Music
Going for Baroque
by Rod Biss
Auckland’s most recent and most surprising musical obsession is the Baroque.
How does an orchestra shaped and equipped to perform music of the 19th and 20th centuries play music written between 1600 and 1750? Music that calls for different instruments such as harpsichords, chamber organs, recorders and the extended family of lute and guitar instruments? Even when sung or played on strings, it requires a very different style of singing and playing.
For its “Splendour of Baroque” series, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra solved the problem by calling in a British early music performance expert, Roy Goodman, who stayed for the full three weeks of the series, working with the orchestra, talking to the audience and taking part in a lecture series at the University of Auckland.
And they minimised the difficulty by virtually ignoring the early Baroque and concentrating instead on audience favourites Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, padding out the programmes with lesser composers of the late Baroque.
Goodman is a master showman – a rare and useful figure in the world of early music. He runs on stage beaming a showbiz smile, arms extended to include both orchestra and audience in his welcoming embrace. His wish for us to enjoy and understand the music seems genuine.
The programmes, however – three concerts and a recital – tried too hard to show the versatility and variety of the period. There were too many short pieces – preludes, excerpts and dances, viola da gamba solos, church music, chamber music, concertos, dance music.
It made the concerts seem like “Best of Baroque” CD samplers, the very concept that Goodman enjoyed laughing at while in the next breath saying that he hoped it was his “Best of Baroque” that we had on our shelves. He ridiculed the Albinoni Adagio, saying many times that it was not genuine – though he did play what was often thought of as its companion piece, the Pachelbel Canon and Jig. It was valuable time wasted.
But the longer pieces such as the Vivaldi Gloria in the first concert and the Bach Magnificat in the final concert, directed by Goodman with stylistic awareness, came energetically, joyfully to life. I wish we’d had more works like this, particularly in the chamber music recital. A series of Bach’s Sonatas for violin and cembalo played by visiting soloist Luigi De Filippi would have told us much more about the German Baroque than the concert of snippets we heard.
The “Splendour of Baroque” series was a great success. Management worried about ticket sales – there is a perception that Baroque music is “difficult” and hard to sell – but in the event all three Town Hall concerts were well attended.
But even with Goodman shaping the phrases, persuading the strings to play idiomatically, with high-pitched trumpets and hard stick timpani, it remained a fact that the APO was unable to let us hear the real splendour of the early Baroque.
This was left for Musica Sacra directed by Indra Hughes, who brought New Zealand’s only theorbo (bass lute) and its player, Jonathan Le Cocq, up from Christchurch. With a handful of strings and John Wells playing the beautiful chamber organ, St Matthews in the City sounded as if it had become St Marks in Venice. It is a sound unlike any other, highly coloured yet clear and emotionally extravagant.
The choir tackled the difficulties of Monteverdi’s Missa In Illo Tempore fearlessly. The instrumental accompaniments had the genuine fluidity of the early Baroque, the sort of improvisatory embellishment of the harmonies that good jazz players know more about than symphony orchestra players.
But wait, there’s more Baroque. As this Listener went to press, the newly formed “Age of Discovery” group under James Tibbles’s direction was about to give a concert at the University School of Music, with the programme including Vivaldi’s Il Gardellino, a concerto for flute and strings featuring Sally Tibbles playing a Baroque flute.
The emphasis of this group is to perform everything on authentic old instruments or modern replicas. “The sound will be a revelation to anyone not used to hearing the authentic instruments,” says Tibbles. The concert also includes Bach’s seldom-heard Mass in A major and his cantata, Lobet den Herrn, sung by Jane Tankersley.
By the time you read this, John Rosser’s Viva Voce will also have presented, twice, their homage to Monteverdi, “The Full Monte”.
“Opera didn’t start with Monteverdi,” says Rosser, “but he’s the first great exponent. He saw the possibilities of the new, simpler melody in which the listener could actually hear the words and get the point of the story.”
The Viva Voce programme includes the exciting Toccata, which acts as a prelude to the opera Orfeo, as well as some solos and choruses; some of his later madrigals; his grand eight-voice setting of the Magnificat; and the thrilling, catchy setting of Beatus Vir (which also brought the Music Sacra concert to a close). Joining Viva Voce are four trombones (sounding as much like sackbuts as possible), three trumpets (pretending to be cornetti), violins, violas (instead of viols) and cello, harpsichord and organ providing the basso continuo.
On Sunday, December 9, Bach Musica performs Bach’s Mass in B minor with conductor Rita Paczian and soloists Nicola Edgcombe, Kate Spence, Patrick Power and David Griffiths.
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