Daniel Barenboim: 'The ABC of music-making is listening'

Music Matters

Tom Service talks to conductor Daniel Barenboim as the new Pierre Boulez Saal opens in Berlin, and the conductors Marin Alsop and Sylvia Caduff meet in Lucerne and compare notes on their lives on the podium.

Tom meets Daniel Barenboim in Berlin, as the city's newest concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal, opens its doors to the public. The hall will host up to 100 chamber music concerts a year, and is home to the Barenboim-Said Akademie, which Barenboim and the philosopher Edward Said created to train young musicians - mostly from the Middle East - and whose public face is the world famous West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. He's a musician who is always interested in the wider world and Barenboim talks to Tom about the middle eastern conflict, world politics, music education and whether or not music can change the world.

And looking ahead to International Women's Day, the American conductor Marin Alsop meets Sylvia Caduff in Lucerne. Caduff, who is now in her 80s, was Leonard Bernstein's assistant at the New York Philharmonic and was mentored by Herbert von Karajan. She became one of the first women to conduct the New York Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1960s when it was virtually unheard of for a woman to conduct a top orchestra.

Marin was also mentored by Leonard Bernstein and a generation later has similarly broken new ground for women in conducting - becoming the first female conductor of the last night of the Proms, and with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra the first to hold a music director post of an American orchestra.

The two conductors compare notes on their lives in music, their roads to becoming conductors and breaking down barriers for female musicians.