“My type of leadership is a leadership of love,” Jean-Marie Zeitouni, the new music director of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, told Classical 101′s Christopher Purdy.

Hailing from Montreal, the consummate traveler said he decided to set down roots in Columbus to make an impact on the Symphony and on the city.

“Everywhere I go, every time I meet new people, they are so welcoming. They are genuinely happy, they genuinely want us to succeed,” Zeitouni said. “That’s really something that warms my heart.”

This heart-warming attitude is something that not all leaders have, Zeitouni said.

“Being in front of a group of people, being able to articulate your thoughts, being able to generate from them the energy and everything, has little to do with musical knowledge,” Zuitouni said.

Some directors, he said, are less scholarly but see great results because they can lead. Others are very refined and knowledgable, but don’t see good results because they can’t communicate with the people they lead.

“I like to cultivate a little bit of both,” he said.

Zeitouni said that even as musicians, being the best isn’t enough anymore.

“We go to school and we learn who to be the best musicians possible, and now we discover that in this world, and in this community, not particularly Columbus but everywhere in North America and everywhere in the world, it’s not enough,” Zeitouni said. “We have to be ambassadors of the art form. We have to connect with the people.”

Related Posts:

• A New Kid in Town
• A look back at the CSO
• CSO conductor search

Read More:

• Five months in as conductor, Canadian Jean-Marie Zeitouni is taking Columbus Symphony ‘someplace else’ (Dispatch)
• Jean-Marie Zeitouni biography (Dispeker)

The Columbus Symphony plans performances of the Symphony no. 10 and the Piano Concerto no. 2 by Shostakovich this weekend. Gunter Herbig conducts and Jutta Czapski is the piano soloist.

It’s been exciting in recent days to listen to a lot of Shostakovich’s music, much of it new to me, in preparation for these concerts.

Shostakovich wrote his Tenth Symphony (there were to be fifteen in all) in 1953, just after the death of Stalin. The composer had found himself vilified by Stalin’s government twice. First in the 1930s following the successful premiere of his opera, “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk”. The story of the wanton Katerina Ismailova, who murders both her father in law and her lover’s mistress, enticed the public but enraged the dictator. Stalin was particularly incensed, so it was reported, by the cacophony of the trombones describing Katerina and Sergei very much in flagrante delicto.

The opera was banned. Music was declared useless unless it served to “lift up” the people. Big choruses in praise of the worker and a lot of jingoistic junk were what was wanted, not abstract symphonic music which could mean whatever the public needed it to mean, without any possibility of outside control.

Shostakovich described the 10th Symphony as a biography of Stalin, especially the second movement. Listen and you’ll hear exactly what Shostakovich thought of the ruler of the Soviet Union and his government. The third movement is a tribute to the composer himself and to the young pianist Elmira Nazirova, who for a time served as Shostakovich’s muse.

I hope this broadcast will whet your appetite for more music by this fantastic, often tormented, composer.

Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch talked to Christopher, and Bob McGrath joined the interview to answer questions about working on Sesame Street the television show.

Included is an impromtu song from Oscar the Grouch:
Oh, I love trash!
Anything dirty or dingy or dusty
Anything ragged or rotten or rusty
Yes, I love trash