Meetings with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gustav Leonhardt
Another artist I had first met during my stint at the English Bach Festival was the great Dutch harpsichordist, organist and director Gustav Leonhardt.
At a later event presented by Lina, I got to know Karlheinz Stockhausen while moving loudspeakers for a lecture-demonstration he gave at St. John’s Smith Square. After the event he expressed a wish to come back to our place. We had just moved into our new house and we sat on the floor until 5am while Stockhausen changed our lives with the most stunning conversation we had ever participated in. Also present were Jill, my wife of barely a year, my old friend Nicholas Snowman and John Tavener.
Soon after, I wrote to Stockhausen asking him if he would be interested in collaborating with me. Astonishingly, no agent had ever approached him. He agreed. He gave me a list of programmes he and the Stockhausen group could play at any time and a list of his orchestral works he could conduct. His conditions were clear. He gave me a figure for every musician and every programme. I had to add tax and my commission on top. He wasn’t concerned how much I might have made as long as he and his musicians received their fees net.
I had gone to visit Stockhausen in his self-designed octagonal house in Kuerten to make these agreements and had scheduled a meeting with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam the next day. In arrangement with the city of Amsterdam, Leonhardt had a magnificent house on the Herengracht seemingly unaltered since the 17th century. Going from one great man living very much in the future to another embedded in the past was the very epitome of ‘Ars longa.’ Leonhardt was as charming as Stockhausen in a totally different way. For some reason he had had an agent in the UK called Nicholas Choveaux. Choveaux was rumoured to have lived in a caravan and was not one of the more prominenet managers. Leonhardt entrusted me with his representation ‘as long as you are better than Choveaux.’
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