Stefan Sanderling grew up chafing against the communist system that saved his famous father's life. Now he has come to terms with his homeland - and his father.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published September 21, 2003
[AP photos]
The Florida Orchestra’s new music director and conductor Stefan Sanderling at his Berlin apartment in June: “I will always remain in a certain way an East German.”
Stefan Sanderling, foreground, stands outside the house where he grew up in Berlin, with his parents, Kurt and Barbara Sanderling, right, and his wife, Isabelle, left.
Stefan Sanderling, right, visits with his father Kurt, 91, at the family’s Berlin home. On the wall is a death mask of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.
A West Berliner walks along a section of the Berlin Wall that divided the U.S. and Soviet sectors of the city in August 1962, a year after the wall was built.
Stefan Sanderling talks of being able to see the West from the landmark television tower that looms over the former East Berlin, shown here in 1970. “It was a little like watching a soap opera. You could look but you couldn’t go there.”
BERLIN - From the rooftop garden of his apartment, Stefan Sanderling can look over the trees at the Berliner Fernsehturm, the landmark television tower that looms over the former East Berlin. The tower, whose silvery sphere looks like a giant disco ball, was an icon of the old communist regime.
"From the observation deck you could see the West," Sanderling said, remembering trips to the tower as a child in East Berlin. "It was a little like watching a soap opera. You could look but you couldn't go there."
Sanderling's hometown has changed astoundingly since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany embarked on reunification. But the 39-year-old, who this week starts his first season leading the Florida Orchestra, was shaped in many ways by the old Soviet empire that ruled with a mix of dictatorial force and bureaucratic absurdity. He was born in East Germany and lived there his first 24 years. He cannot remember a time when he wasn't desperate to leave.
"I always wanted to get out of East Germany. Always. And I was very radical about this. I hated the daily life in East Germany, the restrictions, the dirt, the way we got treated."
Sanderling's misery came with a paradox: He enjoyed a life of entitlement as son of the prominent conductor Kurt Sanderling, artistic director of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. As a German Jew, exiled to the Soviet Union during the Nazi era and then having returned to East Berlin, the elder Sanderling was a powerful propaganda symbol for the communists.
The son constantly criticized his father's relationship with the state, and could not understand why he didn't flee to the West as many artists did during the 1960s and '70s. "We had very strong discussions about it, very strong," Stefan Sanderling said.
But he also followed his father to the podium. More than 15 years after conducting his first orchestra, he's still discovering just how his father has influenced his life and work. Only this year has he learned from a newly published book many of the details of his father's extraordinary journey.
"My father, when I was young, was Kurt Sanderling, probably a great conductor, but he was very private. Just a very nice father, not a celebrity. And it's not like he did or did not want me to become a conductor. It was more like, "Well, just try to survive in the system.'
"I didn't make it easy for people around me because I was a rebel."
Berlin in his blood
To get to know Sanderling, I spent several days in June with him in Berlin. I knew the conductor from interviews and concerts in the Tampa Bay area, but at first I didn't recognize him from across the lobby of the Kempinski Hotel. Sporting a two-week beard, wearing a polo shirt, cut-off jeans and sneakers without socks, he looked like a college kid on summer vacation.
Sanderling was in the middle of a break, on the recommendation of his doctor. Months of almost constant travel and conducting had given him high blood pressure, and he'd canceled several engagements to get some rest.
Berlin - for all the youthful angst it recalls for him - had been just the ticket. Sanderling's blood pressure was back to normal. He loved spending time with his father, whose own health had been fragile a few months earlier.
He also relished being in the spacious top-floor apartment in a four-story building he and his mother own. It's on a leafy block off Friedrich Engels Strasse, a five-minute walk from the house he grew up in and where his parents still live in the Niederschonhausen section of northeast Berlin. He enjoyed shopping for additions to his collection of miniature conductors, dozens of baton-waving figurines from Zubin Mehta to Mickey Mouse.
Sanderling toured me around Berlin in his 1987 Mercedes convertible, a sporty two-seater, steering away from eye-popping tourist attractions such as the newly domed Reichstag or the vast, futuristic Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz. A short distance from the glitzy architecture of the city's post-Wall renaissance, many neighborhoods - especially in the former East - are drab and rundown.
"You have to imagine that all of East Berlin looked like this when I was growing up - completely destroyed, no upkeep, nothing," he said, pointing to a hulking stucco apartment house, unpainted and graceless, still scarred with World War II bullet holes.
Living with reminders
It is rare to find Sanderling in Berlin. In March, he and his wife, Isabelle, a French musician, bought a house for $227,500 in St. Petersburg's Bahama Shores neighborhood, just a block from Tampa Bay. When he isn't there, he is on the road guest-conducting or working with the other orchestra of which he is music director, L'Orchestre de Bretagne in Rennes, France. He also has an ongoing commitment with Ohio's Toledo Symphony Orchestra, where he is the artistic adviser while it searches for a music director.
But Sanderling is rooted emotionally in Berlin. Several times when I was with him there, he would describe a place or point of interest in terms of Heimat, an essentially untranslatable German word.
"It's a sentimental word that means something like "home' or "homeland,' " he said, walking through one of his favorite neighborhoods, the old Jewish quarter around the Hackesche Hofe. Once the poorest part of town, it's now an arts and shopping district, a warren of 19th century alleyways and courtyards and brick warehouses turned into galleries, theaters, boutiques, restaurants and lofts.
Still, the terrible past is never really past in Berlin, even on this neighborhood's funky main drag, Oranienburger Strasse. At night, streetwalkers parade past the concrete barricades, metal detectors and police with submachine guns that guard a historic synagogue. A nearby Jewish school is similarly surrounded by armed police, security cameras and high fencing. A plaque commemorates the former site of a building where Jews were held before being sent to concentration camps.
Berlin is a hard city to love, given its history as capital of the Third Reich and ground zero of the Cold War. Sanderling's family history is intertwined with that of the city.
Making music, not history
Kurt Sanderling, who turned 91 this month, had one of the more eventful artistic odysseys of the 20th century. Born in 1912 in what was then East Prussia (now Poland), he was a rehearsal pianist at a Berlin opera house when Hitler came to power in 1933.
Two years later, when the Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws, Sanderling was fired from the opera and had to emigrate. But unlike many Jewish artists who found a haven in the West, he went east to the Soviet Union, because he had an uncle in Moscow who got him a visa.
The stories of Jews who migrated east to escape the Holocaust are rarely told.
"You only read of people who survived," Sanderling said of his father's story. "People who went to the West most often survived. People who stayed in Germany did not survive, and most people who went to the East did not survive either."
Sanderling learned much of the story not from his father but from a book of interviews with him, Andere machten Geschichte - ich machte Musik ("Others Made History - I Made Music"), published last year in Germany. He was reading the book during his stay in Berlin.
"It's a very emotional moment if you read a book about your father and find out things you've never even known," he said. "But we never really spoke about this part of his life. It was not a happy time, and he never did want to talk about it. For me his life started in East Germany, but when he came to East Germany, he was 48. A lot had happened before he started his life in East Germany."
More than 21-million people perished in the Soviet Union during the war. In the book Kurt Sanderling said conditions were so desperate that he and his first wife kept poison pills in case they had no choice but to commit suicide.
In 1942, Sanderling was named co-conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. For the next two decades, he was second in command to the legendary Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky.
"It was without a doubt the best orchestra in the Soviet Union," Stefan said. "It had a lot to do with power. At the time, if a musician wanted to at least go out to the West once in his life, he had to become a member of one of the major Soviet orchestras. What I learned from my father's book is that you could be sacked any time. So Mravinsky had unlimited power.
"My father joined the Philharmonic not in Leningrad but in Siberia, where the orchestra had been evacuated. It was only Mravinsky, my father and the orchestra, so they needed each other. They became close. Whether they were friends, I don't know."
A second beginning
After the war, Sanderling remained in Leningrad until 1960, when the Soviets dispatched him back to East Germany to head the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. Founded eight years earlier, the East Berlin orchestra was the communist answer to its rival on the other side of the Wall, the Berlin Philharmonic, whose prestige and virtuosity embodied West Germany's recovery after the defeat, devastation and shame of World War II.
Twenty-five years after the Nazis chased him out of Germany, the refugee was back on the podium. He opened his first rehearsal with the orchestra by telling the players that he was a Jew.
"Being Jewish was made very important to my father, because it determined most of his life," Stefan said. "His life would have been different if he had not been Jewish and had to leave Germany. I think he just wanted to make it clear from the beginning. Here was a Jew who came back to Germany."
Stefan is ambivalent about his heritage, defining himself more as an East German than a Jew. "Being Jewish has a role but I'm also East German, and I definitely was formed by that. I come from a Jewish family in a communist country. I don't know which is stronger. But I definitely have a very strong feeling for East Germany, which is not a very positive feeling but it is a feeling.
"I lived in East Germany until I was 24; this is the time when you get most of the ideas of your life, when you get formed. I will always remain in a certain way an East German."
Stefan is the elder of two sons from his father's second marriage, to Barbara Wagner, a double bassist in the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. In his first marriage, which ended in divorce on his return to Germany, the senior Sanderling had another son, Thomas, who also became a conductor. Four years ago, Thomas led the Florida Orchestra and Master Chorale in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, filling in on short notice after the death of the scheduled conductor, Robert Shaw.
Thomas, who lives in London, is more than 20 years older than Stefan, and the half-brothers are not close. Stefan's younger brother, Michael, is a cellist in Berlin, and they keep in touch.
Although father and son don't talk much about personal history, they do talk about music. Kurt Sanderling is a vital presence in Stefan's life, not just as beloved parent but also as mentor as his son prepared for his first season as head of an American orchestra.
"Stefan and I will be wrestling over some aspect of a program and he'll just pick up the phone and call his dad and ask him," said Jeff Bram, the Florida Orchestra's artistic administrator. "He's an encyclopedic resource. They're almost two generations apart so this is truly an elder and a legend here. I sense a lot of respect and deference for his dad, especially with regard to music director issues."
For example, Stefan fretted at one point that it would be wrong to put pieces by Prokofiev and Shostakovich on the same program, because the composers didn't like each other. His father, who knew both men personally, told him not to worry about it if he thought the music worked well together.
Kurt Sanderling is proud of his son being hired to lead an orchestra in the United States, but at his advanced age, it's unlikely he'll be able to see him conduct in Florida. While posing for a photograph with Stefan in front of a death mask of Mendelssohn that hangs on a wall at his house, he said travel was too hard for him now.
"My son got to Florida too late for me," he said. Somewhat stooped, walking slowly with a cane, he appeared frail, but he was alert and radiated a sense of warmth and wisdom that was palpable. He was very friendly during my visit but didn't want to be interviewed at length.
The senior Sanderling continues to be immersed in music. When Stefan and Isabelle left Berlin in June for a round-the-world journey to conducting engagements in Australia, Japan, California and France, his father asked that they swing by his house on the way to the airport and drop off the score of Bruckner's Symphony No. 8. He had misplaced his own score and wanted to study the long symphony over the summer.
"Isn't that amazing?" Isabelle asked. "At his age, he's still studying music."
A permanent fixture
One day, Stefan took me to see the last original section of the Berlin Wall still standing, part of a memorial on Bernauer Strasse. A cross marks a spot where somebody was killed trying to go over to the West. The Wall passes by an old cemetery, thick with trees and foliage, lending an idyllic atmosphere to the scene.
"I didn't have strong feelings about the Wall," Sanderling said. "It was like being an animal in a zoo because I never knew anything different. It was up before I was born and was there all the time I lived in East Germany."
On the day when the Wall began to open - Nov. 9, 1989 - Sanderling was on the other side of the world, studying conducting in California.
"I lived in Hollywood and heard the news on the radio," he said. "I'm not sure I was really impressed. I already knew from my parents that things were going on. But two days before, if you had asked me if the Wall would come down, I would have said no way.
"And it never came to my mind that East Germany would not survive. Everything in my lifetime was made for securing the survival of the state. I could not believe that it would vanish, would not exist anymore. Not that I didn't want it, but I just couldn't imagine it."
Back then Sanderling thought he would never return to East Germany, because he had been, in effect, kicked out of the country the previous year. It was the culmination, he said, of his lifelong rebellion against the communist state.
"People sometimes ask why I was so anti-East Germany, and I say it was because it was so predictable. Surprises didn't exist because surprises meant a failure of the system. We lived in a planned system. You wanted a car? You applied, there was a waiting list, and 26 years later you got your car."
His worst experience came in the East German army. With military service mandatory, he went into the army at 19.
"I was lucky because most of the time I played clarinet in an army band, which probably made it a little more bearable than running behind tanks through the sand, or doing even nastier things, but it still was probably the most horrible time in my life," he said.
"The East German army was made for destroying personalities, and since I had a strong personality - I'm not saying good or bad - I was the target of all those officers and sergeants who make life wonderful in the army. It didn't take them five minutes to see that I detested them. It's probably not a very smart thing to let people know with whom you have to live together in barracks that you detest them.
"But I couldn't help it because the army had so much to do with the East German state and Communist Party. I had a very hard time there."
Sanderling's army post was on the outskirts of Berlin, and several times he was AWOL. For those and other offenses he served time in military prison.
"That's really where they break everyone, in those military prisons," he said. "Once it was only two weeks, the other times, three weeks. Then you were ready to be a nice guy until the game started again."
Discovering German roots
After 18 months in the army, he enrolled at the university in Halle with no clear career path. "I'm not even sure whether I wanted to become a musician," he said. "I always played an instrument, but not exceptionally well. I started with piano and then clarinet. Nothing was very exceptional."
Sanderling may have been more interested in literature than music. Even today the shelves of his living room in Berlin contain more books than recordings. There are rows of the works of Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Knut Hamsun, Voltaire, Goethe, Pushkin, Kafka and others.
"I was very much interested in theater. I was interested in philosophy. I wanted to have something to do with music, but not in a career where you go from A to B to C to D."
Wisely, Sanderling's father never pushed him to take up conducting. "There were people who did everything to have a career in conducting," Stefan said. "They didn't do anything else but read scores or go to concerts or study music theory. I never was a part of that."
In Halle, the birthplace of Handel, he became enamored with the early music movement, the rediscovery of Baroque and classical performance practices.
"I think the basis of my approach was laid there," Sanderling said. "My approach does not come from my father's tradition, the romantic tradition of conductors like Wilhelm Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer. It comes more from the early music tradition I learned in Halle.
"I think it helped me a lot to have started not from the same point of view as my father, because otherwise it would never have been unique, it would never have been mine."
Sanderling fell afoul of Communist Party political correctness in Halle when he wrote a controversial program essay on the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony. He argued that the Russian composer had an anti-communist point to make in writing a symphony of only three movements instead of the customary four. Party officials had him expelled from the school.
"I had to do self-criticism," he said. "Self-criticism was very common in East Germany. You could be wrong, but then you had to stand up and say, "Comrades, I did a very stupid thing and I wasn't thinking of Marxism-Leninism at the time. Now I will try to become a better human being and someone who really acknowledges the great achievements of our Soviet Party . . . blah, blah, blah, blah.' "
Sanderling says he was a thorn in the side of East German authorities, not least because of his father. "I made fun of them and I provoked them in a way that they didn't know how to react to. If my name had been Tom Schmidt, then they would have just sent me to prison. But I was Kurt Sanderling's son."
He and his father had arguments about the East German system. "My father was never a supporter of the regime, but the regime saved his life, so his approach to it was different than mine."
By the 1980s, Kurt Sanderling's guest conducting abroad gave him and his family ample opportunity to defect. Stefan urged his father to do just that.
"He said he couldn't. He was too old and didn't want to lose everything another time. Now sometimes I think I should not judge my father's decision. Maybe after the life he lived it was natural to make the decision not to start over again in another system."
Sanderling recognizes that his father's prominence protected him. So did his Jewishness. Anti-semitism was against the law in East Germany, which took the propagandistic line that all the Nazis had been in the West.
"I could feel like a hero, but you're only a hero if you really risk something. I didn't risk anything. East Germany could make my life miserable, but at the end there was the name, there was the family. They couldn't have afforded to do things to a Jewish family."
California dreaming
In 1986, Sanderling went to the conservatory in Leipzig, the city where Bach composed many of his greatest works. He entered the conducting program headed by Kurt Masur, music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and later the New York Philharmonic. Masur was a useful role model.
"I learned a lot from just watching him rehearse with the orchestra, what works, what does not work," Sanderling said. "He was not the deepest conductor, not the technically best conductor, but he had something that no one else had: He had a nose for power.
"In dealing with an orchestra, you can learn a lot from Masur because he smells where the problems are. He smells what he can do and what he cannot do. You know, keep your hands off there, don't touch this guy because he's stronger than you."
After two years in Leipzig, Sanderling could no longer bear living in East Germany. With assistance from his father, a frequent conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he was admitted to a summer music institute of the orchestra and received government permission to travel to California. There he came under the tutelage of the Philharmonic's chief executive, Ernest Fleischmann, an influential figure in the classical music business who had previously run the London Symphony Orchestra.
"Ernest was nice to me in a horrible way," Sanderling said. "He let me feel he that he had to be nice to me because of my father but that he couldn't stand me. I think Ernest thought I didn't have any talent."
Stefan was "a little cheeky" when he arrived in Los Angeles, said Fleischmann, now a consultant whose clients include Sanderling's orchestra in France. "He was a little full of himself, but he's gotten rid of that. He's grown up a lot."
A great admirer of Kurt Sanderling, Fleischmann sees something of the father in the son. "His podium technique does remind me of his father. If he's absorbed some of Kurt's musicianship, you're in for a fantastic time in Florida."
At the Philharmonic Institute, now defunct, Sanderling studied with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin, Yuri Temirkanov, Edo de Waart and John Nelson. When he decided to stay on in Los Angeles, he was admitted to the University of Southern California, where he studied with the professor of orchestral conducting, Daniel Lewis.
The call of home
Sanderling figured he was through with East Germany, but everything changed when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunited. In 1990, he got an offer to be music director in Potsdam, a city near Berlin that used to be the summer residence of Prussian royalty. Potsdam had a theater with an orchestra, singers and chorus, and conducting staff for symphonic concerts, opera, ballet and drama.
"It was a bizarre time," Sanderling said. "I became music director not because I was the best but because I fit their needs. Within a year, every theater in East Germany fired their music director. Now they needed new faces. They were not ready yet to accept people from the West, but they didn't want people from the East anymore. I was a little bit of everything. I was new. I was available. So I was perfect."
When Sanderling took his first professional job, he had virtually no experience. "I became music director of an opera house without having conducted one opera in my whole life. Just about everything I conducted in Potsdam I was conducting for the first time."
He was there for five years. "Potsdam was not a good orchestra, but for me it was the best orchestra in the world, because I was the music director. I learned the hard way. To make an orchestra like this sound acceptable in a Beethoven symphony is not easy. You cannot tell them: play better; or play louder or softer. You have to have musical ideas, and then you have to tell them how they are to translate these ideas into technical things: bowings for the strings; for the winds, how to start a phrase."
His parents, living less than an hour's drive from Potsdam, regularly came to concerts. "I got criticized, of course. My father would comment, sometimes nicely, sometimes a little less nicely. For example, my first Leonore, the third overture (to Beethoven's opera that became Fidelio), he hated. He said everything was wrong."
Sanderling moved on to another music directorship, in the former West German city of Mainz, where he worked for another five years.
"I wanted to go to the West," he said. "The East has big problems, and part of the problems are the people. The people are sometimes a little whiny. They like to blame the West for their problems."
In 1996, Sanderling became music director of the Brittany orchestra based in Rennes. "I was attracted to Rennes in the beginning because I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to learn another culture," he said. "I spoke German, I spoke English, I spoke a little Russian, but not French. It was a good orchestra. And there was potential for building something."
Sanderling will wind up his tenure in France after this season. When he took over as music director, there were 600 subscribers; last season there were 2,800. In 2002, he led the orchestra on a tour of mostly smaller venues in the United States and got good reviews. In Rennes he also met his wife, Isabelle, a cellist in the orchestra. This season she'll be playing with the Florida West Coast Symphony in Sarasota as well as the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.
Since the mid 1990s, Sanderling has done a great deal of guest-conducting, from opera and ballet in Berlin to symphony orchestras around the world. When we were talking one morning over breakfast on the roof of his apartment building, he dwelled on what he called his worst experiences as a guest conductor.
It came three years ago in a pair of summer concerts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. One featured Holst's The Planets, which can be pretty dull and evidently was with Sanderling on the podium. But the real problem came in a second concert whose soloist was the Korean soprano Sumi Jo in a set of Viennese songs.
"It was a disaster," he said. "First of all, we hated each other. It started with the fact that in rehearsal I said her name "Sumi YO,' and she made a big scandal: "It's Sumi JO! Don't you know this?' "
Jo's presence drew a huge turnout from Los Angeles' Korean community, but the performance lacked the necessary elegance and wit. It had "all the lightness of a collapsed souffle," in the words of LA Weekly music critic Alan Rich.
"I simply didn't get it," Sanderling said. "I didn't get what she wanted. I thought the review was even too nice for what we did. No one liked it."
Fleischmann had retired from the Philharmonic by then and wasn't at the concert, but he heard about the fiasco and had a talk with Sanderling.
"He didn't seem totally prepared for that program. It didn't seem like his kind of music," said Fleischmann, who offered Sanderling some advice: "To be a lot more careful in choice of repertoire. To take the advice of experienced people before he makes mistakes."
Sanderling took it to heart. "Since then I'm very picky about repertoire. If it's not my repertoire, I don't do it."
His core repertoire is traditional. "I think it's German repertoire, Russian repertoire. It's Bruckner, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven. At the moment, more Haydn than Mozart. Then the Russians: Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Tchaikovsky."
Sanderling's musical preferences are more or less the same as his father's. In Stefan's three appearances with the Florida Orchestra in 2002 and 2003, he made the deepest impression in the Sibelius Second Symphony and the Brahms Fourth Symphony.
"Sibelius Two was one of his father's great pieces," Fleischmann said. "His father also conducted great Brahms."
Nobody's music was more important to the father and now to the son than that of Shostakovich, the Soviet Union's political composer par excellence.
"It has something to do with my life. I'm very much interested in music that tries to change the world," said Sanderling, who will conduct the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony in February with the Florida Orchestra.
Like many young conductors, he likes to test his mettle on Mahler, and will be conducting the Fifth Symphony in May. Surprisingly, he does not consider himself strong in French music. "I don't touch French repertoire, with very, very few exceptions," he said.
Even after six years in Rennes, where French music was central to the orchestra? "Yeah, because I never really felt comfortable with it. I think in music, in any art, if you have to force yourself, then it cannot be good."
A sense of story
Sanderling's style is much different than that of his predecessor, Jahja Ling, the Florida music director for 14 years. "I think the differences are striking," said artistic administrator Bram, who essentially agreed with me that Ling's first priority was to make a beautiful sound.
"I think Stefan is after something a little more raw. Not always beautiful but always truthful. I think Jahja could make even the most painful piece of music beautiful. Stefan digs into it a little more. He comes out bloody from the process, whereas Jahja always came out lily white."
Talking with Sanderling one day about his conducting, I described it as a German intellectual approach.
"I don't know," he said. "(Leonard) Bernstein did not have a German intellectual approach, and still he conducted some very deep Mahler symphonies. I have a different approach to every single piece. I wouldn't say I have a general German intellectual approach. I figure out what I think Sibelius Two is about and I develop an approach to it. My approach to, say, Mendelssohn would be completely different.
"It's going to be interesting to see if people buy it or they don't; if people like it."
The Tampa Bay audience often packs the halls for rousing renditions of Tchaikovsky symphonies. Sanderling's more cerebral approach could take some getting used to.
"Someplace where I cannot go is this very brassy kind of Star Wars sound in Tchaikovsky that many people enjoy. For me, a Tchaikovsky symphony is sometimes very intimate, sometimes very dark; not a bright, loud sound. People might not like that. People may need the loud percussion, trombone and trumpet."
In vintage recordings by conductors such as his father and Mravinsky, I told Sanderling, there was an analytical clarity and intensity of interpretation that I also heard in some of his performances.
"I think it is very important that there is an interpretation, and not just following a line in the score," he said. "It's not enough to try to make every note sound beautiful and well-crafted. There has to be a story behind it; this is what interpretation is."
