Climbing inside the music

I have often found that playing a piece for the first time, even a piece that I am familiar listening to, can be an astonishingly revealing experience. Even if it is piece that I think that I know very well - it might be music on a favourite CD or something I have heard regularly on the radio - it can turn out that I haven't, in fact, really known it until after I have played it in the orchestra. I have had that experience with Grieg, Dvorak, Wagner... After playing a piece in an orchestra, it is as though I have had the privilege of climbling into the composer's mind just a little way to experience their genius at short range. What I find astonishing is the unpredictability of which aspect of the music it is that hits me most. With Dvorak it was the utter emotional openness of his melodic invention in the 8th Symphony. With Grieg, it was the astonishing, spiralling harmonic progression of "Morning" from Peer Gynt Suite. While with Wagner - and I admit to having had a little bit of a problem with Wagner in the past - it was his kaleidoscopic counterpoint in Die Meistersinger. I suddenly found I was listening in a dozen different directions and marvelling at the man's command of his invention, as if he had been designing different parts of a cathedral with different pens all at the same time. Come and climb inside too.