Listening Room: Edward Gardner

My “Desert Island” recordings are the ones that open up the music to me in a different way. They are the recordings that speak above everything else.  

As a 13-year-old kid, I didn’t listen to much orchestral music, mainly just choral music and Queen. But two pieces that really spoke to me early on were Solti’s Concerto for Orchestra (from Chicago, the Bartók recording) and, weirdly, Karajan’s Beethoven No. 9. I couldn’t believe that second movement. It still sounds amazing to me. 

Listening to Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s late Mozart symphonies for the first time, I didn’t realize that Mozart could sound like that. Günter Wand’s Bruckner No. 4, the early one, I couldn’t believe what he did with the middle of that first movement. It just felt like my mind went from being completely narrow to way out there. Absolutely extraordinary. Carlos Kleiber’s Tristan and Knappertsbusch’s Parsifal are also on my “Desert Island” list.  

The recording of Britten conducting his own Sinfonia da Requiem helped me unbelievably. He conducted his own works like someone coming fresh to the music, which is so amazing to hear a composer dealing so viscerally with what looks on the page to be so prescriptive. We played it with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for my Carnegie Hall debut, which was incredible because the piece had debuted there 70 years earlier. It’s a winner of a piece.  

Mravinsky conducting the late Tchaikovsky symphonies is another one. It’s mad because I was brought up in this snobby English country and I was told Tchaikovsky was cheap, and so was Puccini. And then you hear those symphonies and the meaning in them. I remember the day I first heard those. I was in my flat in London, and someone had just mentioned them. I went out and bought the disc. I just couldn’t believe the rawness of the music-making, the directness of it.  

My philosophy on recording is that you want to keep something of the ephemeral in what you’re doing. It shouldn’t be too safe or too sturdy or too solid. It needs to be as risk-taking as you would make it in performance.  

I’ve never recorded to make a document of what I think of a piece of music. I’ve recorded to give a performance of where I am with that piece in my life. We all do it when we’re in recording sessions, and worried about the tuning of a chord, or the verticality of something, but it’s just like the air goes out of the tire in everything. There are some bootleg recordings of Karajan’s Brahms from the Salzburg Festival. The freedom in the music-making is unbelievable, and it’s the polar opposite of what Karajan put down with the Berlin Philharmonic on the label. In that era, a recording was a bible of what you thought of that piece and that orchestra.  

One thing about there being so much streaming and so much live recording now is that it frees us up to be who we are on that day. And I think that’s really it for me. 

Discover Edward Gardner’s Listening Room playlist here