which pours a kind of livid torpor into the eyelids of the average Brit – I skimmed through a copy recently and couldn’t believe the rubbish in it.
Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music – even The Who now cite him as an influence. There’s an intense, dirty harmony, but there’s a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.
Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.
Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.
There’s always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it’s so hard to fight for Beethoven’s soul! But that’s what I have to do!
I love the way Monteverdi’s opera embodies the triumph of evil love in such a luscious way. The closing love duet is just pure amoral, liquid passion. The Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment sound great in the Albert Hall, and the Glyndebourne cast is fabulous.
It’s wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.
A hundred years ago, concerts were far more come-what-may – people played cards, drank beer and appreciated the music. If we go some way towards restoring that spirit, I’ll be happy.
For anyone who doesn’t have that connection with Mozart, I urge those people to go and find some of his music, because it can quite genuinely make you just glad to be alive.
The rest of my family are obsessed by ‘The X Factor:’ I’m intrigued by it, although its musical values are far away from mine, like a cup of tea with 400 lumps of sugar in it. There’s something very strange about Simon Cowell’s lips, isn’t there?
I think most people’s record collections are more interesting than radio generally gives them credit for. You’re likely to be as interested in the Grateful Dead as Palestrina. It pisses me off how compartmentalised music is. I used to be in a punk band, you know?
There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say.
In America, they have this nauseating habit of calling the conductor ‘maestro’. I always slightly gag when the cor anglais player goes, ‘Maestro, can I discuss bar 19 with you?’
I spend so much of my time working away, but I love being here. My family is in Somerset, and this is where my heart is.
All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.
Music is a lens through which to see who we are. Every phrase of every piece of music is trying to tell a story.
I hate playing the piano! And it’s so hard to fight for Beethoven’s soul! But that’s what I have to do!
For too long, musicians have been the greatest enemy of music. Their lack of desire to proselytize is a kind of betrayal.
Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.
I want to prove that Holst’s ‘The Planets’ can be as much of a sensory overload as a concert by the Grateful Dead, and just as exciting.
When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.
