Sunday, April 20, 2025
7:00 PM
On WCRB In Concert with Boston Baroque, renowned coloratura soprano Erin Morley makes her Boston Baroque debut with concert arias by Mozart. Her performance is bookended with Mozart’s magnificent and beloved Haffner Symphony and Beethoven’s bold, expressive Symphony No. 2.
Boston Baroque
Martin Pearlman, Music Director and conductor
Erin Morley, soprano
W. A. MOZART Symphony No. 35 in D Major ("Haffner"), K. 385
MOZART "O zitt're nicht" from Die Zauberflöte
MOZART 'Vorrei spiegarvi, oh dio!", K. 418
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36
Read program notes for "Beethoven & Mozart."
This broadcast is no longer available on demand.
Using the audio player above, hear Cathy Fuller's interview with Martin Pearlman as he reflects on 52 years with Boston Baroque. Read the transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT:
Cathy Fuller I'm Cathy Fuller. Boston Baroque is America's first period instrument orchestra. And there have been so many milestones along the way since 1973, when Martin Pearlman founded it and became its director and led it through some amazing firsts. But today, we are at an utterly unique milestone. Martin Pearlman is in his final season with Boston Baroque, and that means 52 years of revelations and memories. And it is my absolute pleasure to welcome you. Thank you so much for being here.
Martin Pearlman Thank you, it's great to be here.
Cathy Fuller You know, I was thinking about forcing you to look in the rear view mirror [Pearlman chuckles] as I'm sure you're looking forward to new kinds of freedoms away from the day-to-day of Boston Baroque. But could you just tell us what whispered to you when you were young about early music and how you got involved?
Martin Pearlman Like a lot of things, it kind of happened by accident. A lot of things in life, I find, you just follow something that happens by accident. And I was an undergraduate at Cornell, and my major really was in composition—which it's always been in my life. And I was a violinist and a pianist. I wanted to stop violin. I played the piano, but I didn't want to take lessons at the school. I had a really good teacher outside the school, so I asked them if I could just not take lessons and they said, "No, you're a major, you have to take lessons here." And so I didn't know what to do.
But I found a little harpsichord off in a corner somewhere—not a great one, but it was a harpsichord. And I convinced the university organist to teach me lessons on it. I went through the whole "Well-Tempered Clavier" and Rameau and Frescobaldi, all kinds of music. And at the end of my senior year, I applied to some conservatories but got a Fulbright Grant to go to Holland which is what I took, to go study with Gustav Leonhart who is the seminal figure in early music. After I came back from there, I went to Yale, I studied harpsichord, got a degree in composition but I did study harpsichord with Ralph Kirkpatrick, and when I came to Boston, I was curious about period instruments because it was just beginning in Europe. There was just one group, "Concentus Musicus," which had been going and was very good, but there wasn't much. The English groups hadn't started yet or anything. And Leonhart asked me one time if I would turn pages for a recording session when he was recording all the Bach Harpsichord concertos. And he had five string players who were all playing on Baroque instruments. I was fascinated with that. And when I got back to the States and was out of school, I decided to get together all the people I knew who could play decently on a Baroque instrument, which was... we ended up with about eight people, and see what happened. And so I put together several concerts as a group and I didn't intend to go any further, but it was a big hit. The church where we played was filled right away. People were curious. And so, I decided, okay, I'll do another season. And it just kind of went like that. It just grew like Topsy over the years.
Cathy Fuller So really, your curious mind just led you from one thing to another. But what was this harpsichord whispering to you? I mean, there's such a big difference between a big piano and a little harpsichord.
Martin Pearlman Yeah.
Cathy Fuller I mean you must have played "The Well-Tempered Clavier" on the piano, right, before you went to that harpsicord?
Martin Pearlman No. Well, maybe a few pieces, but not... I wasn't intensively into the early music before, and I was playing violin also in orchestras and so on. But well, I mean, my experience in Holland especially, I played on a lot of antiques. And then when I went to Yale after that, they have a museum with some fantastic harpsichords that are restored, and I spent a lot of time on them. So I have that in my ear. And for a long time, I did harpsichord recitals in Europe, a lot of places in Europe and in the States too. And I spent a lot of time on earlier music than I could do with the orchestra because there weren't orchestras in the early Baroque. I spent a lot of time playing French Baroque music and all kinds of specialized things. And then I got together with these other players and we started playing together.
Cathy Fuller I remember a story about Ralph Kirkpatrick and Horowitz. Do you remember that story?
Martin Pearlman Is it a story that I told?
Cathy Fuller Yeah.
Martin Pearlman [Pearlman chuckles] Yeah, well I kind of think of it as why I'm fine about playing harpsichord music on the piano if it's played well, or having a modern orchestra play an early piece if it's played well. Ralph Kirkpatrick had written a book, the book really, on Scarlatti. And there was a period in Horowitz's career where he was retired for 12 years, and during that, he became fascinated with Scarlatti. He actually made recordings of Scarlatti, but he contacted Kirkpatrick because he was a Scarlatti man and said, "Can I play you some and see what you think?" And so during one lesson, I said to Kirkpatrick, what did it feel like to give a lesson to Vladimir Horowitz? And Kirkpatrck was not a modest man. He kind of puffed up and got very officious and said, "Some of what he was doing was all wrong." And then he thought for a moment and he said, "But it was so beautiful that I couldn't say anything." [Pearlman and Fuller laugh]
Cathy Fuller So he said nothing?
Martin Pearlman Yeah. So it can be very beautiful, but it's a different piece, in a sense, when it's played on the piano.
Cathy Fuller Oh, and I bring that up because I guess there has long been sort of a tension about what's right, what is the proper way to play Bach with a period instrument orchestra, or any of the great older composers. But have you felt that tension as time has gone on?
Martin Pearlman I don't know if I'd call that tension. Back when I was studying harpsichord in the 60s, early 70s, there really weren't a lot of recordings you could listen to. And there weren't performances to go to, really. And so a lot of what we learned was really out of old books about what they wrote, plus playing on the period instruments themselves which teaches you a lot. It was kind of primary sources, in a way. And then my attitude was, you learn what you can, but when you get into rehearsal or concert, that's put aside. You just respond to the music, but you've been trained to think in certain ways.
Cathy Fuller But then you forget it all.
Martin Pearlman But then you have to be free. It's a lot like with a little child, you might occasionally say, "Don't do that. That's not good," or, "That's not right." And they're learning the way to behave. But as they get older, that's just part of their frame of mind. And they're freer. So you know, it's like that, when you learn the way we learned.
Cathy Fuller Well, when you think back over the concerts that you've given with Boston Baroque, what was the first real big splash that really meant a lot to you? Do you have a—
Martin Pearlman Yeah, as I said, we started with just eight people. So we were doing small pieces, concertos. We did do the Fifth Brandenburg, and I played a lot of harpsichord concertos and violin concertos. But the first big one... I suppose there was one year after we were into it for maybe eight years or something like that. I had added a chorus by then. We did the Mass in B minor. And in that same year, I actually did our first Messiah, which was the first period instrument Messiah in Boston. And I remember the Mass in B minor people, even the Globe had written about it and was wondering whether these instruments could play that music. And I thought, well, it's written for those instruments. [Pearlman and Fuller laugh] It's just a question of whether we've built up the technique to play on these instruments music like that. And that was a big hit. That was something that really increased our audience and got us a lot of attention
Cathy Fuller Do you remember the reaction of the audience?
Martin Pearlman Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was very strong, very, very strong. And then later that year we did our first opera. We did Monteverdi's ["L'incoronazione di] Poppea," because as the group grew, I just wanted to expand so that we could play the entire repertoire of the Baroque, and then eventually the Classical era as well.
Cathy Fuller So you were thinking through the Baroque, you were heading toward Classical, but you weren't gonna do that right away.
Martin Pearlman Well, we did some. It was just a matter of the size of the group, what instruments were available. We had some oboists, but could they play classical oboe as well? That kind of thing. But I have to say, it wasn't according to plan. Each thing was, what are we curious about now?, you know? Let's try that. Let's try this. And it grew. And fortunately, there was the support for it.
Cathy Fuller Let's hear a little bit maybe of Messiah since that was such a big hit and you weren't sure it was going to be a big hit, probably.
Martin Pearlman At that time, which was 1981, Messiahs were traditionally pretty slow and reverential. Even though Handel never performed them in a church, they were treated that way.
Cathy Fuller I've heard you call them boring, back then.
Martin Pearlman Well, yeah, for me they were. But I mean, people were devoted to going to Messiah every year, but I thought of it as a more dramatic piece. And I almost feel fortunate that I did not grow up hearing the Messiah every day. So to me, when I got to it, it was another Baroque piece. And I treated it the way I would treat the figurations in any Baroque piece, and not with the baggage that was associated with Messiah at that point. There was a lot of baggage. So I didn't know what the reaction would be, but that wasn't my concern. And it was very strong. People loved it. So we were asked to do it again and then again and I did not intend on an annual Messiah, but we've done it ever since.
Cathy Fuller You got to watch what you ask for. Let's hear a little bit of it. [music]
Cathy Fuller There's such a beautiful clarity about it and it feels so three-dimensional, and it makes such sense! It's like when something comes into focus. There's background and middle ground and foreground, and all the articulation feels so honest, and the words are so clear. I mean, besides being a function of you as a brilliant conductor, is this in part because the instruments articulate more honestly?
Martin Pearlman There is more articulation both in the style of playing, but also the instruments help that as well. And there's a kind of a transparency to the sound. You can hear the inner voices more easily. And with the chorus singing in that style with them, it's true of the chorus as well.
Cathy Fuller Is there a lot of calibrating that you have to do as a conductor and have had to do over the years about balance?
Martin Pearlman Well, there's always some, but my feeling is you want to have players and singers who are compatible with what we're trying to do and with this music, and then let them go. Let them sing, and not pull them in because that results in a performance that's tight and not so interesting.
Cathy Fuller Right, so you're freeing them.
Martin Pearlman Yeah, they should feel free. I mean, you want the right kinds of people who have the right musical sense about this music. And of course, you know, we talk about things, we fix things in rehearsal. But ultimately you want to let them perform.
Cathy Fuller Do you love choral conducting as much as instrumental conducting?
Martin Pearlman I actually do. And it's odd to me because I don't have a background as a singer or choral conductor or whatever. But I kind of grew into that and I do love working with the chorus, yeah.
Cathy Fuller One of the things that happened along the way with Boston Baroque is that you hooked up with Telarc. And boy, they were making beautiful sounding recordings. Was that a big part of the growth of Boston Baroque?
Martin Pearlman I think it was. I mean, once you have to really get things exactly right, you know—in a performance, things happen and they go by and it's not important, but in a recording you have to really have it right because you don't want the same misstep to happen every time you listen to it. But yeah, I think it really gave a boost also to the players, especially because in our first year, we got a GRAMMY nomination for that Messiah. And that was a surprise! And I think that all just gave a big boost, and it made the audience grow because people were hearing the recordings and of course coming to concerts.
Cathy Fuller That's one of the things that I think is so amazing about this process that you've gone through, is that you focused everything. All of a sudden, everything seemed in focus. When you hear those big, fat, Karajan kind of things, those big vibrating orchestras that play Baroque music, I mean, it can be lovely. But it muddies up the whole architecture. Do you know what I mean?
Martin Pearlman Yeah. I mean, I love those big orchestras for their kind of music, but for this music, I find there's just much more clarity in it, you know? With this kind of performance.
Cathy Fuller You did the first American period instrument orchestra performance of The Magic Flute.
Martin Pearlman Yeah, I think it was the first.
Cathy Fuller And Don Giovanni as well.
Martin Pearlman Don Giovanni certainly, yeah. That was actually, I think, the first—there was one attempt at it that I heard didn't work in Sweden before, but other than that, it was the first modern-day performance on period instruments of Don Giovani.
Cathy Fuller Was there some fear in stepping into that world?
Martin Pearlman Oh, of course. I mean, I have great memories, fond memories actually, of just immersing myself in this score—and it's a complex score—and just trying to go into a new territory basically with this ensemble.
Cathy Fuller I picture you sitting down in the dark of night with this giant score. I mean, how do you work through it? Do you go through each part? Do you play it for yourself?
Martin Pearlman A lot of the work is silent. I do some playing, but it's mostly silent. It's studying the balances and it's also studying the structure of the piece, because you have to have a trajectory of the piece from beginning to end in order to really hold it together. Same with Messiah or any large work.
Cathy Fuller But Mozart, too, must have come into focus because of these pronouncing instruments that are so clear.
Martin Pearlman Yeah, and with the chorus too. I mean, you're talking about the pronunciation. To me, and maybe this is because I didn't have a background as a singer, I was particularly interested in the speech quality of some of this music, which partly helped determine tempos. And also, when we speak, we might sustain a word. If I say "sustain," it's a long "A," I just did, but my voice came down during it: "sustain", you know? That kind of thing. And that quality is a little different from a lot of what singers do, which is really sustaining the same level of a note right through. I would tend to go for more of a speech quality, a spoken quality, where a voice might drop off during a long note or even increase. It just has a shape, which we do when we talk. And I think that makes it, for this music, for the Baroque music... you wouldn't want to do it in a 19th century piece, but in Baroque Music, I think it really makes for a clarity of that kind of music.
Cathy Fuller Right, so it's speaking. And the Baroque instruments, in a way, do that better, or more easily. More naturally.
Martin Pearlman I think so, yeah. And the singers can do it too if they're trained for that.
Cathy Fuller We were talking a little earlier about Gluck. One of the things that I've loved that I hope will continue with Boston Baroque is your extra CD full of revelations, and pointing out some of the magic that happens in certain pieces. With the Gluck Iphigénie en Tauride, you just take us through these unbelievable moments that are, like, changing music. But you do it in such a natural way. Do you think that will continue with Boston Baroque?
Martin Pearlman I hope so. I mean, you know, there'll be a new Music Director and presumably it'll be somebody good that can continue that kind of thing.
Cathy Fuller I think it's precious stuff for an audience to be let into a piece like that. Have you thought about writing a book about what has happened in your life?
Martin Pearlman Not really. I've written a lot of program notes—
Cathy Fuller You have. They are great.
Martin Pearlman —which are actually all online now, but my writing is more musical writing, music composition, instead of book writing.
Cathy Fuller One of the other CDs that you said you really love that you produced with Boston Baroque is the Jupiter Symphony, which is Mozart at his best, isn't it really? I mean, the last few pages are... I don't know if anyone else could ever have done that. Maybe we could hear just a bit of the Jupiter Symphony and you could tell me why you're happy with it.
Martin Pearlman [Pearlman chuckles] Okay. [music]
Cathy Fuller That must be a kick to conduct that thing!
Martin Pearlman It is, it is.
Cathy Fuller I mean, what does he take, like, five themes and mash them all together? It's like a mash-up.
Martin Pearlman Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing ending. But one of the things about doing that kind of music is that, for our kind of orchestra and of period instruments, it's late in our repertoire. And so it's pushing the orchestra, in a way. It's pushing it, and Beethoven even more so. When we do Beethoven symphonies, to me, one of the qualities of Beethoven is in pushing the boundaries. Pushing the instruments, whether it's a piano for a piano sonata or just an orchestra, is pushing them to their limits. I've always felt that. There are performances I love with modern instruments, but one quality that they don't have, even though they may be very beautiful and exciting, is they're not being pushed to the limits, because those orchestras are designed for even later music. They can play Mahler, for example, whereas this has that tension in it that I find very exciting.
Cathy Fuller Yeah, because we're sort of afraid the piano is going to break at times, you know?
Martin Pearlman Especially if you had a piano of that type.
Cathy Fuller Yeah, those early forte pianos. That cycle that you did of all of the Beethoven symphonies on period instruments, that was one of the first times that that was done, isn't that?
Martin Pearlman Possibly. In this country? Yeah, it's possible, I don't know.
Cathy Fuller That must have really changed the orchestra, in a sense. Did it do something fundamental to the sound of the orchestra?
Martin Pearlman Well, as I say, it has that tension, and it's a wonderful feeling. It's exhilarating. And for us, it's not the millionth time we've played it, or just another symphony. It's something very special, and it is late in our repertoire, and it's at the extremes. So that's an exciting thing to do.
Cathy Fuller When we talk about the things that are affected by the instruments and the sound world that you have helped us to get into, it really is astonishing. When you think about the fact that when you started in 1973, you know, with Watergate and dial phones, you must have gone to the library all the time, and it was just pasting and taping and gluing, and probably hard to find music even in that case, right? And when you think of what you have seen over the course of these 52 years and how much easier it is to put your hands on stuff.
Martin Pearlman Yes.
Cathy Fuller You can't turn on the radio, you can't spend much time now without hearing a period instrument orchestra. That just is the case now. And we thank you because you sort of led that. You were that force that helped us to hear this focused, articulated, beautiful sound. It turns out that your daughter is starting a period instrument orchestra. [Fuller and Pearlman chuckle]
Martin Pearlman That's right!
Cathy Fuller See what you've done? Are you inclined to interfere, or is she...?
Martin Pearlman Well, not interfere. I'm actually on her board.
Cathy Fuller Okay, well that's good.
Martin Pearlman [Pearlman laughs] But I'm not performing with them. But it does feel like almost like a kind of reincarnation, in a sense. I'm leaving this one, and she's up in Portland, Maine and they just had their first concert.
Cathy Fuller How did it go?
Martin Pearlman It was great. It was a big hit. People were very excited. There was a big audience, and they were all very excited by it.
Cathy Fuller I've heard you say that every generation, something new happens. A style changes. Do you still feel that way?
Martin Pearlman Yeah, I don't know if it's every generation, but every so often, I've always felt that period instruments and the style of attempting to resurrect old styles of playing out of an antiquarian interest, they really are a product of our times. We like to see things and see cultures in their own terms. We don't change them all automatically into our own. And I think that's why period instruments came along in the late 20th century. So if you think of what we call a "modern" instrument orchestra, it's an orchestra that mostly plays music that's, what, 200 years old, 150 years old, on instruments that are as old as that. So it's not modern in a sense, but I've always thought of modern instruments as electronic instruments and the resurrected early instruments because they're from our time. Nothing wrong with the older ones, you know, but I think of it as a modern phenomenon.
Cathy Fuller Another one of the recordings that you mentioned to me when I asked you which popped to your mind as real successes was the Bach. And of course, Bach is sort of the prime arbiter for everybody and everything, but I love the Third Orchestral Suite and I love how you do the "Air" which everybody loves so much. But I guess it has a lot of options, right, in tempo. Let's just hear that. [music]
Cathy Fuller There's just an incredible sadness there that I think can be missed. A lot of people take it at quite a clip. Why do we react so strongly to that piece?
Martin Pearlman That particular piece? It's a beautiful piece. It's an interesting piece in that it has... Well, unlike certain contrapuntal music that has many voices that are equal, this one has a melody, which not all Bach has a melody across the top. And then this pulse in the lower voices, and then these backgrounded middle voices that are also playing interesting things. They're not just accompaniment, but they're more in the background. It's an interesting balance, I think, in that piece. And very beautiful.
Cathy Fuller The smoothness of the tone, the straight tone, whatever you want to call that when it's not vibrating, is so sad to me for some reason. It just has a real effect because the crescendo seems so pure as it comes to us from sort of nothing. That's something that Baroque instruments can do so much better.
Martin Pearlman Well, yeah, it's not that we don't use vibrato. We do.
Cathy Fuller Yeah.
Martin Pearlman And there's vibrato in that. It's just that it's used more as an ornament. It helps intensify a sound. It's not a constant where everything has a vibrato. So it's a different view of it.
Cathy Fuller So that's that transparency.
Martin Pearlman I think so, yeah.
Cathy Fuller Another one of the recordings that you said you really love is The Creation, the Haydn Creation. That also must be some incredible thing to conduct. Lots of forces and lots of... He's sort of conjuring up the world and all the things in the world, but it starts with chaos. Was that really unusual, what he wrote there, for the time?
Martin Pearlman Oh, it's absolutely unique. He's way ahead of his time, and he almost in places had to invent notations to make clear what he was doing. Normally in a score of that period, you'll have the same dynamic up and down through the orchestra. Everybody will be marked forte, everyone will be marked piano, and then you have to balance it a little bit. But here, everyone's got something different. It's just... Things come in and out of focus, and it's really quite an extraordinary piece.
Cathy Fuller And let’s hear that effect. [music] It's eerie.
Martin Pearlman It is.
Cathy Fuller And the dissonances that get hung on to when things don't finish...
Martin Pearlman Yeah. You can just imagine the chaos of things moving around but not in any order, or just appearing, disappearing. And every once in a while something violent happens in this. It is extraordinary.
Cathy Fuller It is. That's a great recording. There are many GRAMMY nominations for Boston Baroque, and of course the Monteverdi Vespers, your signature piece, it touches people in a deep way. Is it a piece that you are particularly fond of?
Martin Pearlman Oh yeah, it's like an encyclopedia. It's got everything in it. It's so extraordinary because it's at the beginning of the Baroque, really. And it was a period when music had changed so much that it was hard to know exactly how to organize a piece. The same thing happened, I think, 300 years later with Schoenberg. When music became atonal, the first music that was written that way was very short pieces. It was hard to know how to organize it, and Monteverdi had that. And here he comes up with this piece that's just enormous, I mean, this gigantic, wonderful piece that is organized by taking early music for him, Gregorian chants, and using them as a structural element running through the piece, and adding onto it modern music. And it's just an extraordinary piece.
Cathy Fuller We always would hear the chant first and then things blossom from that.
Martin Pearlman Sometimes, or sometimes it's just buried within as a structural element. [music]
Cathy Fuller Did you study dance when you were studying Baroque music, or did you have to?
Martin Pearlman Oh, you have to know what the dances are and how they work. I'm not particularly a dancer myself, but you have to feel that. I mean, this particular excerpt is the introduction to the piece. It's all on one note for the chorus, but it gets very complex in the later movements as well.
Cathy Fuller Incredible. As a composer—and you've always been a composer. I think you were six when you... What did you write? What was that that you wrote when you were six?
Martin Pearlman Oh I wrote a bunch of piano pieces and at one point my mother gave me some things that I had written even before I could read music. It made no sense at all, but I was trying to write music. [Pearlman chuckles] But at six, I was studying piano, so I was writing piano music.
Cathy Fuller So that was always an instinct in you. How does that help you if you're looking at a score? Does it help you to figure out how the composer is thinking?
Martin Pearlman I think it does. I think you have the idea, the feeling, that this music is not inevitable. It could have gone a different way. How did he get out of this spot? How does he move? There are surprises, there are just wonderful directions that a piece may go, but as we know from Bach, pieces could go many ways because he would, not so much revise, but he used a piece in another setting and it would do something else or one of those orchestral suites he added a chorus on it in a cantata. He could just endlessly spin it out. So there are many ways that something can go and I think you have a sense of that as a composer when you're trying to figure out for yourself what direction this piece is going to go, what's the next thing that I need.
Cathy Fuller And what tools did he have at his disposal? How much could he say on the paper about what he was after?
Martin Pearlman Yeah, well that's true too. Because you want, you get an instinct about it. I mean, someone may have a different instinct about it, but sometimes you feel that this is a composer who wants a particular feel. You don't just do it strictly by the book, because notation is very limited, what it can express.
Cathy Fuller The sensibility toward language that you were talking about earlier and making music speak and the Baroque instruments being so spoken... That seems important to you. I mean, as a composer, you actually set parts of "Finnegan's Wake," which is a world of language that no one else—and I know other composers have done that too, but do you have that language love in you?
Martin Pearlman Yeah, I guess I do. I'm thinking about Messiah, going back to that, because in my program note for that, I remember I wrote about taking certain passages as spoken, and others as sung, and there's a difference. There is a switch that he'll make between them, and that's part of what energizes a piece, I think.
Cathy Fuller And other things that you have composed have not used words, right? You sent me a two piano piece which is really fabulously rhythmic and driven. And it made me think about all the rhythmic and driven pieces in the Baroque repertory that you've brought to life with so much conviction. And we all try to be as alive as you are when you make music. Is this gonna be something that you'll feel more time for as you hand the baton over?
Martin Pearlman Yeah, I certainly will be spending much more time composing. I've always done it, but it's been more in the background. I haven't tried to make a career of it. But yeah, certainly. It's been, in a way, almost living in two worlds, and now I can maybe focus more on one of them.
Cathy Fuller There was the other Marty who was...
Martin Pearlman Yeah, in the 17th, 18th century, which I had an affinity for. And one in the 20th century or 21st.
Cathy Fuller What do you imagine for Boston Baroque? I mean, it must be quite something to give birth and then hand off this child [Fuller and Pearlman chuckle] to someone else.
Martin Pearlman Well, I don't really know. There'll be a search on various conductors coming in and I think they'll have their own ideas or not. The committees will decide about the ideas. It could go in other directions. I hope it keeps some of the culture of this organization and some of the excitement. I think it can, certainly. But it'll be interesting to watch.
Cathy Fuller You've really expanded your fan base, that's for sure. Streaming has helped that, I know. There's six continents worth of fans, right? That might not have happened maybe if the pandemic hadn't sort of settled in on us, because you needed to get the message out somehow. And do you feel like the message, the music, is still as powerful, even just as a stream? As opposed to a live performance?
Martin Pearlman A live performance, of course, has some things that can't be reproduced, but yeah, no, I think streaming certainly works. I've watched streams of other things as well as ours, and if it's a good quality stream, which we've been able to do here at WGBH and get very high quality, then it's wonderful.
Cathy Fuller With thoughts about the visuals too, which I always appreciate. I think that's such a nice thing to do. You put up these beautiful artistic backgrounds, which really play into the experience. I hope that happens and continues.
Martin Pearlman Yeah, I hope so. And who knows what other directions. As I say, it grew organically. I mean I didn't set out with a 50-year plan. [Pearlman laughs]
Cathy Fuller You weren't controlling its DNA.
Martin Pearlman Yeah, yeah, and so we'll see. But I think there are possibilities that could be very interesting.
Cathy Fuller And will we see you coming back and conducting?
Martin Pearlman Possibly. I mean, it depends on the group and on me and where I'm at.
Cathy Fuller Well, we are so grateful, and I am really grateful that it all happened here in Boston. I suppose it could have happened in Chicago or on your Fulbright. You could have stayed over there and abandoned us. But you've lit us up in such an important way.
Martin Pearlman Thank you.
Cathy Fuller And we are so grateful. Martin Pearlman, thank you for your time. It's been a great pleasure.
Martin Pearlman Thank you. I've enjoyed this. Thank you.