Do you have a mysterious and slightly embarrassing musical blind spot? One of mine is for Dvorák, whom I don’t need to be told is a great composer. Maybe it was overexposure to the New World Symphony as a child; or maybe I’m unreasonably irritated by his Czech bounciness, just as some people write off Vaughan Williams because he reminds them of that jibe about the ‘cowpat school’. Anyway, it’s a problem.
One way to tackle a blind spot is to listen to a superlative recording of a work by your ‘difficult’ composer. So, a couple of weeks ago, I bought a CD of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto played by Pieter Wispelwey and the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Ivan Fischer. The live performance was incandescent and Wispelwey the ideal soloist. But still: not quite there. And then I remembered that there’s a chapter devoted to the concerto in a book called Talking About Music (1977), by the broadcaster and composer Antony Hopkins.
The book is based on the best musical talks I’ve heard in my life.
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