The Lebrecht Interview

The Lebrecht Interview is the interview series that runs during the Proms season in which the writer and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht talks to key figures in the world of classical music.

Today, Norman is in conversation with the Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and of the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela.

Dudamel is a walking advertisement for the success of the extraordinary El Sistema music education project in which poor children in Venezuela are given the opportunity and financial support to train in an orchestra. A product of that system, Gustavo Dudamel has become a byword for joyous, passionate music making, his concerts celebrated almost as religious events. In this interview, Norman Lebrecht talks to the man behind the hype. How heavily does Dudamel feel the weight of reputation?

In the last edition in this series, Norman Lebrecht talks to the great English singer, Dame Janet Baker. The Yorkshire-born mezzo-soprano has mostly been known for her performances in operas by Mozart, Monteverdi, Purcell and Berlioz. In the concert hall she was renowned for her lieder singing especially Mahler, as well as English music, in particular the works of Benjamin Britten with whom she was much associated. The clarity of Janet Baker's voice and the dramatic intensity of her performances have given her a legendary status in the international worlds of opera and song.

Edward Gardner is the Music Director of English National Opera and about to become Principal Guest conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He talks to Norman Lebrecht about his career to date.

Gardner was appointed to the post at ENO in 2007 while in his early 30s and began by conducting a new production of Britten's Death in Venice. He was born in Gloucester and began his musical life as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral. He later went to Eton where he enjoyed the music making and education and then went to Cambridge where he says he enjoyed the conducting and performing that he did there rather than the more academic side of the course. The Royal Academy of Music followed but before leaving he was already working in the summer at the Salzburg Festival as a repetiteur encountering some of the leading conductors and operatic productions of the time. This experience has influenced some of his choices at ENO. He then worked with Mark Elder at the Halle Orchestra.

So choral music and opera were both at the heart of his musical training. In 2004, before he was thirty, he was invited to be Music Director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera, an experience, he says which gave him the opportunity to conduct operas like La Boheme 20 times in different venues and acoustics around the UK.

Since taking up the baton at ENO he has been involved with the planning of the company's repertoire and has conducted new productions of operas by Saariaho, Verdi, Bartok and Puccini. He talks about the challenges the company faces. How it has improved its image and work after a period of decline and argues with Norman about the continuance of the company's policy of performing operas in English.

Producer Tony Cheevers.

Dame Monica Mason has spent all of her working life at the Royal Ballet in London. Now 70 she is about to start her final season as Director of the Royal Ballet. In conversation with Norman Lebrecht she talks frankly and warmly of the experiences her various roles in the company have given her.

Born in South Africa she first encountered ballet in Johannesburg and began to dance. After the sudden death of her father when she was just 13 she tells Norman how her mother brought her to London where they lived frugally in a bedsit in Finsbury Park.

Monica got a place at the Royal Ballet School and then unexpectedly was put in the company. Here she immediately encountered some of the great figures in international ballet whom she talks about in this interview.. The founder of the Royal Ballet was Dame Ninette de Valois who was then at the helm and a figure who fought for the company throughout the war years but who inspired fear in many. Frederick Ashton was the founder choreographer of the company and later held the post of Artistic Director. Monica Mason tells of dancing in his full length ballet Ondine to music by Henze which he found difficult to work to, but generally she was not one of his favourite dancers.

Monica also talks about Margot Fonteyn who for many years danced many of the best roles and continued past the normal age when dancers retire partly due to the arrival of Rudolf Nureyev with whom she formed a memorable partnership. Mason also talks of dancing with Nureyev herself.

She found a more direct working partnership with Ashton's successor Kenneth Macmillan who built his version of Rite of Spring around her . Macmillan was a troubled man subject to dark moods who, when he discovered Monica was considering leaving as her dancing years came to an end, persuaded her to stay as his assistant.

Monica Mason remained during the difficult years of the 90s when the Royal Opera House went through a troubled period, continuing as assistant to Norman Morrice, Anthony Dowell and then Ross Stretton. And it was only after Stretton's sudden dismissal that she went into the role of Director herself, at first she thought, on a temporary basis. Soon after she was offered the job. She reflects on her experiences as Director and how she has tried to move the company on, appointing Wayne McGregor as resident choreographer and commissioning a new full length ballet from Christopher Wheeldon.

Producer Tony Cheevers.

Norman Lebrecht meets the conductor Valery Gergiev, head of the Kirov Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, and Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and the World Orchestra for Peace. Gergiev also runs festivals in Russia, Holland, Israel and around the Baltic, and was recently charged with re-launching the historic Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and St Petersburg. Undoubtedly one of the busiest musicians on the planet, Gergiev has been criticised for skimping on rehearsal and detail; he has also been accused of having too intimate a relationship with Russian power.

In this extended and wide-ranging interview recorded at Gergiev's Festival in Mikkeli, Finland, Gergiev tells Norman about his childhood in Ossetia and his reaction to the death of his father when he was just 14; his own very special method of fund-raising; his controversial relationship with Vladimir Putin; and just what drives him to live life at his famously frenetic pace.

Producer Emma Bloxham.

Richard Rodney Bennett is a contemporary of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies but his musical life has pursued a very different path. From his childhood onwards music was there for him. His mother was a pupil of Holst while his father wrote children's books and ballad lyrics. But his frailty meant that the young Richard was sent to boarding school, so he hardly knew him. Bennett's musical mind was inquisitive from the start and after reading about her he approached the composer Elisabeth Lutyens for lessons. She invigorated him further. Soon after he went to the Royal Academy of Music but this didn't give him the stimulus he needed although it was there that he met one of his best friends Cornelius Cardew. Together they wanted to find out about the new music which was being written in the 1940s and 50s.

Norman Lebrecht meets the German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, widely considered to be one of the finest lieder singers performing today. Although only four feet tall, with very short arms - Quasthoff's mother was prescribed thalidomide during pregnancy - Quasthoff is nevertheless a towering presence on the stage.

In this extensive and wide-ranging interview, Quasthoff reflects on his happy childhood, his very close relationship with his brother Michael (who died of cancer last year), and the challenges of rebuilding his marriage after its apparent collapse.

Having said some years ago that he wouldn't return to the operatic stage, Quasthoff tells Norman how he's been lured back, and how his fundamental optimism has remained intact.

Producer Emma Bloxham.

Deborah Borda's is Chief Executive Officer of the hugely successful Los Angeles Philharmonic. Her career has also spanned a range of the great American institutions, including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Detroit and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras and the St.Paul Chamber Orchestra. She has a reputation of toughness and a creative approach to managing in often difficult circumstances. She talks to Norman Lebrecht about the future of the American symphony orchestra and reveals her approach to dealing with crises that frequently befall arts organisations.

In the first of a series of interviews with prominent musicians, writer and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht talks to one of the world's most sought after conductors, Semyon Bychkov. Born in Russia, growing up during the Soviet era, he finished his education in the United States. He talks about living in poverty in Leningrad, crammed into a single room with his parents and brother, and having to share a bathroom with several families. He describes himself as obsessive about music, yet denies ever being a control freak. Married to pianist Marielle Labeque, he also discusses his difficult relationship with his brother, Yakov Kreizberg who died earlier this year.

Producer, Jeremy Evans.

Now 65, Patrice Chereau is one of the most highly regarded French directors. He began his career directing at his Lycee and running a theatre in the Parisian suburbs in the 1960s. Not long after he was invited to Italy and to Germany initially directing plays by the classic dramatists.

His first job in opera was a work by Rossini at Spoleto but the occasion which caused the greatest controversy was in 1976 at Bayreuth when he directed Wagner's Ring Cycle with Pierre Boulez conducting. Chereau was not the first choice - Ingmar Bergman and Peter Brook were asked but both turned it down. Then, after Peter Stein accepted but then withdrew, Boulez approached Chereau. His production was deemed controversial in its setting, drawing as it did, heavily on the years of the 19th century Industrial Revolution and many staunch Wagnerites were incensed that the centenary Ring should be in the hands of a French production team. But the production is now seen as hugely influential in the effect it had on opera directors all over the world. It was widely seen on television in this country and abroad.

Patrice Chereau talks candidly to Norman Lebrecht in this interview recorded at his home in Paris about the Bayreuth experience including the hostility of the audience and the problems caused by his late appointment as director. He also talks about the works which attract him: Wozzeck and Lulu by Berg and Janacek's From The House of The Dead, all of which deal with difficult and sometimes expressionistic subject matter. And about some of his films which deal with issues of sexuality including L'Homme blesse and Son Frere.

Producer Tony Cheevers.