I don’t listen to music outside of a concert hall. I love going to concerts and listen to all different kind of music (opera, orchestra, chambermusic, jazz, experimental, you name it), but the older I get the less I am intrigued to listening to canned recordings. When listening to music I need to have the live atmosphere, I want to see the creation in process, not some pre-made product. Indeed I live in a very lucky place, Berlin, where we have tons of live music every day, dozens of concerts to choose from, three opera houses, jazz-clubs, other clubs, and I am spoilt by having that chance, I admit. I do own quite many LP’s, mainly piano music, loved Horowitz and Dinu Lipatti while growing up, but I haven’t even replaced the needle on my excellent LP-player when it broke four years ago. Although I own a little ipod, I have no music on it whatsoever, just audio books which I listen to while jogging. I don’t need a constant stream of music draining out the last bit of thoughts I might be having – and I do think better when there is no musical distraction around me, and I love to be alone with my thoughts, don’t need any kind of background noise for it. What I am listening to in the moment? The Silent House by Orhan Pamuk 🙂

And very few of these artists and their manager are aware of the fact that we are not reaching the younger audiences with this kind of snobby approach („we are something better than everybody else, our music is more valuable than the popular music“), and whenever people are trying, they are often using cheap tricks. I try with most basic tools to make personal contact with the younger generation wherever I perform. How? I offer myself to go to public schools and to show them that classical music is something very much alive, that one can appreciate it without ever having learned anything about it, and that we musicians are as funny, young-spirited, sports- and pops fanatic as themselves.

My so called general management is located in London, the agency SulivanSweetland, two lovely ladies, directly responsible for finding concerts in the UK, Benelux, Scandinavia and Australia as well as my recording deal with Hyperion. In addition to that they not only coordinate my entire calendar and the already existing local representations, but they try to establish me in markets in which I am not so present, especially Asia. They put together presskits, demo cd‘s, send them with letters or hand them personally on their numerous travels out to representers, orchestras and local managers, since personal contact counts more than ever. The times where an agent picks up the phone and arranges the concerts are over for a while. It is a hard job, and I wouldn‘t want to switch with them, concertizing is much easier. The two other most important managements, with whom I am in constant touch is my Germany management called markus bröhl artists and concerts. The owner is a friend of mine, who loves music and his artists more than anything, that he puts his work above everything else. And last but not least Michal Schmidt in New York who has done miraculous work in the shortest of all periods. Within a year she had turned my American career around by just informing every single orchestra about me, and within months she had filled an entire season with eight different orchestras. Most important for me is the fact, that all of them care about music and the human being behind the musician which results into me being able for the first time in my professional life to take with their support an entire summer month off – I am not twenty anymore and I need a break to „recharge the battery“!

Certainly we mustn‘t take everything which is written or said about us at face value, but on the other side if I find a common tenor in several reviews I take it very serious and actually this attitude made me a better player over the years. As for many musician it is not always easy for me to accept criticism, it can hurt at times, especially because we need enough self-confidence in order to survive on stage, which can be undermined by a slating. I try to read reviews no matter if negative or positive a couple of days after a concert and then reflect about it. No, I don‘t want to please everybody, rather the contrary: I try to find my own voice and play things the way I and not the possible reviewer, think they should be played – but at the same time we never know how our music arrives in the hall, and for that the music critic is a good mouthpiece.

But already the second time I had to realize that it was not only an important and efficient tool to fill a hall in the evening with much more and a much younger audience, but that I learnt it lot about myself – at the end of the session I had to admit to myself that I had fun and felt fulfilled. I gave my managers immediately the order to offer it wherever I was playing. Since I am not very good in selling anything, I had a hard time convey the idea, but today I try to go as often as possible to schools, and pursue that in a much more aggressive way by talking to the school inspectors directly – to do exactly what?

Rather unpretentious and simple: I am sitting in front of 30 to 50 students and play at first some Bach. Dangerous? They don’t understand that? On the contrary: children react to the Bachsuites more directly than to any of the Paganini, Ligeti or Kodaly solo pieces or any other more spectacular solo literature I have offered so far. After that I tell them a bit about me, encourage them to ask any kind of questions, answer willingly and without taboo as many as possible, play a bit more, maybe something modern and like this I break slowly through the ice, the wall, which is between the younger generation and classical music.

I was once asked by a little boy in an underpriviliged school in Berlin why I was doing this. I had never really reflected about it except that it gave me the feeling of doing something good with it. But good what for? To fill a hall? After a bit of thinking I realized how important music and the occupation with an instrument was for me as a young person. In school everything got quite rapidly much easier for me, I managed to concentrate better than my classmates, got more self-confident, learnt through music to get in touch with my feelings – I just had more from my life. I am not out there to encourage more youngsters to become professional musicians, but I believe that every child should play an instrument because it is beneficial for its emotional, social and intellectual development. I have met so many interesting and succesfull doctors, lawyers, scientists, journalists and other professionals whose background was music, who all played with great enthusiasm and wide varying degrees of talent their instruments. I don’t believe that everybody who plays an instrument is smarter than everybody else, but probably he or [...]]]> https://albangerhardt.com/what-exactly-is-your-school-project/feed/ 0