Despite the fact the conductor did not, per se, exist during the baroque period?
Actually, that’s complete nonsense. They were paying a time beater in St. Mark’s in the sixteenth century. I know that the role of conducting has perhaps changed, but there was always the need for the director and with big forces there was the need for a time-keeper. But I just don’t believe that interpretation was something that was invented in the 19th century. When we read about the great performers of the past, be it Mrs Cibber moving an audience to tears, or Tartini with his eyes popping out of his head, we’re obviously talking about great musical personalities. There must have been something in the performance that suggests a strong interpretative element. So interpretation is perfectly viable and possible in early music, and it has a good role to play.
Is there a fundamental difference to your approach in, say, baroque or romantic music?
I’ve realised in the last few years that I’m happy being what I call a generalist specialist, working across much of the repertoire. I’m one of those strange conductors who will go from doing a Mahler song cycle to Renaissance polyphony. I find it utterly enriching. If there are people in symphony orchestras who think that Renaissance and baroque music are a waste of time, then I feel really sorry for them because, God, they don’t know what they’re missing. How they can play Brahms if they don’t understand Schütz, I’ll never know. Conversely, there are people in the early music world who think you’ve let the side down if you conduct a Brahms symphony and I feel very sorry for them as well. I just don’t want to be like one those conductors in the 80s, where you tick off Bach, then Handel, then Mozart. What a boring way of working!
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If there are people in symphony orchestras who think that Renaissance and baroque music are a waste of time, then I feel really sorry for them because, God, they don’t know what they’re missing. How they can play Brahms if they don’t understand Schütz, I’ll never know. Conversely, there are people in the early music world who think you’ve let the side down if you conduct a Brahms symphony and I feel very sorry for them as well.
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I don’t think commercial considerations allow for that these days. That was a time when record companies were avid to record ‘authentic’ performances, but that has long past.
Quite. And I think it was a pity, because it probably wasn’t done very well. There were so many recordings that could have been great if they’d been made five years later.
I don’t totally go along with that idea, which is very prevalent today. I still find that a pioneering, visceral excitement still comes across on some of those early period instrument discs.
Perhaps that’s true of the best of them, but when you got to the point where there were three Beethoven cycles in progress with substantially the same players, was there anything serious going on there? I doubt it. And then there was the arrogance of the early music movement, egged on by recording marketers, in suggesting that the faked sight-reading that went on in the recording studio is worth more than the great tradition of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Brahms or whatever.
Gabrieli made its early recording reputation with historical reconstructions, both liturgical and festive ...
Yes, it’s a bit of a curse, isn’t it? I’ve made twenty-five records of which no more than six or seven are in that form, but all people mention is the dreaded R word…. It’s a particular interest of mine, because there are two things I believe passionately. One is that composers of sacred music, especially in the Renaissance, intrinsically knew the shapes and the forms of the services for which they wrote. The other is that the liturgy itself is one of the great art forms of Western culture and we have to respect that. So reconstruction was an opportunity to present sacred music in a way that appealed to the market and solved a lot of the programming issues. I frankly just don’t want to hear one of those endless concerts of The Tallis Scholars doing bits of polyphony. They sing it very nicely, but the whole thing is to my mind just completely lacking in shape or form. I’m sure a lot of thought goes into it, but there is something uncomfortable about listening to endless polyphony. It’s a bit like religious statuary looking appropriate in church, but horrible in an art gallery. But although there are a couple of other projects in mind, I don’t really want to go down the reconstruction road much further.
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