Re: A more dramatic retirement from performing than Glenn Gould's!

[Jon Windust <jon@COGNOLOGY.COM.AU>]

One of the things that really surprised me when I met members of our
symphony orchestra is their lack of passion for what they are doing.  For
many it was just a job and a bit of drudgery.  It just doesn't seem to tie
in with the energy and the emotion of the music they play.

This is anecdotal but I feel that the ones who lack the passion are those
who were over encouraged by their parents to learn an instrument as a child.
They have gone down the path of performing in an orchestra because that is
their one skill.

Jon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nessie Russell" <nessierussell@YAHOO.CA>
To: <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 2:01 AM
Subject: A more dramatic retirement from performing than Glenn Gould's!


> I am sure most GG fans have seen this.  I am wondering
> what people think of this.  We know GG had a distaste
> for concerts.  What would he have thought of this?
>
>
>
> Agence France-Presse - 28 July 2003
>
>
>
> A French concert pianist ended his career Friday by
> hiring a
> helicopter to drop a worn-out piano into a lake in the
> south of the
> country.
>
> François-René Duchable played Beethoven's Third piano
> concerto and
> Saint-Saëns' Second to an audience of 2,000 before the
> instrument was
> consigned to the depths of the lake of la Colmiane
> near Nice in
> southeast France.
>
> He said he was retiring at the age of 51 to "change
> his life", far
> from tours with a perpetual eye on the time. The
> gesture, he said,
> was to show that everything was over, to get rid of
> the weight of a
> career.
>
> "It was a purification by water," he said.
>
> Purification by fire follows on August 31 at the
> Provençal village of
> Mazauges. Duchable will play at a festival whose
> organizers have
> been "friends since 1984" and will end the evening by
> burning the
> clothes he performed in.
>
> "I leave with a real exaltation, a great freedom for
> what will
> follow," he declared as he prepared to bury the
> stage-life once and
> for all.
>
> Duchable sees himself as a "man of nature" and never
> liked his life
> as a concert pianist, or the world of music, let alone
> the public
> that came to hear him.
>
> "How could I like one percent of the public since we
> know that 99
> percent of people have no access to classical music? I
> cannot feel
> love for a public that despises others. People think
> being a musician
> reflects a passion. It doesn't. My profession has
> never brought me
> happiness," he said.
>
> "My love of music has never been in question. I reject
> money, the
> tinsel, this rigid, dusty world, a whole system in
> which I have never
> been at home."
>
> Duchable said from now on he wants to "live a more
> personal, tranquil
> existence, rediscover calm and solitude," to divide
> his time between
> his beloved sport of cycling, pottery, about which he
> knows little or
> nothing, and perhaps learning other musical
> instruments.
>
> "I want to do much more interesting things than keep
> on doing for 30
> years what I have been doing for the last 30."
>
> "I have held on for 35 years," he said, recalling his
> first concert
> given when he was 16.
>
> If he does return to the keyboard, it will be in
> circumstances of his
> own choosing and at his own rhythm, in hospitals,
> schools, prisons
> and asylums.
>
> The pianist said he might also cooperate with actors
> and sound and
> light artists to offer another approach to classical
> music and plans
> to conduct master classes in Switzerland and Paris.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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