If one tries to prod him, he immediately gets excited when talking about tomorrow’s music fans: “We have an uphill battle to fight, which will get tougher and tougher. We haven’t done our duty toward the young public and have not given them good lessons.  People know a little bit about my campaigns. I’ve been going to schools for over 20 years now, and I keep meeting with people all over the world. This battle must be fought with enormous perspicacity. Just look at the TV programs, the Quebecois tradition of a certain era, what the broadcast Les beaux dimanches used to provide Quebec. At the time, we had an hour of classical music every week. Now, we have less than seven minutes a month. We must ask ourselves why and admit that it’s part of our culture. Very dispassionately, I continue the struggle and tell my classical music colleagues: “If you don’t go out into the streets, if you don’t go to TV and radio broadcasts, if you don’t do the work, music will be for a small group of people and it is destined for extinction.”

As a pianist I realize that often we place ourselves ahead of music, we serve it less well than we ought to. The role of an artist is not merely to go on the stage and say, “ I’m beautiful, I’m great. Rather, it is to go into the streets and roll up one’s sleeves. Pollini started his career by playing in the Fiat factories. This isn’t demagoguery but a real job. A society that creates good citizens, people who know how to vote, is a society where a large place is granted to the arts because art gives one the hindsight necessary for thought. To have hindsight requires the maximum amount of cultural information so as to be able to judge a situation.”

Without batting an eyelid, he quotes a number of serious studies on the impact of classical music on children’s brains: “The life of a child who regularly listens to classical music will necessarily be different. The richness music brings into one’s life is extraordinary. How can the young choose classical music if we don’t offer them even one minute of classical music? Once they’ve heard it, they’ll come back to it. What makes me proudest of all is when I receive letters from small children who say, ‘Now I love classical music.’ ”

To listen to Alain Lefèvre’s latest recording, featuring works by Mathieu, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn, it’s here…

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 8:16 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.