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Category: Episode

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One of my favourite episodes so far! I arrived at the Carnegie Hall Resnick Wing not knowing what to expect from the ‘Digital Music Sampling Workshop’. I’d just been asked to bring along my horn and talk to the young participants who were young and interested in hip hop.  I wasn’t sure whether we’d have much in common – the ‘nerdy’ classical musician and the ‘cool’ hip-hoppers. I certainly felt out of place when I first walked in the room as I seemed to be the only one not wearing a hoodie or a hat!

But it turned into an amazing day, I loved talking to everyone and they had great questions about the horn and my job in the Berlin Phil. I enjoyed being part of the Organic Orchestra (see the outtake) and was very impressed at how they sampled my horn as part of the workshop.  In fact, I was so impressed with the four hip hop tracks that the participants came up with that I have posted them here here. Can you hear my horn in them? Let us know what you think!

Thanks to the Carnegie Hall Resnick Wing team, Pudge and Matt, the team from Building Beats and also all my new friends who attended the workshop. I really hope our paths will cross again. And if any of you know the name of the young New Yorker who took the Horn Challenge, please let me know, I´d love to send her the clip!

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“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!”

Carnegie Hall is almost a holy place for us musicians—the building, the location and the acoustics. Walking out onto that stage is always an amazing experience and during a concert, although Carnegie seats 2800 people, it feels like you are making chamber music.

It was great to be able to film with friends there. Leif Ove Andsnes is a superstar and I am a huge fan of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.  Leif’s wife, Ragnhild plays the horn so he´s practically in the family (we dedicate his noble Horn Challenge to her). It was also an honour to interview the ‘Boss’ of Carnegie Hall, Sir Clive Gillinson, who has done such wonderful things there.

Everyone backstage was really friendly and welcoming and asked lots of questions about Sarah´s Music – they only know me with a horn in my hand, not with a camera team in tow, so were interested in this new project.

I loved Jeremy Geffen´s conductor-in-underwear story. And thank you to Synneve Carlino and the rest of the Carnegie Hall team

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These girls are awesome. Really. They are not only amazing pianists and have the most successful careers but they are wonderful, funny, gorgeous and generous women who are so much fun to be around. I chose to visit them for this concert because they had played ‘Nazareno’ with us in Berlin with Sir Simon Rattle conducting and I love the piece. The composer, Gonzalo Grau, is a fantastic multi-talented Venezuelan musician (who also dances great salsa… which we of course did!) and I was happy to feature his music.

These two days in Paris were fabulous, we all laughed a lot backstage and I want to go back and make The Labèques Part 2 as soon as I can! Merci beaucoup, Katia et Marielle, your Horn Challenge is one of my favourites so far. It took a while to get all that lipstick off my mouthpiece…

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“Cut! Let´s try that bit again, that note wasn’t quite in tune…” are words we all dread from the recording engineer during a recording. But sometimes something wonderful happens and we hear, “Cut, that was the perfect take”! This episode features some of the incredible people responsible for bringing music from the recording studio into our ears. The Teldex Studio in Berlin is a beautiful place to record in but during the filming I realized something else I love about the place- the silence of that big hall. I´m used to it being full of musicians whenever I record there and the day we were there it was just for us.

We really enjoyed the day there – isn’t that the control room impressive with all its buttons and switches? Thanks to Friedemann Englebrecht and René Möller for their time, their studio and all the music they have helped bring into the world. And I was happy to get my own back a little bit on René with the Horn Challenge for all those “cut!“ moments he and I have shared 🙂

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For this episode I was really excited to feature my wonderful Berlin Philharmonic colleagues from the woodwind section: Jonathan Kelly, principal oboe, Dominik Wollenweber, english horn, Stefan Schweigert, principal bassoon and Markus Weidmann, contrabassoon.

It was fascinating to hear them explain about the trials and tribulations of being part of the Double Reed Club – in other words, those musicians who have to make their own reeds.

They showed me how they do it – and told me stories of what happens if the reeds don’t work. And I thought horn playing was hard!

One of the things I enjoy about Sarah’s Music is learning more about people I thought I knew.. It was great to interview my colleagues and I had even more respect for them after understanding more about their instruments.

Thanks to them and also to Willi Reinicke, the woodwind instrument doctor, who told us why he can’t really relax when he goes to concerts. And… turn the sound up loud for this Horn Challenge!! 🙂

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Usually for Sarah´s Music, I make suggestions of who and what we should feature on each episode (of course calling on my friends and contacts in the music world…). This time, the producers rang me up and told me that there were horses dancing to Mozart in Salzburg and might I like to feature them? My first thought was… nooooo. I had never heard of Bartabas and his equestrian theatre and I wasn’t convinced that dancing horses were right for our programme.

How wrong I was!! I was totally transfixed by Bartabas and his horses – it was breathtakingly beautiful to see what he and Marc Minkowski have created to Mozart´s music in the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg. I´m so glad we could feature this incredible project and thank you to the brave creature who accepted this episode´s Horn Challenge 🙂

Munich, November 2015 Yannick Neget-Seguin, Emmanuel Axt, Felix Klieser

The Echos are Germany´s answer to the Grammys and I loved getting all dressed up and glamourous for this one!

It was a big party day—I saw so many friends from the music business. It was great meeting the horn player and Echo award winning horn player, Felix Klieser, and we had fun playing duets together. Felix was born with no arms and yet has become a great horn soloist. He is very inspirational and I admire him a lot.

My favourite moment of the day was catching my friend and this year´s “Conductor of the Year“ award winner Yannick Nézet-Séguin getting into a taxi at the stage door of the Gasteig. It suspiciously looked like he was trying to escape the Horn Challenge…

But I got him and you will love the result. All the dogs in the neighbourhood did! 🙂

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With each episode of Sarah’s Music I do, the more I love doing it—and I learn so much! For example, in the Strings and Stradivari episode, I realised I knew little about string instruments.

Catherine Arlidge and John Tattersdill were great interview partners from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

I loved listening in on the Borodin Quartet’s rehearsal and discovered that around the corner from my flat in Berlin are world famous violin makers & repairers Daniel Kogge and Yves Gateau.

To be allowed to play the cello with Alban Gerhardt for the horn challenge was a very special moment, even if I rather embarrassed myself!

One of my favourite string instrument trivia facts I learned during filming (which sadly hit the cutting room floor): the hair used for the bow of a string instrument comes from a male horse.

Why the male horse and not the female? Because the female pees on her tail and it makes the hair too brittle to use for bows—there you go!

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Deutsche Welle sponsors the Beethovenfest in Bonn every autumn so off to Bonn we went! I didn’t know much about Bonn except that it used to be the capital of Germany and that Ludwig van Beethoven was born there. But Bonn is also famous for the fact that it is the home of Gummibears! My first thought was how many Gummibears could we fit into my horn bell…you’ll see the result of that bright idea in this episode.

I really enjoyed listening to and seeing old friends in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and as always, it’s a great pleasure to talk to Andris Nelsons. As an ex-trumpet player, his Horn Challenge was pretty impressive but what you don’t see in the Challenge is that he was having so much fun that he wouldn’t give the horn back…

Gummi Bears, anyone?

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So it’s not every day I have pancakes (“Palatschinken” in Austrian) with Placido Domingo and Anna Netrebko! But this is exactly what happened for this episode of Sarah’s Music. Not bad for only our third episode! We were in Salzburg for the famous summer festival which is such a hub of musical activity during this time – it was great to be there and see so many friends.

The highlight was, of course, interviewing Placido.  What a wonderful singer, musician and person he is… but his talents don’t seem to include playing brass instruments. Young Clemens, star of the very first Horn Challenge said to me next time I saw him that ‘the opera singer guy was much worse at the horn than me!”

Have a look at the episode and see if he was right! 🙂