Charles Hazlewood
Charles Hazlewood
Charles Matthew Egerton Hazlewoodis a British conductor and advocate for a wider audience for orchestral music. After winning the European Broadcasting Union conducting competition in his 20s, Hazlewood has had a career as an international conductor, music director of film and theatre and a curator of music on British radio and television...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth14 November 1966
absolute change connect horror might music people resistance terrible tremendous
There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say.
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Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.
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It's wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.
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In America, they have this nauseating habit of calling the conductor 'maestro'. I always slightly gag when the cor anglais player goes, 'Maestro, can I discuss bar 19 with you?'
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I'm always up for music shows such as Jools Holland, but news more than anything, particularly Newsnight. And cookery: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein - it's down to him that I cook fish so much - and the great food alchemist Heston Blumenthal.
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I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
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Even if you're playing the most well-known repertoire under the sun, I still believe you have a responsibility as an artist to tell the audience why you're playing it, what are the key aspects to it, and then throw in a bit about its historical context.
music
When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.
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I spend so much of my time working away, but I love being here. My family is in Somerset, and this is where my heart is.
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Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.
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I want to prove that Holst's 'The Planets' can be as much of a sensory overload as a concert by the Grateful Dead, and just as exciting.
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The way Fatboy Slim layers motifs is the same as 18th-century baroque counterpoint. You have an idea, then you have an answer to the idea in another voice, then you have a counter idea accompanying the original idea, and you build up your texture like that. I'm really into Kruder and Dorfmeister at the moment, and they do the same thing.
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Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.
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It's Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony I'm really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour.