David Robertson: evaluation

Transcript context

…As a kid, how did you first discover classical music? How did it click for you? I heard Bach on public TV, a Brandenburg. In some of the other languages that I’ve learned later, as a young adult and an adult, I can tell you specifically where I learned, which train platform I was standing on when someone corrected me, and I learned this word in this language for the first time, but in my mother tongue, there’s no way I can go back and say when I learned “water. ” Clearly, it was there at some point. The thing with the classical music is, we had all sorts of music growing up. I was from probably what would be considered a middlebrow household. My dad played Dixieland jazz on his clarinet — badly, as he would say. He also played guitar and banjo. My mother sang and played piano because every young lady should learn to play piano. It was that kind of an upbringing. There was everything, from church hymns to music that was known through musicals or from jazz, and then music appreciation records, which we had. There were all sorts of different things, and I can’t actually say when I became besotted with it. I was fortunate to grow up in the Santa Monica Unified School District where they had a wonderful music program. They still do, but this was before Proposition 13 in California. It was, as many other cultural things were, beautifully funded. I started singing in the choir at the age of six and then started instrumental music in school at the age of, let’s see, nine, and then just went on from there. I can’t really say. I do have an early memory. We bought a Panasonic tape machine, reel to reel, and we only had one tape. That tape, I now realize — at the time I didn’t pay any attention — was William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra doing Bolero and Rapsodie espagnole. I don’t think the Rapsodie espagnole of Ravel made any impression, but Bolero — I do remember actually listening to it and being able to hear that that’s the same melody now, but with a different color. I must have been seven. I was just besotted with music from the very early start. Your [November] 2025 concert with the New York Philharmonic — why do the 1911 Petrushka and not the 1947?…

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