Page 58 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

She laughs and becomes edgy about personal chat — “No more comment. Let’s

leave it there.”

So I swerve into more solemn matters. What does she think we should do about the

Russians? The great conductor Valery Gergiev resigned from his job as president

of the EIF because he’s a pal and public supporter of Putin. What would she do?
With touching honesty she ties herself in knots thinking about this.

“I have many Ukrainian friends. I’m actually teaching a Ukrainian musician in a
couple of days. Any person who is my age, anybody that has come into their own

post-Second World War or Cold War, we sort of can’t fathom the severity and

length and proximity of this. Are we ever to get past this kind of atrocity?” She

lands herself safely on the position that a blanket ban of Russian musicians is

unfair and only explicit Putinists should be kept out.

“Obviously Gergiev — one of the greatest musicians in the world — he is one of

those people. So I think if that is something that you can’t have an association
with, I think that is absolutely the right of the festival and any orchestra in the

world. But I think there are nuances and degrees. Do I think that Russian musicians

should be prevented from playing around the world? Absolutely not.”

Less solemn, perhaps, is her view of what she calls “candy”, meaning pop culture.

She went into education because she wants children to hear what’s going on, to cry

— as she once did while playing the third movement of Beethoven’s Archduke

Trio — at the sheer depth of the experience.
When it comes to pop, she’s mellowed. She’s not trying to stop people listening to

anything. “I think that many things can coexist. What I would like to achieve is

that people also know how to experience something else. They also know how to

delve into a longform work that takes two hours to get to the crux of, and the

beauty of it.”