Masaaki Suzuki: belief

Transcript context

…How was your musical ear back then? The Richter recording — I think of it as a little bit of a mix of overblown and stiff, even though it’s pretty good, right? It’s not what people would listen to now. Did you have a sense of that back then? Or were you just blown away? No, no. For other interviews, I have listened again to that record recently. That was completely different, and it is not acceptable at all for my ears. Karl Richter must have been a really wonderful musician. Also, he played the harpsichord by himself and conducted, for example, St. Matthew’s Passion without seeing any scores. That’s a really amazing thing. Anyway, that’s his way of music making, completely modern. Not only modern, but the machine-like notes by notes [mimics sound] and so on. That is really not acceptable anymore, but at that time, that made, probably, a lot of excitement for the audience, and this is very nice, I think. Do you think there are any older recordings of Bach, say, of the B-Minor Mass or the passions that have held up? Before the Dutch movement for original instruments.…

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