His comment on the performance was very typical, he was particularily happy "that you didn't drag about - que vous n'avez pas trainé" It still took six years before I could to record the piece, but the fact that the CD with Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France came out on his 97th birthday is one of the major joys of my life. I have still on my answering machine the message that he left after having listened to the concert, saying that he absolutely wanted it to be put on a CD and that he had even an idea about how to help make it happen financially. When I played it in Los Angeles with Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2008 he could no longer travel but was very keen to listen to the recording. The last time he came to listen to me play the piece was in Barcelona, Ernest Martínez-Izquierdo conducting. His several visits to Helsinki, my embarrassment of driving him around the frozen city in my very old Volkswagen with no heating, or a week in the Hague and Amsterdam when I played Tout un monde lointain with Diego Masson. I have many wonderful memories of traveling together with M. Dutilleux stopping every few measures to apologise for playing so badly himself. It was one of those unforgettable moments of which I can recall just one detail, M. Dutilleux I heard countless times his displeasure of people playing his slow movements too slowly.) As I was about to play the piece soon again he invited me to come and play it through with him on the piano in his tiny studio. (In the following thirty years of knowing M. The only criticism he expressed was for the second movement, where the conductor had preferred a slower tempo than what the score indicated. Again, he related to me with all the respect that a person three times my age would have expected, not I. He immediately asked me in and we listened to the recording together. I managed to blurt out some words to the effect that I would love to hear his opinion about the performance. To my shock, at the very moment I was about to drop the cassette in the mailbox he opened the door on his way to the post office. Two years later I had played Tout un monde lointain myself in Helsinki and wanted to leave the recording of the concert discreetly at his mailbox and run away quickly - I had been much too shy to ask him to work with me before that concert. Dutilleux seemed happy that someone spoke to him and treated me as if I was a musician he had known for years, he was quite excited to tell that he had just finished the last two movements of the 3 Strophes sur le nom de SACHER and that he would be happy if I played them. Shaking with embarrassment, I acted on my instinct and told him how much I loved his piece and that I was also a young cellist. After the rehearsal, at the traffic lights outside the Royal Festival Hall, I realised I was standing next to the composer. As I knew the piece from the LP recording but had not heard it in concert yet, I decided to go to the dress rehearsal and the concert. In 1983 I was in London and heard that Rostropovich was going to give the UK premiere of Tout un monde lointain.
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