Which conductor/performer/composer would you most like to have met?

[Richard Tarleton]

Gesualdo anyone?

Well...perhaps not, but John Dowland definitely - his compositions, instruments, technique, his travels....probably one of the most interesting musicians of the late 16th-early 17th centuries. The SP on the court of Elizabeth.....Plus, we don't know what he looked like - no surviving portraits.

[ahinton]

I played Busoni's piano concerto this evening. Not a piece that I've taken to down the years, but I really enjoyed it. Must play it more often.

What is it about Busoni that makes you want to meet him?

Everything, really! Whose performance of the concerto did you listen to?

[ahinton]

Not a lot!

Pardonnez-mois, mais le rosbif wasn't asking you!...

[Beef Oven!]

Pardonnez-mois, mais le rosbif wasn't asking you!...

That's a bit rich coming from you!

[Beef Oven!]

Everything, really! Whose performance of the concerto did you listen to?

Garrick Ohlsson, The Cleveland Orchestra and Men's Chorus, Christoph von Dohnyanyi.

[Barbirollians]

Menuhin's mother so i could have locked her in a cupboard when Yehudi was having his lessons with Persinger.

Du Pre and Barbirolli - and asked them to record the Dvorak Concerto pronto

EMI music execs of the 1970s and persuaded them to record Ida H in the Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky , Mendelssohn etc

[ahinton]

That's a bit rich coming from you!

Sometimes le rosbif can be abit rich!...

[Richard Tarleton]

Gesualdo anyone

Actually, just getting into Glenn Watkins' "The Gesualdo Hex", as discussed recently on the Early Music Show by the author talking to Catherine Bott - killing your wife and her lover was not only normal, it was obligatory.

...women in late-Renaissance Italy were not allowed amorous dalliances. Spanish convention, which would have included Naples [i.e. Gesualdo], inclined to the killing of both the adulteress and her lover, the northern Italian tradition to killing only the wife. Thus custom held that a cuckolded male, and particularly a Neapolitan prince, had not only the right but the duty to protect the honour of the family name by murdering the guilty parties.

Watkins gives other examples from the time, including one known to Gesualdo. So we shouldn't get too hung up about it, it was perfectly normal though considered excessive today , there'd be lots more to talk to Gesualdo about....