Donald Mitchell is chairman of Faber Music and the author of books on Britten and Mahler. Together with Hans Keller, he edited Music Survey from 1949 to 1952.
I only need to hear a few bars from Mozart’s G minor Symphony (K. 550) and in a flash Hans is as vivid a presence as he was when he was alive. Not any old bars, mind you: to be precise, bars 125 to 136 of the finale, where in a remarkable unison passage which propels us into the development Mozart exploits (almost) the total resources of the chromatic scale.
‘In thirty or forty years,’ Gustav Mahler is said to have said, ‘Beethoven’s symphonies will no longer be played in concerts. My symphonies will take their place.’...
We may nowadays he chary about using the word ‘genius’, but we still have a good idea what is meant by it. For example, there are great numbers of very gifted musicians who are...
Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.