Inspiration
“Never underestimate the power of music in bringing people together”
Dear Antony,
I wanted to get in touch with you and share this story from our performance in Bridgewater Hall a couple of days ago.
I saw a woman sitting right behind you in the concert hall before we started playing. Her face expressed nothing other than quiet resignation. You see hundreds of faces like that every day. Tired faces, worried faces, forlorn faces... Faces looking back at you from the pages of Orwell's 1984 that seem to step out of the book into the real world around you as the years go by.
We started our music making. Nearing the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony, I felt the urge to find her face again and I couldn’t. It was still there in the same spot, but it was unrecognisable. Beautiful, lit up from inside like all the wisdom in the world was being whispered to her alone in that moment.
This woman didn’t belong to a four-hundred-year tradition of music making we were trained in. She didn’t care to think about what Tchaikovsky, Beethoven or Schubert tried to say. And yet our music spoke directly to her. Somehow, she became an integral part in every moment of our creative process. Every detail and emotion Tchaikovsky put in this finale reflected in her face back at us. We have done that with our music.
And this made me realise what difference music makes in people’s lives. That this is why I want to make music – to make it more passionately and to make it more enriching every time I perform for as long as I can.
Thank you, and all the best,
Ivan Alekhin (student Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester)
To inspire…
Together with the organisation Cartooning for Peace and their chairman Kofi Annan, the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande gave a concert to remember the victims of the terror attack at Charlie Hebdo – for peace in the world. While the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande played Beethoven's Eroica, the world famous cartoonists Chappatte (New York Times) and Plantu (Le Monde) drew cartoons inspired by Beethoven's visionary music in a small contribution to world peace.
My speech at the end of the concert of National Youth Orchestra of the Netherlands at the Konzerthaus Berlin.
To award The International Children's Peace Prize, I conducted the Rotterdam Philharmonic at a moving ceremony in Ridderzaal in The Hague.
My friends at the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Rouen have a wonderful tradition: once a month they all go to the academic hospital in Normandy, France to play for the patients. Such a fabulous way to share music - and when I am in Rouen conducting, I regularly join them.
And my personal inspirations…
Benjamin Zander: The art of possibility
