Schubert - ‘Symphonie no. 8 (unfinished)’

I played the flute, but I wasn’t fully with it – it’s girly, small and cheap, and didn’t take up space in the house, but wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Later on it became clear for me that I really wanted to play cello and percussion. But at that time in school with the flute, I was having difficulty enjoying performing, and a lot of the pieces we played were from a period that I wasn’t interested in – baroque, that kind of thing. That summer I went to a music summer school for two weeks, and we were playing for like nine hours a day in an orchestra, and we had these two massive pieces to learn, to go perform them at the end back in Paris for the parents. It was the first time in my life I felt really strong emotions while playing music. It was a very important turning point for me. Again, it was about the collective – I never enjoyed playing flute alone but suddenly when you put the whole orchestra around it created something really strong that I had never experienced before. Maybe as a teenager the romantic era of classical music appealed to me in a way that baroque hadn’t, and there’s more space for emotion and sadness and softness. Musically it’s a staple for me – this symphony is cinematic, and contains so much and makes you travel emotionally to all these extremes, but all within this one piece of music.