Barenboim's Warning on Music Lessons

Ciar Byrne:

When Daniel Barenboim returns to the Royal Festival Hall in the new year, where he made his London debut at the age of 13, he is planning to launch an impassioned plea to educate young people about music.

It will be the first time in more than 40 years that Barenboim has performed all of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas in London; the last time he played them in their entirety was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967.

But as well as performing eight concerts, the legendary pianist and conductor is using his return to the Southbank next month to warn that in many countries, music has disappeared from the education curriculum, making it appear elitist and depriving people of a life-enriching experience.

Barenboim will deliver a series of lectures, as the first speaker in the Southbank Centre's "Artist as Leader" programme, looking at the role of the artist in society.

He said: "Music has disappeared from the education curriculum and this has far-reaching consequences. It means there are billions of people who have no contact with music, and I believe their lives are all the poorer for that."

In the Southbank Centre members' magazine, he said: "The problem is that music now appears only to a small quantity of the population and therefore it is too expensive, which in turn makes music look elitist, which of course it isn't."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 24, 2007 12:00 AM
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