What was the first record you bought?
Madama Butterfly with Maria Callas. I’d seen it on television (the NBC Opera did a live telecast). I was nine or 10 and literally saved up pennies and dimes to buy it. Imagine my surprise to find out it was in Italian!
What was the last piece of music you bought?
Actual printed music: Schoenberg’s orchestration of Bach’s St Anne Prelude and Fugue and Hindemith’s Nobilissima Visione. The last piece of recorded music was Kander and Ebb’s very last musical, The Visit, with Chita Rivera.
What’s your musical guilty pleasure?
Listening to Boulez. Please don’t tell Pierre.
Is applauding between movements acceptable?
It is more than acceptable; it is how the audience collaborates with and corroborates the genius of the composer as well as the effectiveness of the performance. We performers have to let the audience express itself. Anyway, the great composers have composed the applause into their pieces. On the other hand, it is incumbent on us to keep the audience from applauding before the end of a piece. That takes real planning and control – but it can be done.
What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert?
Classical concerts should be conceived as a single piece of music made up of a number of elements that can be from different composers and different eras, but the information contained within the music should continue a line of discourse that is comprehensible to the listener. It should not be about wild contrasts, or filling in the three dreaded slots – overture, concerto, symphony – with the occasional new piece that has absolutely nothing to do with its neighbours. Context and process is everything.
What’s been your most memorable live music experience as an audience member?
There are too many for a single “most memorable”. Horowitz’s return recital at Carnegie Hall; that Nilsson/Windgassen/Böhm Tristan at Bayreuth when I was 20 years old; the last night of the “old” Metropolitan Opera House … Then again, Maria Callas’s return to the Metropolitan Opera, after an absence of seven years, to sing Tosca with Franco Corelli and Tito Gobbi was also “most memorable”. When 3,400 of us heard her offstage “Mario!”, and we knew she was actually going to show up and not cancel at the last minute, there was a general inhalation that felt like someone had put his finger into an electric outlet and we were all holding hands.
One more: I was 10 years old and seeing Carousel at the New York’s City Center, with Howard Keel and Barbara Cook in the leading roles. The audience was totally absorbed in the performance – so much so, that when Keel sang the line in the Soliloquy, “Hey, why am I takin’ on like this? My kid ain’t even been born yet!”, a woman in the orchestra stalls below said, loud enough for all to hear, “Oh my gosh. That’s right!”
We’re giving you a time machine: what period, or moment in musical history, would you travel to and why?
Oh boy, this would be an enormous list! How about February, 1812, Vienna: the local premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with Carl Czerny at the keyboard, Beethoven in the audience and tableaux vivants being presented with the music? Then again, perhaps we could arrange two weeks in Paris (from Thursday, 15 May to Friday morning, 30 May, 1913) for the opening of the Ballets Russes at the brand-new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. That way I could see the world premieres of Jeux and Sacre du Printemps, along with a reprise of the original Firebird, and, of course, see Nijinsky dance and hear Monteux conduct these masterpieces. If the genie would grant me a third, it would have to be the opening of the Bayreuth festival in the late summer of 1876 to see the world premiere of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Do you enjoy musicals? Do you have a favourite?
Carmen is my favourite musical and Carousel is my favourite opera. And while we are at it, Porgy and Bess is an opera! (I know, you didn’t ask me.)
Which conductor or performer of yesteryear do you most wish you could have worked with?
I have been extremely fortunate with this one: Leopold Stokowski, Carlo Maria Giulini, and Leonard Bernstein were mentors, and they were direct links to the men who invented modern conducting. But when it comes to performers, I just missed three women with whom I was supposed to work: Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman and Birgit Nilsson. They were each so generous and supportive to me, but time and age caught up with them before we could make it happen.
What is the best new piece written in last half-century?
Hamilton. It’s brand new and a game changer. It stands equal to what Gershwin did with ragtime and jazz, making it viable for long-form orchestral works and opera, and what Bernstein later did with pop music in the 1940s and especially in 1957 with West Side Story. Now the music of today’s streets, AKA hip-hop, has been transformed by Lin-Manuel Miranda to tell a great and moving story, and it is simply thrilling.
But the work from the past 50 years that I return to with ever increasing admiration and affection is John Williams’s score to AI from 2001. If the soundtrack album could be reconstructed into a single orchestral work and called something like “A Symphony of Stored Memories”, it would be programmed by orchestras throughout the world and be a standard addition to the repertory.
Which non-classical musician would you love to work with?
I have been extremely lucky with this one, too. I have worked with so many: Santana, Monty Python, Garth Brooks, Madonna, Brian Wilson, Barbara Cook, Bonnie and John Raitt, Neil Patrick Harris, Alan Cumming, Danny Elfman … But, I have never worked with Lady Gaga or Justin Timberlake, both such interesting and brilliant artists. I think we could tear up the town together.
What do you sing in the shower?
I have never sung in the shower, but maybe that’s because there’s so much music going on in my head. I occasionally dream my own music. And then there are the melodies that are always lurking during the day – except when I am studying, rehearsing or performing, then it’s pretty obvious what’s going on in my head! If there is one tune, however, that has accompanied me for most of my life, it is that sad and beautiful melody from Act III of Tristan und Isolde for the shepherd who watches the horizon for Isolde’s ship. I first heard it when I was 15 and it never really goes away.
John Mauceri conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s new CD, Genius of Film Music, released on 1 September.
