New York - Day 9: The Third Class - The Gold Medal Winner

My review of Mr. Barenboim's Sonatas have been vindicated and confirmed by none other than The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/16/arts/music/16BARE.html

This whole Beethoven thing is getting exhausting. I can't believe it's not even half over. Also, if I hear the term "tonal ambiguity" again, I'm gonna vomit onstage. The classes are more and more representing something that you could read in the program notes of a concert rather than a real lesson - it's almost like a structure and harmony class rather than an educational experience; at least today. Predominantly, the content of today's class was shadowed by wit and charm, two characteristics that seem to come completely naturally to him. But at the end, all the repetition of Beethovenian structure and analysis boil down to "tonal ambiguity", something every student knows about Opus 101 before he/she even tackles it. Whatever.

The most interesting Barenboim said today was in response to the question, "is age a big factor in developing musical intelligence and maturity", to which he surprisingly answered with a blatant "no". He said, he has met too many of his colleagues, either a monk who can express the sexual properties of eroticism, or a man who has had 20 affairs who cannot express any of it. With singers, especially, he says that so many are incredibly talented at expressing deceit, greed, eroticism, power, humility, redemption, and any other possible human emotion.....but when you get a cup of coffee with them, you wish you hadn't.

When asked how his interpretation of the sonatas have changed he said: "I used to be a child prodigy. The prodigy is gone but the child is still here."