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Johannes Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34. Third movement. John Browning, piano. Music Masters Classics 1612 67161-2.

Franz Schubert Sonata in A Major, D. 959. Andantino. Second movement. Alfred Brendel, piano. Philips 438 703-2

La Nina de los Peines Siguiriya. Arte Flamenco Vol. 7. Mandala / Harmonia Mundi S.A. MAN 4856; HMCD 78.

Sergei Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30. First movement. RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra. Fritz Reiner, conductor. Vladimir Horowitz, piano. RCA Victor 7754.

Johann Sebastian Bach Goldberg Variations [excerpt]. Glenn Gould, piano. CBS Records / Masterworks MK 37779.

GILBERT KAPLAN: Happy New Year and we open our 2009 season of "Mad About Music", marking one of the most significant changes in the leadership of a New York cultural institution as Philippe de Montebello ends his 31 year reign as Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[Theme Music]

Just a few days ago Philippe de Montebello stepped down as the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today "Mad About Music" celebrates his contribution to New York cultural life – by revisiting his earlier appearance on our show. We got off to a surprising start when I asked Philippe de Montebello – arguably the leading art curator in the world – whether it was true as I had heard – that he had confessed that he could easily live without art but could not survive without music.

PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO: I obviously didn't have job security in mind when I came out with these unfortunate words, but it's true. Still if I had to think myself on a desert island I would far rather had a discotheque with me than all of the Skira editions of books. That's just the way it is in terms of reaching deep into the psyche. To me music is fulfilling in a very different way.

KAPLAN: Now, you started off as a child, I suppose, like all of us, taking piano lessons and was there music in your family?

MONTEBELLO: Both are correct. I was unfortunately and something I've regretted all my life, because I'd love to be able to play the piano and play it well, is that I was such a bad boy with my mother when she tried to teach me. My mother was actually an accomplished pianist. She studied with Alfred Cortot. She once played the Schumann Piano Concerto with Munch in Paris and that's how good she was. When she married and had children, you know its that generation, she decided it was not appropriate to continue to play in concerts, but there was chamber music at home all the time, the piano was always spoken about, was always heard, and the piano is my most profound love in music.

KAPLAN: Did you make an attempt at it yourself?

MONTEBELLO: Well, she did force me to learn solfege and to try to play. I have to confess that it never worked. I can read music and I follow music, I follow scores. I love to follow scores, especially with complicated music, lets say chamber music where there are many voices, and I can play the right hand of a lot of let's say slow pieces of music. But no, I don't play.

KAPLAN: I suppose that explains that, in looking over your list, most of your focus is on the piano today. Is that the concentration of your listening?

MONTEBELLO: Very much so and it's the concentration especially of my concert-going.

KAPLAN: Well, we'll return to that a bit later. I think we should turn now to your music and we'll start with your first choice, which is Brahms Piano Quintet. Now originally, I think this work might not have made it on the list because I've discovered that Brahms wrote it as a string quartet and only added the piano a bit later.

MONTEBELLO: It takes me back to my days at Harvard where I frequented, for some reason, a number of people who were musicians and discovered a lot of the music I now play in those years; and there were two pieces that my roommate at Harvard loved -- the Brahms Piano Quintet and also the Schumann Piano Quintet. I've chose the Brahms over the Schumann because I just think its, while I love the Schumann, the Brahms I find deeper, richer, so full of extraordinary harmonies and wonderful syncopation, particularly in the movement we're going to hear now.

[Music]

KAPLAN: The third movement of Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor with John Browning and members of the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble. A work chosen by Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he appeared earlier on "Mad About Music". Although universally known for its superb collection, the Met also has an outstanding concert hall and an ambitious program of musical presentations. Given what he said earlier on the show that he actually preferred music to art, I asked Philippe de Montebello if he played an active role in planning the Museum's music program.

MONTEBELLO: Yes I do. Although if I didn't it still would be a great program. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium with Hilde Limondjian who books and creates the programs is quite wonderful -- many great chamber music ensembles, the Beaux Arts, the Guarneri, so many wonderful performers from Ruth Laredo to Perahia and so forth, but I'm not here to advertise the Grace Rainey Rogers. I do take an interest because I love music and so Hilde and I talk about performances, performers. I come as often as I can. I come to the rehearsals when I can't come to the actual concert.

KAPLAN: Actually, I understand that sometimes she uses you as a talent scout looking for new pianists. Is that true?

MONTEBELLO: She's victimized by my occasional forays into creativity. I remember once I was driving back from the country to the city and listening, was tuned into the middle of a performance of the Goldberg Variations that I had never heard before which I found very rousing, very clear and quite musical and the announcer came on and said this is a young Russian pianist by the name of Sergey Schepkin and so I called Hilde and I said, "Have you ever heard of him?" and she said, "No" and I said look into it, maybe he's somebody we could book sometime and she did and he fills the house.

KAPLAN: But staying with art and music for a moment, many people make a connection between historical styles of art and music and it's often said that Debussy and the Impressionists have a connection and that atonal music and abstract painting come out of the same era. Do you feel this is true?

MONTEBELLO: Well, many connections have been made. They seem to be on the surface logical. I've never been too caught up or convinced that those two arts that are so very different have really that much in common.

KAPLAN: Well, do you find that you can look at modern paintings more easily than you can listen to modern music?

MONTEBELLO: The answer is yes, but music affects us physiologically very differently; for example, I heard Kay Graham speak about 12-tone music and she said it just, hate it, she said positively hated. I must confess, I don't like it either but see to me it hurts the ears. If you look at a clash of colors, it doesn't register on the retina with pain. It causes a certain degree of intellectual shock but you can look at it. Dissonance to the ear is actually physiologically a painful thing.

KAPLAN: Well, let's move away from dissonance then to your next selection which is a piece that could well have been performed at the Museum, Schubert's Sonata for Piano in A Major, a piece he wrote, I think, just two months before he died.

MONTEBELLO: One of his great late sonatas. The reason I chose this and so specifically the Andantino, the very slow movement -- achingly nostalgic and sad--because as I said earlier, I do play with the right hand and one of the great moments of solace for me at the end of a long day, I sit at the piano and I have a number of slow movements, Mozart, specifically Schubert, and I just play for myself the slow movements of Schubert. So this to me is music in which I have a direct participation and really goes deep into the soul. That Andantino is just such a dream.

[Music]

KAPLAN: The second movement Andantino from Schubert's Sonata in A Major, Deutsche 959 with Alfred Brendel at the piano, a selection of Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art when he appeared as my guest earlier on "Mad About Music". When we return, we'll explore the composers and styles of music Philippe de Montebello just doesn't connect to.

[Station break]

This is Gilbert Kaplan as we celebrate Philippe de Montebello and his remarkable 31 year reign at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from which he stepped down as Director just a few days ago. On this occasion we are revisiting his earlier appearance on "Mad About Music" and as our interview continued, I suggested that with his preoccupation with the piano, it probably meant that there were large areas in music in which he had little or no interest.

MONTEBELLO: Well, I guess it's true. I'm a fairly opinionated person. Before we talk about the areas of which I have little interest or even dislike, we've already touched on 12-tone, I do want to say I wish I could have thrown Mozart here because he, for me Mozart I guess would be my number one love, but there's too much out of Mozart that I just couldn't pick out of Mozart, so…

KAPLAN: Well then let's start with pre-Mozart.

MONTEBELLO: Well, when, well, pre-Mozart, I mean you still have Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and I enjoy small segments of Renaissance music but I think long segments of what I consider to be of what to my ears somewhat repetitive and the same harmonies wears thin. I have a lot of flaws in my musical tastes – I'm not crazy about voice as an instrument. I've just offended probably every one of your listeners but that's just the way it is. In chorus, yes. In certain exceptions, Gerard Souzay or Fischer-Dieskau in Schubert lieder, yes, or Brahms. Boris Christoff in Boris Gudonov. If you've been born to Boris Christoff playing Boris Gudonov, frankly, no other Boris will do as far as I'm concerned. I'll tell you what else -- the harpsichord. I have a brother who is a harpsichordist and when he plays in his apartment I enjoy the harpsichord. As a concert instrument or in recordings, I don't particularly enjoy the harpsichord.

KAPLAN: So your lack of interest in the voice means you probably have very few operas you enjoy?

MONTEBELLO: That is true. There are some, almost universally all of Mozart, Berlioz' Les Troyens, Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, a few others, but on the whole, no, and I must say I'm not a fan of Verdi either.

KAPLAN: Now, what about orchestral music?

MONTEBELLO: Yes, I've no problem with orchestral music, it's just that if I'm going to displace myself to a concert, I'd rather go and hear a pianist or a pianist playing a piano concerto.

KAPLAN: I find it curious that while you say that the voice is not an instrument that attracts you so much, there is at least one voice I know that you admire greatly and it comes in a surprise in the next selection of yours.

MONTEBELLO: Well maybe it's a perversity of my nature, because I think it's a voice that any opera lover would find the antithesis of a beautiful voice – it is the voice of La Nina de Los Peines who is one of the greatest Flamenco and cante jondo performers in the 20's and 30's. I think my recording is from the 30's that I chose, so it's full of, you can hear the scratches of the needle on the 78 recording. And what our listeners will hear is that raspy voice coming out of deep into the earth in a sublime lament.

[Music]

KAPLAN: Siguiriya, a Flamenco classic sung by the legendary artist best known simply as La Nina, a selection of my guest Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum when he appeared earlier on "Mad About Music". After our diversion to Flamenco, we returned to the piano and I asked who were his favorites among the current generation of pianists.

MONTEBELLO: I think Richard Goode playing Beethoven to me is at a very high level of musicianship, Murray Perahia, quite a number of people. Brendel, in fact, for certain kinds of, for Beethoven.

KAPLAN: Do you have all these artists in your collection?

MONTEBELLO: I used to. I had to throw away most of my records because I don't have a turntable anymore and I've sort of transferred, like everybody else, to CDs and it got too complicated. So, alas, I regret having tossed away so many records.

KAPLAN: All right, returning to your own selections today we now have heard chamber music, solo piano, and now a concerto, Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. What is the special appeal of this music to you?

MONTEBELLO: Well, you know, I've chosen some very famous pieces and it occurred to me that maybe I could look very clever choosing things that I love that are not so well known, but I decided to be honest and I learned to love that piece in the early 50's when I listened to it with my mother, and it was the Horowitz performance with Fritz Reiner, one that I don't think has ever been surpassed. Certainly has not been surpassed by Horowitz who's been a disappointment, who had been a disappointment ever since in all of his further performances. Anyone who wants to hear Horowitz and the Rachmaninoff Third don't listen to his coming back in Carnegie Hall after his long absence, go back to the Fritz Reiner recording, it’s unparalleled. It's a piece I love and I'm not ashamed of it. It may not be as intellectual as one would wish, some would wish, but in terms of just purely emotive experience, that recording to me is splendid.

[Music]

KAPLAN: The first movement of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto from the 1951 recording featuring Vladimir Horowitz with the RCA Victor Orchestra under the baton of Fritz Reiner, a selection of Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he appeared earlier on "Mad About Music". When we return, Philippe de Montebello reveals the music he turns to for consolation at difficult moments in his life.

[Station break]

This is Gilbert Kaplan and we are celebrating Philippe de Montebello as he steps down as the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art having served in that position for 31 years. We celebrate by revisiting his earlier appearance on "Mad About Music". And as we continued our discussion, I pointed out that he was perhaps the fussiest guest I've ever had on the show when it came to deciding which recordings should be played. All guests of course select the music, but most don’t have specific recordings they want featured. I had the feeling that for Philippe de Montebello, sometimes there might be only one recording that truly satisfied him.

[Station break]

MONTEBELLO: That certainly does happen. I think the Berlioz Requiem, which is so seldom played unfortunately, such a great piece of music, I know it thoroughly through the Munch recording of, I think it was in 1959, Boston Symphony. I've never heard a performance that even comes close to it and I wonder sometimes if there aren't, as in the case of Munch and the Boston Symphony, moments in individuals who are able to bring out just so astonishingly every aspect of the greatness of the piece that maybe -- who knows?

KAPLAN: Now do you use music at all when you have a difficult decision to make? Do you turn to music at difficult moments in your life?

MONTEBELLO: Unquestionably, yes.

KAPLAN: And, if there was a moment that was very sad for you, what might you turn to?

MONTEBELLO: It depends. I do play the Faure Requiem; I like Requiems, the Brahms, the Mozart, the Berlioz. Not the Verdi. But it really depends on the mood, and the kind of mood.

KAPLAN: We're going to turn now to you final selection, Bach's Goldberg Variations, a work that has now established itself as the universal favorite on this show. You come after Peter Jennings, who selected it; Jim Wolfensohn; the late Katharine Graham. How do you connect to this music?

MONTEBELLO: I figured that it would be a very popular -- again as I said for the Rachmaninoff, I wanted to be honest. It would have been so easy for me to choose something else but when I really sort of examined my relationship to music, I realized that probably the single piece that I play the most often, actually in a car, is the Goldberg Variations, so I had to choose it to be honest. It's the piece that I play the most often. It has to me absolutely everything for someone that likes the piano. As I said, not the harpsichord, so while I have Wanda Landowska playing it, it's wonderful. I prefer it on the piano. I like the second version of Glenn Gould. I find the first a little choppy and not altogether logical in its sequences. I love variations in general, Beethoven's Diabelli I love and other things. The sense of cadence, of rhythm, with Gould, with the great clarity, the contrasts, the inner logic that follows, just a piece that to me musically and in every way that's totally satisfying.

[Music]

KAPLAN: An excerpt from Bach's Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould, the final selection of Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he appeared earlier on "Mad About Music". My final question – and mind you this was seven years ago when I asked it, was whether when Philippe de Montebello decided to step down at the Met, he might enjoy the challenge of running a musical institution, perhaps something like the other MET.

MONTEBELLO: Uh, no. If I were able to remake my life and switch into music I would have wanted to be a performer, not a manager of music.

KAPLAN: Yes, but I thought you had said earlier that you didn't think that was in the cards whereas managing a musical institution as in managing a museum certainly could have been.

MONTEBELLO: No, I think it would have brought closer to me too frequently my frustration at not being a performer.

KAPLAN: All right, and with that, our show with Philippe de Montebello concluded. We wish him great success as he now takes on several fascinating and challenging new assignments: as a professor, as a TV host, as an advisor to governments on cultural matters, and presumably still playing the right hand part of some slow movements, especially his beloved Schubert piano sonatas. This is Gilbert Kaplan for "Mad About Music".