5 Minutes with Philip Setzer
Chamber Music Amerca Magazine - June 2024
Chamber Music: What led you to this position at Manchester Music Festival?
Setzer: When I got the offer, I was reluctant. I told my wife Linda, "This going to be time-consuming. And it's something I've never done before. She said “Exactly. It's the one thing you've never done before-so why don't you do it?" So, here I am.
The musicians in Manchester's Young Artists Program will now be playing alongside guest artists in the festival's main concerts. Why was this a priority?
In my early days. at Marlboro Music, I got to play alongside titans like Rudolf Serkin and Alexander Schneider. Getting to work with these venerable musicians - not just to be coached, but to sit there and actually rehearse with them - made me feel incredibly lucky. I've tried to do this with my own students.
How do these collaborations benefit young musicians?
The young artists aren't coming to Manchester for piano lessons or violin lessons: they're coming to be part of the fabric of the festival. In a coaching, you say things, they try it, and then you move on. How much is that going to sink in?
At Marlboro, we spent a whole summer with [the late Hungarian violinist and conductor] Sandor Vegh preparing the Beethoven Op. 132 quartet-microscopically, note by note. It was difficult and frustrating to be working that slowly, but at a certain point he'd say, "Let's play through the first movement," and it was lilte-wow.
When I'm working with young musicians at a festival, I'll stop rehearsal and tell a story. Because that's what those guys did at Marlboro. While a few of us were working on some Webern once, we had lunch with Felix Galimir, who knew Webern and Berg and Schoenberg personally. We asked him what these men were like, and he said:"You're walking along and you see Berg across the street. You go 1'.lbanl' and he crosses across lanes of traffic to give you a big hug and a kiss, then he runs back into the traffic. With Webern, you'd be walk:ing along and see this man with his head down and you say 'Antoni' and he says 'Nicht so lautl Nicht so lout’ ['Not so loud! Not so loud!']. With Schoenberg. you'd say 'Guten morgen,' and he'd say, 'What do you mean by that?'"
What can students glean from stories like that?
To demonstrate the difference between Webern and Berg, which has so much to do with their personalities. Webern is very small and Berg is so big. It's important for all of us to have some historical context and connect with the people who've created the art. The more you understand, the more you humanize these composer-gods who walked the earth, the more you can feel sure of what you're doing as an interpreter and a performer.
