Max Baillie and Steve Goss: Radical Interpretations!

How flexible are musical scores? Can we really sing the blues in the cadenza of a Mozart violin concerto, as Gilles Apap does? Or stop in every bar of Albéniz’s ‘Asturias’ like Aniello Desiderio?

In 1967, Roland Barthes argued that the meaning of a text is not determined by the author’s intention, but rather by the reader’s interpretation. Can we argue this for a musical text? A score? Have we been too focussed on a composer’s intentions rather than a performer’s artistry. Max Baillie and Steve Goss discuss the limits of taste, style, and artistic freedom in a livestream panel that explores radical interpretation.

Warning: not for purists or the faint hearted.