Johann Sebastian Bach  Two-Part Invention No. 1 in C major [excerpt]. Peter Serkin. BMG Classics 9026 68594-2.

Georges Bizet  Carmen ACT II [Quintet]. RCA Victor Orchestra. Fritz Reiner. Risë Stevens. Jan Peerce. Licia Albanese. Robert Merrill. MMBMG 7981-2.

John Adams  Harmonielehre [excerpt]. San Francisco Symphony. Edo De Waart. Nonesuch 9 79115-2.

Pierre Boulez  Répons [excerpt]. Ensemble InterContemporain. Pierre Boulez. DG 457 605-2.

Johann Sebastian Bach Cantata No. 82 “Ich habe genug”. Emmanuel Music Orchestra. Craig Smith. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Nonesuch 79692-2.

Charles Mingus (music) Joni Mitchell (lyrics)  “Sweet Sucker Dance” [excerpt]. Joni Mitchell. Asylum 505-2.

Steve Reich  Music for 18 Musicians “Pulses” [excerpt]. Steve Reich and musicians. Nonesuch 79962-2.

Osvaldo Golijov Ayre “Nani”. The Andalucian Dogs. Dawn Upshaw. DG B0004782-02.

 

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GILBERT KAPLAN:     Welcome back to “Mad About Music” with my guest today, the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian.

[Theme Music]

It would be hard to imagine someone with a more distinguished career in the artistic administration of our musical institutions. Starting with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, then leading the artistic initiatives of the Aspen Festival and School, and finally, to his appointment as the Senior Director for Music at Carnegie Hall – always acclaimed for his musical ideas. Then in 2006 he was appointed the Dean of Juilliard, surely the world’s foremost music conservatory. And in full disclosure, I should mention that I’ve observed his career both as a member of the Board at Carnegie Hall and the faculty at Juilliard’s Evening Division. Ara Guzilimian, welcome to “Mad About Music.”

ARA GUZILIMIAN: Thanks Gil, it’s a pleasure to be here.

KAPLAN: Now with such a distinguished career in music I’ve just described, in which you’ve done almost every job except play every instrument, it’s only natural we should start by asking, how did you start? When did you first remember coming in contact with classical music?

GUZILIMIAN: I was born in Egypt into an Armenian family and one of my earliest memories of  being sentient, being aware was listening to my brother who is a pianist and who is older play the Bach Two-part Inventions. He had been studying piano before I was born, and I was just drawn to this amazing phenomena of somebody playing with both hands this music that seemed to me, that it was incomprehensible that somebody could play, and so I would go down the hall to the room where the piano was and listen to him play this music.

KAPLAN: And how old were you then?

GUZILIMIAN: I was two, three—it’s really among my earliest memories of just being on this planet is associated with this music. I actually became enough of a pianist to play this music myself years later, but there is a kind of magnetic draw to me to Bach on the piano and, it’s still, I hate to confess this, but I still prefer Bach on the piano, as much as I love period instruments.

KAPLAN: Well, you know, so many people who have been on the show always say it all goes back, it all begins with Bach. And although this is not one of your official selections today, why don’t we sample just a few bars of this music as the music that got you started.

[Music]

KAPLAN: A small sampling of Bach’s Two-part invention No. 1, here performed by Peter Serkin, and the first musical memory of my guest today on “Mad About Music,” the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian, when he was only about three years old. Any other notable childhood memories?

GUZILIMIAN: A very major one, this was in the 1950s and remember Egypt is pretty far removed from technological advances, so the idea of an LP was a very high tech object and we had exactly 7, and one of them, the most prized one, was highlights from Bizet’s Carmen with Risë Stevens and the cast largely drawn from the Metropolitan Opera and Fritz Reiner conducting. None of that made any sense to me when I was five and six years old. What made sense to me was a lurid LP cover worthy of pulp fiction or at least cheap romance books of Risë Stevens with one of the great come-hither looks in all of history, leaning towards you with her ruby red lips. And I loved, I could be placated as a child by having Carmen played for me, I could be bribed into behaving better and one family legend is that I actually feigned being sick, so I could stay home and listen to this particular recording of Carmen. I’ve actually chosen a specific moment that’s not one of the obvious great moments from the opera, but it’s music I adore and it is on this recording with Risë Stevens; it’s the Quintet from Act II, and it’s some of the most elegant and witty and sensual music in the opera, in the middle of which Carmen announces, “je suis amoureuse,” “I am in love.” And you know trouble is going to follow. And even as a six-year-old I understood there was some great dangerous adult sentiment that I would understand later.

[Music]

KAPLAN: A quintet from Act II of Bizet’s Carmen, led by Risë Stevens in the title role, with the RCA Victor Orchestra and conductor Fritz Reiner, a recording discovered during his youth in Cairo by my guest today on “Mad About Music,” the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian. So that’s how it started, but tell me, when did it first occur to you that classical music would become your life’s work?

GUZILIMIAN: I knew it in the second year of college. I had been on a math/science track and music had just been my passion, and I had petitioned to take an upper division seminar on Russian opera, which most math/science undergraduates don’t do. And I was headed towards that class when in one of those few rare moments of realization one has in life, I actually thought to myself, “If this is what I love, why aren’t I doing this?” And that began, that afternoon, changing my major officially to music history and I “followed my bliss,” as Joseph Campbell would say, having no idea professionally what that would lead to, just going on a sort of pure instinct to pursue the study of music and hoping that something good would come of it.

KAPLAN: Well it’s clear something very good came of it as can be seen from your remarkable career. And that brings us to your next group of selections. Almost all are works by living composers. I assume there is an idea behind that.

GUZILIMIAN: There is an idea behind that. I always remember a line that the wonderful music critic Andrew Porter wrote nearly 30 years ago in the New Yorker when Balanchine was making his Stravinsky ballets at New York City Ballet, and he wrote that living in New York City was while Balanchine was making dances was like living in Salzburg or Vienna when Mozart was writing his works; this kind of exhilarating sense of the creation that was going on simultaneous rather than the creation of artistic work being a historical fact. And I decided that although obviously I am deeply steeped in and love the core repertoire, that in thinking back over the last 20 or 30 years of my working life some of the greatest satisfaction has been to be occasionally a midwife or a helpful part of the chemistry in the creation of new music and supporting the work of the composers, and it was very, very difficult even within that to settle on a handful of composers with whom I’ve had the privilege of working.

KAPLAN: All right, now, before we start with your first composer, I should say something I think you would agree with, that the audience for contemporary music is still quite a small audience, maybe growing. Certainly many of the listeners of “Mad About Music,” I know because they e-mail to me, are not particularly attracted to the atonal portion of that realm. Did you bring us music which the listeners today will be able to enjoy—aside from being interesting?

GUZILIMIAN: I wouldn’t have brought it if I didn’t think that there was potential for enjoyment. One of the most pointed things I hope to do with this selection of music is actually music that’s across the stylistic spectrum, and to show that there is a vibrancy and an excitement and, yes, a beauty to very different contemporary musical vocabularies. Again, my passion is that music is not merely a historical phenomenon.

KAPLAN: Now, was there a time that even you who knows so much about music and are open to so much music, was there a time that even you found, some classical music as it was evolving, particularly when it got into the atonal and traffic noise era for a while, did you find that challenging?        

GUZILIMIAN: Oh sure. Look, one of the most important things for all of us is not to love everything we hear. The only thing I would ask of audiences is listen with open ears, genuinely open ears, and that’s what I ask of myself, and take it in. It was the stage director Peter Sellars who said in a world with very little privacy left to us that how we respond to the arts is one of the few truly private things left to us. We can mouth platitudes and say nonsense to make ourselves sophisticated, but at the end of the day when your head hits the pillow and the lights go out, privately we think what we think, and I would never ever want to deprive that of anybody; I think that’s the richness of the artistic experience. What I would ask is to listen and in other arts watch and take in with open ears, open mind, open heart and then think of it what one will. And there are certainly pieces that I’ve struggled with and oddly enough some of the things I’ve struggled with the most earlier on in my life have come back to haunt me in a positive way and I’ve become obsessed with them later on.

KAPLAN: Well you know, you’ve mentioned the right to privacy but it, this reminds me that Bernard Holland who was a reporter about music for The New York Times once wrote a piece saying that one of the elements of contemporary music is the intimidation of the audience who are informed that if they only understood it, they would like it, so they feel guilty about not liking it, and that’s very healthy for you to say that there are things you can like and things you don’t have to like, and that’s a private matter. All right, we should turn then to real music and not just talking about it. And we start with your first composer who is John Adams who over the course of this show I’d say has appeared many times, not his music so much but people talking about that he might be perhaps the foremost composer today in America, maybe the world, certainly listenable and yet accepted as modern. So, tell me about your view on John Adams and what you’ve brought us.

GUZILIMIAN: We met actually in the early ‘80s and the work that we’ll hear a little of is Harmonielehre, a huge orchestral piece from the early ‘80s, which was one of his big, kind of burst-on-the-scene calling card statements. John Adams for me captures the moment. He does have a distinctly American voice and he is very much a product of his generation and the music he grew up with. I was doing a talk at the Met Opera the other day to a group of educators and we listened to the “Landing of Air Force One” from Nixon in China, and I burst out very spontaneously to them saying somehow there are moments of this music that sounds like an unexpected combination of Duke Ellington and Wagner, which is not a combination I would naturally think of, but both of those are very much in John’s mind and vocabulary, and he is uninhibited about embracing that. And he is an American composer who grew up with a certain music in his ear, gathered a lot more sophistication, and writes it with a kind of an unabashed directness and honesty. Harmonielehre begins with one of these giant gestures like the opening of the Eroica Symphony that immediately compels attention and has a sort of pulsing energy and even optimism that I think is characteristically American; to me it’s unmistakable and when you hear the opening of Harmonielehre, there is a distinct, powerful American voice in action.

[Music]

KAPLAN: An excerpt from Part I of John Adams’ Harmonielehre, the San Francisco Symphony with Edo de Waart on the podium, music chosen by the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian, my guest today on “Mad About Music.” This is music he’s chosen to document his work with living composers. When we return, we’ll discuss whether today’s remarkably talented students are likely to develop distinct musical personalities – at least when compared to the giants of the past.

[Station Break]

This is Gilbert Kaplan with my guest today on “Mad About Music,” the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian. Now let’s talk about all the extraordinarily talented students that are walking the halls of Juilliard and all the leading conservatories. Now in spite of their technical prowess, one often hears from teachers that there seems to be a lack of a distinct musical personality. Does that sound right to you?

GUZILIMIAN: I think that’s a real challenge for young musicians, I do agree with that. Allowing a distinct personal voice to emerge, which is why we cherish the great artists we cherish, I think is one of the biggest challenges. It’s probably a by-product of too many years of recorded art, which requires a kind of cleanliness and clinical accuracy that sometimes is mistaken for art. And I always like with young string players, there is a recording I love of the Brahms B-flat Sextet from the Prades Festival, in the early 1950s that has Pablo Casals, and Isaac Stern among the musicians playing. And it’s a live performance; its 60 years ago and it sounds like it happened yesterday. It’s gruff, there are rough edges, there are hairs that go flying, but it’s a living, breathing performance, and I love playing that for students, who would never think of playing with that kind of abandon, and say, “What’s essential about what you’re hearing?” So, the trick is always to integrate within a high degree of polish that kind of in-the-moment excitement because I think in the end that’s what we turn to music for.

KAPLAN: You bet, you bet. Now how good is the Julliard orchestra at its best? Would you say it is comparable to the great American orchestras that are professional?

GUZILIMIAN: I think, yes, I think comparable to the great American orchestras I’d be comfortable in saying and probably with an extra measure of freshness because many of them are experiencing this music for the first time. Alan Gilbert just began a very long arc of rehearsing the Mahler Ninth Symphony, as a big teaching arc at Julliard, and at the very first rehearsal in October for a performance that will take place in April, he said, “How many of you have played this piece before?” And out of a hundred people I think four raised their hands, and I looked at them with such envy. Imagine being absorbed in the Mahler Ninth for the first time in your life from the inside. And so there is a kind of freshness and preciousness to that experience of the first time that the 50th time doesn’t have. The 50th time has worldview and life and experience and wisdom and other qualities, but it doesn’t have that kind of, you know, fresh morning mist of discovery about it. And, so I think in addition to a high level of accomplishment there is this intangible quality to our students performing this music.

KAPLAN: One more question about Julliard and then we’ll move to your very fascinating list of music we want to play today. When you and the president and the senior people of the school get together and look at each other, what do you regard as the most daunting challenges facing Julliard at the moment?

GUZILIMIAN: The most daunting challenge right now is, unfortunately like so many others, is financial, and particularly continuing to come up with enough scholarship support, so that when you have a gifted young artist who’s been educated at Julliard, they don’t leave with a massive debt, which is part and parcel sadly of so many students’ lives these days. And that debt might force them for pragmatic reasons to go away from pursuing their artistic goals and dreams. There are all sorts of other issues, adapting to a changing performing arts landscape, but I would say as much as possible removing financial obstacles to the realization of a young artist’s dreams is probably as central an issue as any these days.

KAPLAN: All right, then let’s return to your living composer list and I see that Pierre Boulez is next. He has been a guest on this show himself, and during the show I asked him why he and his friends, close composer colleagues, were against any composer who wrote a beautiful melody with somewhat traditional harmony. He was upset with me a little bit about that, and he said there is wonderful melody in what he writes, you just have to get used to it and find it and then you will come to love it. So, tell us about your choice for Pierre Boulez.

GUZILIMIAN: Well, Pierre Boulez is somebody I met in the early ‘80s through a great mentor of mine, Lawrence Morton, who ran a series in Los Angeles, called “Monday Evening Concerts” and was Stravinsky’s great champion in Los Angeles and a very close friend of Boulez’s. And I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Pierre Boulez and his fearless, fierce advocacy for his own beliefs in music. There is a wonderful book by Simone Signoret called Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, it’s her autobiography, and Pierre I think is basically just anti-nostalgic in music. He doesn’t believe in rewriting what’s already been written, and so he is one of those explorers of the farther edges of the horizon in every generation and he’s championed composers who he thinks do that. One of my great working experiences was a landmark moment in my time at Carnegie Hall, when for a benefit event celebrating the birthday of the chairman Sandy Weill the hall had a great platform put over the seats. We took advantage of that unusual set up and did a piece of Pierre’s called Répons, which has a group of musicians in the center, literally at the center, with the audience surrounding it rather than in the more conventional set up, and then sort of six satellite stations of musicians set up all around the listeners and the core group of musicians, and all of it is processed and transformed by very sophisticated electronics to a series of speakers all over the hall, so it becomes a kind of  glittering audio installation art as much as a concert piece. And the moment in this piece where the music goes from the conventional ensemble placed in the center to the sound opening up all over the hall to me is like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when it goes from black and white to color, and the moment I’ve chosen as the excerpt is that moment; it’s hard to imagine in the two dimensions of a recording, but I think what you can hear is this kind of starburst, glittering beauty of the sonorities, and that’s something that Pierre Boulez, who is widely regarded as a fierce intellectual, which he certainly is, is not given sufficient credit. He is also a French composer, who grows out of a line of Rameau and Couperin and Debussy and Ravel, all of whom had an elegance and all of whom had this real sensitivity to beautiful sonority, and this excerpt I’ve chosen is that sensibility translated to a composer living in the late 20th century.

[Music]

KAPLAN:  An excerpt from Pierre Boulez’s Répons, performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain led by the composer himself, another musical selection by my guest, the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian to reflect his collaboration with living composers. You know, we’ve been talking about composers you admire obviously, but I’m wondering whether even for you there are some mainstream composers with whom you just don’t connect.

GUZILIMIAN: I don’t know. A friend of mine once said, I’m not sure if it was as an accusation or a compliment, said, “Let’s face it Ara, you’re a cultural omnivore.” And I’ve had to just own up to that. You know, in the right performance, I can be persuaded with just about anything. I’m not very fond of sort of mindless virtuosity of the late 19th century, but in the next breath I can tell you that in the hands of a great artist I’ll be persuaded. I’m not necessarily close to late 19th century Russian Romantic music, but in the hands of Valery Gergiev or somebody who just lives and believes in that, I completely throw out that natural instinct. Prokofiev might be an example, but I will instantly suspend that in the face of a great performance.

KAPLAN: Are there any composers you’ve sort of reassessed, not based on a particular performance, but just over time they’ve grown on you?

GUZILIMIAN: Now we’re moving to the true confessions part of the program. Two composers who were anathema to me when I was in my 20s were Sibelius and Messiaen, and over time I’ve become obsessed with both of them, I can’t get enough. So it’s a great humbling lesson in never say never about your artistic tastes.

KAPLAN: Okay, well then I would change it a little bit and ask you about music that you respond to in a highly personal way, the role that music might play in your life at special moments when a great event happens or something sad happens in your life, a disappointment, sort of a soundtrack you can live with.

GUZILIMIAN: That was put to the test a few years ago. I had to have pretty significant surgery, and it was a frightening stretch of my life, and the outcome at least prior to the surgery was certainly uncertain to me, the outcome at least had a lot of uncertainty for me, and I found out at the hospital where I was having the surgery they have this enlightened view of allowing you to take music on headphones into the operating room until the moment you’ve lost consciousness and the anesthesia took effect. And so, I then had to choose music to go into this moment of darkness and uncertainty, and the music I chose was an artist whom I adored, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who had an ability to speak from an inner life with a directness that is singular in my experience. And the music I took with me was her recording of the Bach Cantatas, and in particular the Bach Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug,” and an aria within that called “Schlummert ein,” in which the text is, “Slumber now, you weary eyes, close softly and pleasantly, world I will not remain here any longer,” and it goes on and ends “there I will see sweet peace and quiet rest.” And it may seem a little strange because the subject in Christian and spiritual terms is death, but there is this comforting cradle song quality to this aria and an extraordinarily touching personal quality to the singing of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson that allowed me to enter into that uncertainty in the most reassuring company.

[Music]

KAPLAN: An excerpt from Bach’s Cantata No. 82 “Ich habe genug” sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with the Emmanuel Music Orchestra, Craig Smith conducting, music my guest, Ara Guzilimian, the Dean of Juilliard turns to for consolation. When we return we’ll hear Ara Guzilimian’s “wildcard” selection.

[Station Break]

This is Gilbert Kaplan with my guest today on “Mad About Music”, the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian. Now after that moving Bach Cantata we just heard before the break, we now take a leap to that section of the show, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, it’s called the “wildcard” where you are called upon to pick some music that is not classical, not opera. This is the part of the show where unexpected surprises often appear, so what did you bring us today?

GUZILIMIAN: Well, in a way it’s the perfect link from Lorraine Hunt Lieberson because it’s one of these iconic great women of song, it’s Joni Mitchell. I mentioned growing up in Los Angeles in the ‘60s and ‘70s; there was a great club in Los Angeles called The Troubadour, and on Election Day in 1972 was my first time voting in a Presidential election, and I will just say that it began a long, losing streak as a voter for me. But on that night, for the one and only time, I saw Joni Mitchell at The Troubadour, which still remains to me one of my more vivid experiences. And she is a singer, songwriter, and an artist and a poet, has been very important to me in many ways in the same personal sense as Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. And I’ve chosen not one of the better known albums but actually sort of one of the ugly duckling recordings, one of the recordings that got clobbered by critics. It’s a very experimental album. She became fascinated with the music of the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, and late in his life as he was ill they began on a collaborative project, in which he wrote the songs and she wrote the lyrics. He didn’t live to see the realization of the project, but she made an album called Mingus, and on it she collaborated with some extraordinary jazz musicians, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, now lamented and neglected bass player named Jaco Pastorius. And one of my favorite songs on that album, which is great jazz and great chamber music and great song, is called “Sweet Sucker Dance.”

[Music]

KAPLAN: Joni Mitchell singing “Sweet Sucker Dance,” a work created as a collaboration with the great jazz bassist, Charles Mingus and the “wildcard” selection of my guest today on “Mad About Music,” Ara Guzilimian, the Dean of Juilliard. All right, let’s return to the music you’ve selected that highlights your work with living composers – and I see next is Steve Reich who’s probably regarded as the father of minimalism, characterized by endless repetitive rhythmic patterns and an expansive use of orchestral color; very easy on the ear but sometimes described as music for people who don’t really like classical music. So before we talk about Steve Reich, talk a bit about this phenomenon of minimalism in music.

GUZILIMIAN: Well, first of all I think it’s, he’s got lots of co-parents, including Philip Glass and La Monte Young and Terry Riley in particular, but he’s certainly one of the pioneers in a vocabulary that emerged in part out of a reaction to the density and thickness - if you will - of the music in the ‘50s and 60s, as well as the exposure to non-western musics; Indian music, Balinese gamelan music. It’s process music, it’s music that works in a very different way. And the classic defining piece for me is Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which is a piece that’s hard to excerpt, we’ll hear a little bit of the opening of it, but it’s a process piece, in which it somehow to me in a great performance and in a great reception bypasses both the mind and the heart and you react to it almost on a kind of philosophical or I’m tempted to say metabolic way. You enter into this world that takes over, and it’s not so much the repetitions as the subtle and kind of hypnotic shifts in the repetition over time. It’s how this music works over a large span of time that I think casts its spell. But even in a short excerpt, I think you can hear this kind of lovely, pulsating, natural figure of the music, as well as a pretty seductive set of sounds. And the opening of Music for 18 Musicians now triggers this almost happy response from me, knowing of the world that’s about to begin, this huge world that’s about to be created, and that I’m about to enter, the pulsing bass clarinets at the beginning of this piece, literally make me happy.

[Music]

KAPLAN: An excerpt from Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians performed by the composer himself with a handpicked group of musicians. A work chosen by my guest on “Mad About Music,” the Dean of Juilliard, Ara Guzilimian. And this brings us to your final selection, the fourth living composer with whom you’ve collaborated, Osvaldo Golijov.

GUZILIMIAN: This is a piece that I had a small hand in helping to commission. This is Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre, which is a real trailblazing work that’s also a work of extraordinary beauty. It was commissioned as part of the conception of Zankel Hall, a work created for Dawn Upshaw. And Osvaldo Golijov, who is an Argentinean Jew, who has lived in Israel as well, somehow is again one of these composers who has taken the times and his complicated personal geography and come up with a musical vocabulary that’s unimagined prior to his writing these works. And Ayre is uniquely conceived for Dawn Upshaw’s extraordinary expressive gifts and her range of musical interests. It takes in Arab-Christian hymns, it takes in Sephardic songs, it takes in Sardinian songs, it takes in the recitation of poetry; it’s with a very unorthodox group that includes hyper-accordion and laptop as well as flute and other instruments, and creates this cohesive whole song cycle that’s very much reflective of our present world. I’ve, for the purposes of this show, chosen a hauntingly beautiful Sephardic lullaby that’s at the heart of the piece that I think is one of those touching, touching melodies in the hands of a deeply expressive artist that makes us glad to get up in the morning and know that there is music.

[Music]

KAPLAN: “Nani” from Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre performed by Dawn Upshaw with a chamber ensemble called The Andalusian Dogs, the final selection of Ara Guzilimian, the Dean of Juilliard, my guest today on “Mad About Music.” Now as we approach the conclusion of the show, we reach a section called “Fantasyland” which involves a question I put to all guests, you have to answer it, here it is: if you could be a superstar in classical music or opera, what would you want to be? A tenor, a composer, conductor – what would it be?

GUZILIMIAN: Now you’re really on to my secret life. I think I’d like to be Cesare Siepi singing King Philip in Don Carlo.

KAPLAN: You narrowed it down that much already?

GUZILIMIAN: No, it’s, it’s a fantasy I’ve had for a long time. I sang as a choral singer and I’m a bass, and in my heart of hearts I’d love to be able to sing that particular repertoire from Don Giovanni to Boris Godunov to King Philip, the roles that Siepi sang and these days René Pape sings so magnificently. I should add King Mark, any of these roles would be fine to me. If I could be René Pape I’d be very happy.

KAPLAN:  Well, I think your colleagues at Julliard may just have to organize this for you. Ara Guzilimian, you’ve been a wonderful guest. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that the future of teaching classical music is in superb hands. Thank you for appearing today. This is Gilbert Kaplan for “Mad About Music.

“Mad About Music”

Gilbert Kaplan, Executive Producer

Heidi Bryson, Producer

Marcela Silva, Associate Producer

Leszek Wojcik, Recording Engineer