Charles Hazlewood Quotes
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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.
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Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.
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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?
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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.
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I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
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When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.
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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.
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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.
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I free-form it, rock n' roll it. I'm a creature of risk, so I don't know how I'm going to explore a Beethoven symphony until I'm doing it.
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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.
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Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.
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I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!
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I'm a bit of a Luddite, really: I don't use email much, as I started drowning in it. So I said 'screw this' and dumped my laptop, though I've begun to re-engage with it.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.