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Welcome to my new blog! I do have already another one, which you might want to follow on Music and Politics in Vienna where I draft also my stories to be published for The Vienna Review.
This blog here, however, is my first attempt to voice my opinion: About Conducting and music in general! This is one of the professions I have studied, and I am currently also practicing. But of all those professional endeavors – that of a journalist and music critic, that of a musicologist, that of a commentator of International Affairs – none reaches so far out into the meaning of life than than directing a musical performance. In none other profession, I believe, are we engaged emotionally and intellectually for one common purpose only: To bring joy to the world!
There is no other musician, conductor and music educator, than Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990) that expresses this joy and this message. That is why I have chosen a Bernstein clip to introduce this blog – a characteristic performance of Peter I. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the last minutes of the Finale, to be precise (recorded in 1974). I have deliberately chosen this excerpt as this work stood also at the beginning of my conducting.
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Matthias Wurz