Yes, everybody travels with two instruments. Rameau is always one of our projects and, of course, we would like to put on an opera, something which isn’t a very easy task.

An opera?

We would love to do Rameau or Mozart. But it costs lots of money. It is only possible within the bounds of a large festival. Opera houses don’t want to stage it because they would have to send their own orchestras home or on holiday for a lengthy period, but we are still hopeful that some festival will agree to our project.

With regard to the positioning of the instruments in the orchestra, it could be said that there are obvious differences compared to a modern orchestra, aren’t there?

Of course. For example, the first and second violins are separated (one group is seated in front of the other). The modern disposition of the first and second violins isn’t bad for some works in which there is a dialogue between the two groups. There wouldn’t be much sense in placing them apart.

A number of years ago you gave a recorder recital in Madrid followed by an address at the Universidad Autónoma, if my memory does not fail me. On that occasion, you spoke about the language of early instruments in orchestral music and the “new” sounds that could be heard in these versions.

Perhaps the organ is a good example to help explain this to the public. You sit in front of the keyboard, press down the keys without selected any stops. No sound is produced, only silence. Later, you decide to select two string stops and you obtain a kind of string sound, to which flute stops can be added, which are real flutes. One notices that the sound is different, that is not mixed with the strings, but added to them. And one can keep adding stops. And when all these sounds are mixed together, the ideal is not to have a flute stop that imitates a violin one, but that the different stops are blended together to create a pleasant sensation. Each stop wasn’t conceived as an imitation of the other. This imitation (a large, homogeneous sound) is what a modern orchestra aspires towards. This is the ideal of a Wagnerian orchestra, which should function as a single, unified whole, in which the flute can imitate a violin. That has been the ideal since Wagner and it is appropriate to this type of music, but it wasn’t the principle of earlier orchestras. Listening to, and working with, a modern orchestra, one realises the mentality of the musicians is very different. The cellos are at their best and most content when they are playing the highest and most difficult passages of Haydn (normally just prior to that night’s performance). Others play the solo from Scherezade and the flutes vibrate madly like coloratura sopranos. These are other ideals, other types of musicians.

I believe we can consider music which today lacks an oral tradition as “early music”, although in a somewhat rigid way. At the moment I would say that Wagner is half way to becoming “early music”. The oral tradition is already so far away that it can be considered as extinguished.

Perhaps the spirit isn’t the same as that you were talking about earlier.

Of course it isn’t.

Do you think these gigantic orchestras will tend to disappear?