Conductor Hartmut Haenchen on a balanced career, Reviews pages 46, 52 and 98 It seems appropriate that a musician whose career is so well entwined with the musical life of The Netherlands—Principal Conductor of the Netherlands Philharmonic (and its related Chamber Orchestra) and Music Director of the youthful Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam—should live in that particularly civilized quartier of the city whose street names are taken from the great composers: Beethovenstraat, Chopinstraat, Brahmsstraat and Stravinskylaan among others. Hartmut Haenchen, like an increasing number of conductors today, chooses to limit his career to a modest number of arenas focusing on the symphony orchestra, the chamber orchestra and the opera house (and the Amsterdam Musiektheater is just that, a music theatre celebrated for the high standards of its productions). On record, however, it is the German strand of Haenchen's career that is best represented—his work with the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Chamber Orchestra whose director he has been since 1980. With the establishment of distribution of the Berlin Classics label in the UK, a large number of Haenchen's discs are now available here at last. How, I put it to him, did he juggle a career that saw him conducting Wozzeck one night, touring Japan with Brahms symphonies and Strauss tonepoems a week later and recordings of W. F. Bach, Haydn and Pergolesi being released simultaneously? "I like to have three contrasted areas because it gives me a clarity of approach; whether it's Parsifal or working on chamber music with 16 strings. "Somehow performing romantic music brings an awareness of structure that I can take back to music of earlier ages. I've always been interested in Auffiihrungspraxis [performance practice] and the way we look at works of the period between the baroque and the classical. Indeed, as a student I prepared an edition of a Hasse Requiem Mass from the manuscript and that awakened my interest in Auffiihrungspraxis, so performing Bach and his contemporaries is not so very strange. The C. P. E. Bach orchestra was founded as a modern music ensemble, Musica Nova, but when I took over we decided to concentrate on the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—that's when we took the name of one of Berlin's most important composers. Besides, Carl Philipp was for his time the Bach and had a huge public. "But I was delighted at the opportunity to record some music by Friedemann Bach which has never been done before. It's actually more like a reconstruction because the state of the manuscript is so terrible. But I do feel it's really worthwhile to look at his work. Some of this music was never heard after the performances in his time and so we are doing him a service. I'm sure he was crazy! In his time he was too modern because it's neither like his father nor Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. He has so many ideas that it's unbelievable, even for our time. It is so improvisatory, it's not worked out but you can feel an idea is coming and that makes it very exciting. You can hear many different styles: you don't know what has happened before, unlike with Carl Philipp— it's so unpredictable. Yet at the same time he could write a fugue like his father." With his calling cards of W. F. Bach, Haydn