CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "Pavana - The Virgin Harpsichord", with Skip Sempé , Olivier Fortin and Pierre Hantai
It is not especially curious that the music of the so-called virginalists formed an important part of the “persuasive” repertoire for the first generation of harpsichordists – now quite a few years over a century ago. Bach was of course a challenge for the harpsichord revival as a test of what would happen if acknowledged and great German music was played on the harpsichord. The music of the French clavecinistes served as a test of interpretive finesse in a virtually unknown repertoire with its infinite possibilities of dazzling ornamentation and puzzling solutions to non – German musical preoccupations. However, the music of the virginalists had much in its favor; not least that it was “program music” in the purest sense, full of English local color, even folk tunes. As the early music revival took hold first in England , thanks largely to the work and influence of Arnold Dolmetsch, Renaissance masters like Byrd, Bull, Gibbons, Morley and Tomkins emerged from obscurity. The reprinting of the keyboard anthology entitled “Parthenia” (1612 – 13) and the publication of the manuscript collection of 297 pieces that became known as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (1609 – 19) revealed the music of the virginalists in all its beauty.
These creations of the English virginalists, from large scale polyphonic treatments of In Nomines and the like to settings of the simplest ditties, are the first indications in the history of harpsichord music that two idiomatic keyboard styles are about to have the ultimate wedding: variety of texture combined with ornamental passagework designed to show off the flair and agility of the hand. And, the “variation effect”, which concerns not only variation technique as a musical genre, but variation in depiction such as Fantasias which bear the indications “A Clear Day”, “Thunder”, “Lightning” or “Fair Weather”. What more could one want in terms of variety and power of virtuosity than Ground basses, Plainsong settings, Pavans, Galliards, Almans, Corants, Jigs, Toys, Autumn Leaves, Dirges, Fantasias, Preludes, Variation sets, arrangements from famous lute and consort music, and arrangements of vocal and instrumental music of the most distinguished foreign masters? Not to mention that the cultivation of variety is also evident in the rendering of various versions and treatments of the same written musical material, which on comparison from one source to another contain from slight to radical differences.
The debate has been too often raised as to whether this music was “originally intended” for a harpsichord or a virginal. There is no rule, except that the performer decides based on the qualities of the finest instruments available. For this recording, the choices were based on a Ruckers style Flemish virginal and an Italian style harpsichord, with the “original intention” of performing some of the most musically substantial and challenging selections on the virginal, rather than the established but rather perverse habit of performing the “serious” music on the harpsichord while saving the virginal as a miniature showcase for the light ditty or dance.
The tradition of playing harpsichords in “consort” was widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to recreate that sound the performers have arranged some of the selections for two or three harpsichords – in this case, either virginal and harpsichord or virginal and two harpsichords. The Antwerp harpsichord makers even produced several models of exotic instruments which combined two harpsichords in one: the “mother and child” virginals (the instrument on the bottom at eight-foot pitch, with the one on the top at four-foot pitch) as well as a model of double manual harpsichord with a virginal built into its side, in a rectangular case. The musical principle is one of decoration, elaboration, and amplification of the original material. For these arrangements, we have drawn mostly on the “famous lute and consort music and arrangements of vocal and instrumental music of the most distinguished foreign masters”.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "William Byrd: Virginals and Consorts", with Skip Sempé and Capriccio Stravagante
“Virginals”
The impressive poignancy of William Byrd's keyboard music has fascinated connoisseurs and interpreters for over a hundred years. Although almost none of it was published in Byrd's lifetime, it was among the very first keyboard music of its time to be reconsidered in the revival of interest in earlier repertoires at the beginning of the twentieth century. As early as 1837, the pianist Ignaz Moscheles gave recitals including virginal music at the Bechstein (now Wigmore) Hall in London. Nevertheless, even today, this music is still largely unknown and its power of expression is underestimated.
What makes for this specific expression, which, in our century, has been more known for the delicacy of its ornamentation and 'English primitiveness' than for its sheer mastery of design and the power of its sonority?
William Byrd, the genius-inventor of sophisticated harpsichord playing, was an accomplished expert in composition, ranging from the most playful and daring virtuoso diminution to the densest sacred polyphony: he made a major contribution to polyphonic harpsichord playing.
Polyphonic harpsichord playing is based on the acoustical sound resulting almost exclusively from touch and timing. Although polyphony is conceived in imitation of voices, the manner of producing the intended effect on musical instruments, such as the harpsichord, is an involved process of acoustic and harmonic over holding and sustaining of sonorities, which, strictly speaking, according to the notation on the page, have already finished sounding. Or, on the contrary, the imitation of strictly notated voices in which actual practice demands that the notes do not or cannot be sustained for their written duration. Instead, they give way to a melodic, rhythmic or harmonic resonance gesture, which is more important to the idea than the notation itself. This technical feat of keyboard 'polyphony' is an interpretative tool that essential to the works of William Byrd.
Byrd's written-out ornamentation (of the diminution type, as opposed to the shorthand signs for ornaments or 'graces') is no doubt among the most exquisite of all sixteenth and early seventeenth century instrumental music. The manner in which lie crafts the melodic ornamentation over the rest of the texture is certainly more expert than the stock-in-trade figurations that are given in so-called virtuoso diminution treatises.
Much of Byrd's keyboard music survives in different sources, with slight to radical differences in diminution, ornamentation, accidentals and structural elements, Those sources include the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book' (copied by Francis Tregian 1609-19), 'My Ladye Nevells Booke' (1591) and Parthenia (c 1612/13). (The Musica Britannica references are given for locating the keyboard works performed on this recording, although other sources were sometimes used as performing versions).
As the leading figure of an entire school of harpsichord playing, Byrd is rather like the Frenchman Jacques Champion de Chambonnières of the later 17th century in that part of the required interpretative knowledge and virtuosity is the freedom of choice of the basic performance text. As to the ornaments implied by the various (and ambiguous) shorthand signs for the 'graces', these, too, figure in the category of individual choice and discretion on the part of the interpreter and influence and enhance his personal concept of the melodic line or the need for further decoration or elaboration. But in both diminution and ornamentation, what matters is the creativity with which they are played, not the pedantic (and slavish) literal following of one of the several surviving texts. This freedom of choice is therefore a developed skill based on the liberty allowed by the composer to guarantee efficient and effective performance.
Ornamentation and other details, such as fingering, articulation, tuning systems and exact choice of keyboard instrument are all details which fall within the larger and more important creative concepts of phrasing and melodic and harmonic gestures. We shall never know exactly how the best players of 1570, 1600 or 1630 solved these interpretative problems, but it is clear, on a subject such as fingering, that a clever keyboard performer would never follow an indicated fingering of any kind if it did not fit the hand or serve a purpose in creating a particular turn of phrase or projecting a larger musical concept.
All these considerations have led to the choice of the 'virginals' for this recording: an Italian-style harpsichord with a particularly striking, noble and proud sound, capable of capturing a wide range of effects, from the most touching intimacy of the rectangular virginals to the roar of singers, cornetts and sackbuts. The instrument used in this performance was built in 1959 by Martin Skowroneck and was inspired by the early traditions. It is one of the very first truly admirable harpsichords of the twentieth century. Its unusually successful qualities define it as historic: in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most popular and sought-after instruments were always already forty or fifty years old.
“Consorts”
In the genre of the dance and variation Byrd refined and perfected earlier works of native English, but also Italian, Spanish, Flemish and French origin (e.g. the pavan Mille regretz, published by Susato in 1551; Belle qui tiens ma vie, also a pavan, which inspired the French corantos, and the sixteenth century French chanson Une jeune fillette, also known as Une nymphe jolie, which inspired The Queen's Alman). His distinctive amalgam of poetry and boldness results from a mixture of filigree and architecture. If one considers Spanish architecture, in which Arabian and Christian elements are intermingled, perhaps by the same comparison one could observe a rare but obvious sentimentality on the part of Byrd, the Catholic (continental resonances) living in Protestant England. It is perhaps partly due to this provocative opposition of the direct and indirect sentiments of the two religions that Byrd is ‘both an extrovert and a nostalgist, and that combination is not just effective – it is irresistible' (Glenn Gould).
Byrd's works for instrumental ensembles -dances, grounds and variations, Fantasias - survive in various sources with varying reliability of text. In the sixteenth century, the practice of playing families of instruments in 'consorts' was born. This was due to the lively and inventive additions to European musical instrument making which led to the perfection of instruments in families from small to large sizes, and finally to the combination of the various families into the spectacularly colorful and magical Renaissance orchestra.
The viols were the basic sound of the Renaissance orchestra, and their flexibility and dynamic gave an uncommon virtuosity and richness to the instruments that surrounded them in larger groups. Continental musicians had already begun to take over England by the middle of the sixteenth century, and many of the viol players in royal employment were Italians. And printed music travelled (as well as singing and whistling sailors).
Among the different consorts heard on this recording are the viols in the Pavan à 5 and the Praeludium and Ground; the recorders in Browning; the viols with harmonic underlay performed by the plucked instruments in The Queen's Alman (from a Bodleian Library manuscript transcribed by Denis Stevens), the mixing of consorts in the Fantasia a 6, the Pavan and Galliard a 6; Mille regretz and Belle qui tiens ma vie, and a version of the so-called 'broken consort' in Lord Oxenford's Maske.
We wanted to return the consort aesthetic to one of unabashed expression and virtuosity which is nothing short of that of Monteverdi and his Italian contemporaries. After a century of 'historic' performance practice, it is important to gain a richer and more profound understanding of William Byrd through the admission of true instrumental and vocal virtuosity in the manner invented and internationalized by the Italians.
Virginals & Consorts - the recording
The so called 'heavenly noise' produced by the consorts of viols and recorder and plucked stringed instrument has been captured through the choice of a particularly warm and reverberant room for recording. In this acoustic, the individual members of the ensemble were able to enjoy the full sound without compromise, and this is an essential element of the style in which each of the individual musical lines is animated in respect to the whole rhythmic gesture or polyphonic demand. In this way, we have hoped to transfer the inspiration of the moment to the listener and communicate the enjoyment experienced by the musicians during the recording sessions.
The brilliant compositional and sonic contrasts, the extravagant syncopation, the rhythmic deplacement between binary and ternary, the ravishing toughness of harmonic and melodic cross-relations, Renaissance conventions of musica ficta, continental and native English exoticisms: all these things go to show that Byrd is one of the greatest of the overlooked masters, and that the Thames of England's Golden Age must have glittered much as did the Grand Canal of the Venetians.
Skip Sempé
Concert program notes for performances of "My Beloved Spake", with Capriccio Stravagante and Chanticleer
William Lawes (1602 – 1645) spent his youth studying music and playing the viola da gamba, quite probably in consorts with King Charles I. When Lawes died in battle fighting for his friend the King, Thomas Fuller wrote: “Nor was the Kings soul so ingrossed with grief for the death of so near a Kinsman, and Noble a Lord, but that hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, he had a particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonly called him the Father of Music” (History of the Worthies of England, 1662).
What did “the Father of Music” mean in the mid seventeenth century? And, after having been told that Josquin, Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach and Mozart were all “Fathers of Music”, who is William Lawes, born four hundred years ago?
William Lawes was one of the most original musical geniuses of his own or any other time. He had that rare gift of combining tradition with invention – in this case, the invention was of uncompromising consequence in the fields of musical composition and in instrumental thought and writing for bowed stringed instruments. Bach to a certain degree imitated Buxtehude, Schubert imitated Beethoven – but it is curious for us to discover who, or even what, William Lawes was imitating.
Italy meant many things to England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Henry VIII detested Rome because of his disagreements with the Roman Catholic faith. He even remodeled Hampton Court Palace during his residence there, removing all signs of Italy , which included its terracotta roofs and the precisely calculated architectural proportions of certain of its courtyards. But, many of his musicians at court were Italian imports, as were many of their musical instruments in the royal collections. Italy and things Italian were therefore not to be avoided in all walks of life.
Many aspirations and inventions of the Italian Renaissance, other than the strengthening the church, were to remain of interest in England for centuries. The first half of the seventeenth century was the time of the Masque (to keep their ephemeral quality, they were only ever given one performance) and the great English Palladian Inigo Jones (who was involved in stage design and stagecraft as much as he was involved in architecture).
What William Lawes most certainly shared with Charles I was a taste for the exquisite in all things. This particular “taste for the exquisite” is perhaps what makes the greatest remodelers. The implications of intensity and of art in remodeling is quite probably Italian in origin and inspiration, and the idea of ancient monuments being reworked by brilliant young men was a Mediterranean, rather than Northern European phenomenon. This development of the ancient and the decrepit with the new and beautiful was a major and recurring theme of all Renaissance thought and action.
Lawes’ music is therefore not so much an “invention”, but a “remodeling” of contemporary Italian compositional taste (in proportion as well as in total declamatory freedom), combined with the essentially English taste for overlay of harmonic dissonance and exotic twist. One of Lawes’ most touching musical tributes in musical remodeling is represented by his combination of the antique and the modern by employing viols (the viol consort was an old English phenomenon) and violins (especially in the trio texture common to the “chic” Italians) in the same work. Musicians of our time tend to insist that viols and violins should not be mixed, and this is false: many seventeenth century masters indicated their preference for the combination, and even when they did not, they had it in mind.
The madrigals of Monteverdi and his Italian contemporaries circulated in England in handwritten copies, and some of them were even arranged for string consorts, to be performed as instrumental pieces. William Lawes would have been the first to admit that an instrumental performance of a vocal work could be just as powerful if delivered by an expert team of instrumentalists who effectively translated the vocal idiom into the instrumental. What surprised in the seventeenth century still surprises today.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Alpha recording: "Louis Couperin: Preludes, Suites & Pavanne", with Skip Sempé
Louis Couperin belongs, of course, to the illustrious Couperin family. He was one of three brothers, all musicians: Louis, François and Charles. They were the nephews of François Couperin "Le Grand". According to Titon du Tillet (in La Parnasse François), the three brothers serenaded Chambonnieres at his country house on 24 July 1651 (or 1650…), who encouraged Louis Couperin to move to Paris. But more importantly, Louis Couperin belongs to the seventeenth century tradition of harpsichord playing that was initiated and developed by the Italian Frescobaldi and the German Froberger, though his French musical family of outstanding harpsichordists and chamber musicians included Chambonnieres, d'Anglebert and Marin Marais.
A short-lived, exotic genius, Louis Couperin compares more convincingly with Marin Marais than to any of the reputed harpsichordists and organists of his own family. It is generally overlooked that both musicians were viol players, as Marais was always recognized as the greatest genius of the viol, and as none of Louis Couperin's viol music is known to have survived. Louis Couperin and Marais share an uncommon passion for wide-ranging virtuoso abilities, from the most sentimental and touching to the brutally savage. This powerful savagery at the harpsichord came neither from the French lute players nor the French air de cour, but from the Italians through their Toccatas and the Germans through their "stylus fantasticus" enriched harpsichord playing. This savage power did not remain in fashion in France (though Louis Couperin is probably responsible for inventing it on French soil) and, quite possibly, never had been - except in the stylish "detours" found in the compositions and the playing of Louis Couperin. Whatever the case, this rare art of power and contrast had been effectively removed by the generation of François Couperin "Le Grand". In France , whatever musical mannerism had existed was over: Italianisms had become a fetish rather than a reality.
It is generally thought that harpsichord playing and viol playing demand a rather light and graceful "touch". But lightness is only one of many supplenesses of touch: in playing the harpsichord works of Louis Couperin or the viol works of Marin Marais, great power of the hand at the harpsichord keyboard or on the viol bow is absolutely essential. "Charm" is not enough - we are dealing here with two musicians who clearly preferred virtuosity to the later rules and regulations of preciousness that tends to deliberately confuse decorum with pessimism. The harpsichord and the bass viol and both large and resonant instruments, and this power required in the hand are part of the beautiful touch. The essential concept to keep in mind is that it is not the keys or the bow which are actually being activated, but the strings. This variety of touch, masterfully exploited in order to produce varieties of energy, is referred to by the contemporaries of Couperin and Marais, by such authors as Le Gallois in his Lettre. The interpretive conviction behind repertoires such as Louis Couperin and Marais require all the various energy levels in order for the music making to be effective.
Louis Couperin was perhaps first noticed in the twentieth century for his Préludes, which are written in the genre that has become known as "Unmeasured Préludes". This style certainly has its some of its origins in the Italianate Toccatas of Frescobaldi and Froberger, but perhaps more importantly, in the tradition of seventeenth century recitative with basso continuo. We can guess that the manner in which the Préludes have been written down is more or less that of the composer, but, lacking an autograph, one can never know. In any case, these Préludes are intended neither for sight-reading nor for quick preparation, because they do not tolerate any kind of tentative playing. Whether they represent "improvisation" or not is a question which has frequently arisen. The relatively recent realization that so much music of this period depends on interpretation -rather than a dry and literal "reading" of the notes on the page - should be enough indication that any formal discussion of these pieces would serve only as a basic introduction to the style of the notation. If these Préludes have survived in the hands of various copyists, then they have probably reached us with a good performance in mind, and performing them has much to do with harpsichord playing and harpsichord sound – and less to do with notation. All notation is a mystery. What the composer suggests with notation must naturally become a close collaboration between the composer and the interpreter. Though some connoisseurs of this repertoire have been involved in all varieties of observation, speculation, and commentary, the listener and the public can only ever be moved by the quality of the end result. The important interpretive conviction for the Préludes (and for all the dance movements as well) is to search and discover what "makes them happen" – what gives them the required "twist" which tells a particular story.
Louis Couperin's harpsichord music was not printed in his lifetime. The largest sources of his surviving harpsichord works are found in the Bauyn Manuscript (Paris) and the Parville Manuscript (Berkeley). Their texts vary from little to considerable, concerning details of ornamentation and various other elements. Neither of these sources are in the hand of Louis Couperin, rather, the music in these manuscripts is transmitted in the hand of several unknown scribes who also copied out music by Chambonnieres, d'Anglebert, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Dumont, La Barre, Richard, Hardel and Lully.
We have no information about the original source of Louis Couperin's harpsichord pieces, from which these two manuscripts were compiled, and, indeed, the composer in question is only referred to only as "Couperin". Believe it or not, we do not really know for sure whether this Couperin is Louis or another member of the Couperin family. Louis Couperin was a known viol player and organist: it was his brother Charles who had an outstanding reputation as a harpsichordist. Charles Couperin was the father of François Couperin "Le Grand", which may lead us to wonder if the finest eighteenth century French harpsichordist was actually trained by his father, rather than his uncle? As a further complication of the issue, the organ pieces of "Louis Couperin" have recently been published, and it has been suggested that the manuscript source of these organ works represents an autograph of Louis Couperin. There is some disagreement on this matter. However, the harpsichord works are so much more interesting on grounds of musical content and finesse of style that I find it hard to imagine that these organ pieces are the work of the same composer. I have suggested that even if Louis Couperin was the scribe, does this lend real certainty as the composer of the music he was transmitting in his own hand? Perhaps we will never know.
CD liner notes for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi recording: "Chambonnieres: Pieces de clavecin", with Skip Sempé
Skip Sempé in conversation with Thomas Mace
Mace : Music history gives Chambonnières the dusty-sounding title of "Father of the French harpsichord school." Why?
Sempé : Chambonnières was the father of many things. He was one of the first harpsichordists who fascinated people as a soloist-composer, who discovered, as a soloist, how to make his instrument speak to people and move them. He was the first player whose touch - his own, personal keyboard technique - was ever talked about. His contemporaries heard things in his playing that they felt no one else could do. The French theorist Marin Mersenne said that, in Chambonnières, the harpsichord has met its last master. Christiaan Huyghens, the much travelled music theorist, says that he was without equal. But his father role is also a myth. Chambonnières is the end of a long Renaissance tradition of keyboard, string consort, lute playing and expressive singing. There is a considerable difference between his art and the French taste that comes later, even between him and his disciple Louis Couperin.
Mace: What about his dance music? Doesn't this put him in the mainstream with d'Anglebert and Louis Couperin?
Sempé: I feel that there is more poetry than dance in Chambonnières. Just because he wrote Allemandes, Courantes, and Sarabandes does not make dance as important in his music as people think. In fact, a real performance of Chambonnières, d'Anglebert and Louis Couperin goes much further than an attempt at “notes inégales", so-called influences of dance rhythm and other French conventions. The works of Chambonnières are a keyboard synthesis of the Air de Cour and Italian recitative, the declamation and rhetoric of Italian monody - to the point of quotations from Monteverdi like the Lamento d'Arianna, or Penelope's monologue from Ulisse. Chambonnières knew how to dance and he even performed in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit of 1653. But strict French dance music was reflective of an orchestral discipline as practiced by Lully in an orchestral formation. Chambonnières was interested in the soloist platform and orchestral discipline is finally anti-soloist. Soloists' liberties are both composed, such as highly irregular phrase lengths or accent patterns, and liberally interpreted - the taking of time for certain gestures and individual notes which guarantee the optimum beauty of particular effects or details. Ornamentation is also an essential element of soloist performance in this period. Chambonnières rejected the Lully tradition, something which explains his rejection at court, allegedly for refusing to accompany in the basso continuo section of Lully's orchestral machine.
Mace: Chambonnières lived at a time when French harpsichord building was changing radically. Italian and native French instruments, with their light construction, short scales, and brass stringing were being superseded by new, long-scale, iron-strung designs based on Flemish models. Is the change in harpsichords important to his music?
Sempé: Absolutely. Chambonnières was the first great harpsichordist to compose for and perform on the new, northern European harpsichord of the type developed by the Ruckers and Couchet workshops. And the French harpsichord style is ultimately based on the sound of that instrument. For example, he is the first composer to use the power and clarity of the harpsichord bass, something one hears in French music for the next century. The northern harpsichord also feels completely different. It responds to a touch that had not existed before. This touch is noble and luxurious; Chambonnières and Lully both had instruments decorated in chinoiserie and this fetish for the luxurious and the exotic is an integral part of what they considered to be style.
Mace : And Chambonnières was praised for his touch in a way that, before him, had been reserved-only for lute players. As a performer, how do you approach the idea of touch?
Sempé: Touch isn't a question of articulation, of going from one note to another; it's a question of going from one rhetorical gesture to another. It depends on time and blending, and building up of resonance - how long you hold the notes further than their written value and which notes you then choose to blend them with; on putting things together under the same harmony or things that are not in the same harmony. You can only do it by listening to the instrument. It has to do with the imagination of the interpreter but is dictated by the possibilities of the instrument. The northern harpsichord has a ring, a very long, sustaining quality that allows you to blend things in a way that a short scale instrument of earlier periods does not permit. Resonance is something that changed the technique of the instrument and allowed it to win out over the lute. That's what composers were looking for - the absolute maximum of resonance. In Chambonnières you can see blending in the notation. If you obey certain important aspects of the notation, you have to substitute fingers all over the place.
Mace: Your recording includes Chambonnières harpsichord pieces with improvised lute accompaniment. What's the justification for doing this?
Sempé: No one in our time has ever experimented with performing harpsichord pieces "en concert" with the lute. But the justification - I prefer the word reminder - that this was done is evoked by contemporaries such as Le Gallois. The lutenist simply reads the music off the harpsichord desk and plays continuo for the solo instrument. The harpsichord and the lute were the two chamber instruments par excellence throughout the seventeenth century in France . Both instruments played improvised accompaniments and both also had an extraordinary solo repertoire. The harpsichordists and lutenists were also of the same brotherhood when it came to, understanding how to get the optimum resonance out of their instruments, especially with the effects of "baigné" and "campanella", in which neighboring notes or repeated notes are plucked on different strings of the lute so that the first note continues to sound even while the second is being played. Remember that these players were all composers and that they understood how to make very, very beautiful and subtle sounds.
Mace: The music of Chambonnières survives in both prints and manuscript collections but none of it is arranged specifically' in dance suites. How did you put together the suites on the recording, and what about the uniquely French "préludes non mesurés"?
Sempé: I compiled the music into préludes, single movements and suites. I was most influenced by the Baroque tradition of having a very small space in time in which to make a point, and to serve this idea I have added some préludes non mesurés, completely improvised in the style or found in anonymous sources - there are no surviving préludes non mesurés by Chambonnières. Because of the diversity of sources of Chambonnière's harpsichord pieces, they constitute a kind of Rosetta-stone of harpsichord playing in seventeenth century France . This recording is as much my own edition as my own compilation of the material. I have simply tried to make a convincing and moving program, and am sure that when Chambonnières played he did the same.
Essay for The Musical Times
For Gustav Leonhardt on his 65th birthday: Concordia Musis Amica
“He (Chambonnières) had a delicacy of hand that others lacked, in a such a way that if he played a chord and someone else imitated him in doing exactly the same, one perceived nonetheless a great difference - and the reason is, as I have said, that he had a different manner of approaching the keyboard and of placing his fingers on the keys that was unknown to others”. Jean Le Gallois: Lettre de M. Gallois à Mme. Regnault de Solier touchant la musique, Paris, 1680)
If performance on « period instruments » has been one of the most important phenomena of the classical music scene over the last three decades, what have we learned?
It has been presupposed by proponents of period instruments that the instrument and not the player is the interpreter. But the possibilities of an instrument must be exploited to their fullest, and this can only be accomplished by total engagement on the part of the performer, through whom the instrument sings and speaks. This applies especially to the solo harpsichord literature. The harpsichord is criticized by some for its supposed lack of tone, dynamic and legato possibilities. Because the soul of the harpsichord, with great depth of resonance and beauty of sound on the great instruments, has been neglected or misunderstood by players good, bad or indifferent, the interested audience has rarely had the chance to experience the true effect of an exquisite harpsichord beautifully played.
Jacques Champion de Chambonnières (1601-1672) was one of the first harpsichordists who fascinated people as a soloist-composer and who discovered as a soloist how to make his instrument speak to people and move them. He was the first player whose touch - his own personal keyboard technique - was ever talked about. His contemporaries heard things in his playing, that they felt no one else could do.
The French theorist Mersenne said that in Chambonnières the harpsichord had met its last master. Huyghens, the worldly music theorist, says that he was without equal. Chambonnières stands at the end of a long renaissance tradition of keyboard, string-consort and lute playing and expressive singing. His compositions were widely sought after and circulated in all the capitals of Europe , even before they were published. There is a considerable difference between his art and the French taste that comes later, even between him and his disciple Louis Couperin.
Among the repertoire of the French clavecinistes, the music of Chambonnières has been singularly neglected and misunderstood in our time. A performer must approach little known repertoire in a chronology of the tradition to which it belongs. For example, in the world of opera an appreciation of second-rate Mozart is the easiest blind alley to third-rate Rameau (and even worse Lully, not to mention Monteverdi…). The tradition of opera is an all inclusive one (text, plot, language, scenery. design, staging singing, air, duo, trio, quartet, chorus, recitative, accompaniment, orchestra and orchestration) which begins in Monteverdi's time with the early Italian operas and Monteverdi's Orfeo and continues in the opera house with an opera public. We should not study and perform the harpsichord works of Chambonnières via the tradition of Rameau and François Couperin but instead inspire ourselves with the music of the traditions that inspired Chambonnières himself.
There is no good reason for having ignored Chambonnières - except one. Musicians tend to feel that public accessibility to a particular composer or style is determined by the composer or the style. But in general it is the interpreter who does not entirely grasp a composer's ideal or a particular tendency which is integral to the effect of the music in question. The musician, in turn, decides that if he does not grasp the music, the public will not grasp it either - and rightly so. In any case, we know we are right if the public loves the result.
Approaching rare repertoire is a rare responsibility, especially when representing the pioneer of an entire tradition which has become one’s specialty through years of experience. It has become chic to say 'I'm not a specialist and I hate specialization’. What in fact has become evident in the music world is the demonstration of a cultivated ignorance in discriminating between diamonds and glass bead. Fortunately specialization and selectivity are still those things which the public really asks of its favorite interpreters. As Rameau said, 'Cacher l'art par l'art’ (hide art with art).
There is more poetry than dance in Chambonnières. Just because he wrote allemandes, courantes and sarabandes does not make the character of dance as important in his music as people may think. It is music of poetry and rhetoric. A real performance of Chambonnières, d'Anglebert and Louis Couperin goes much further than an attempt at 'notes inégales', so called influences of 'dance rhythm’ and other French conventions. The works of Chambonnières are a keyboard synthesis of the air de cour and Italian recitative, the declamation of French text and the rhetoric of Italian monody.
Chambonnières knew how to dance and he even performed in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit of 1653. But strict French dance music reflected a Lullian orchestral discipline, something antithetical to the soloist freedoms in which Chambonnières was primarily interested: such freedoms are both composed (as in highly irregular phrase lengths and accent patterns) and interpreted (as in the taking of time for certain gestures and individual notes to guarantee the optimum effect of particular details). Ornamentation is also an essential element of soloist performance in this period. Chambonnières rejected the Lully tradition, something which explains his rejection at court, allegedly for refusing to accompany in the basso continuo section of Lully's orchestral machine.
Chambonnières’ music is influenced by various French improvisatory traditions. In the case of the harpsichord one learns not only from the instrument itself but from its closest and most intimate companions in resonance and spirit, the lute and the viola da gamba. Both are melodic and harmonic instruments, the harpsichord but a large lute with a keyboard capable of somewhat broader sweep. The viola da gamba a rich bass section possessing, a broadness, drama and variety of bow stroke that rivals both the lute and the harpsichord in virtuoso effects.
Played in the style of these intimate instrumental companions, the harpsichord at once sheds its reputation as an instrument with the crude attack of a bad rhythm section. This lute and viol quality is achieved by touch, and it is this touch which made harpsichordists in former days renowned and sought after as performers and teachers (not only performers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also such distinguished interpreters as Wanda Landowska who had a great palate of touch on her style of harpsichord, perhaps more than today's representative performers on traditionally styled harpsichords).
Touch is not a question of articulation, of going from one note to another; it is a method of going from one rhetorical gesture to another. That depends on time and the blending and building up of resonance - how long one holds the notes further than their written value and which notes one chooses to blend them with, by putting things together under the same harmony or things that are not in the same harmony. One can only do it by listening to the instrument. The Flemish-style harpsichord, in particular the noble and luxurious instruments by Ruckers and Couchet valued by Chambonnières, has a ring, a very long sustaining quality that allows one to blend things in a way that short scaled, earlier instruments do not encourage. Resonance is something that changed the technique of the harpsichord, allowing it to win out over the lute. This is what composers were looking for - the absolute maximum of resonance.
On opening an 'edition' of Chambonnières' music, one must first come to terms with the fact that neither the composer nor his, contemporaries have left us anything which even remotely resembles a definitive source. Clearly we are entering an area of performance practice in which the performer's discretion is required on a large scale. The 'score' is merely a hint of what is actually to be played with respect to ornaments, variation of the printed rhythms. optional repeats, subtle variation between melodic and accompanying elements and cadential figures - in short, all the marks of a personal approach to music making and the accepted values that first and foremost every musician is different and second that one doesn't always play the same way twice. The diversity of sources of Chambonnières' harpsichord pieces constitutes a kind of Rosetta stone of harpsichord playing in seventeenth-century France and elsewhere. One must make one's own edition as well as one's own compilation.
In short, players are advised to improvise, to study the turns of melody in order to ornament skillfully (with reference to both Chambonnières' own ornament table, as well as d'Anglebert's), to compare the sources in creating their own personal edition, to develop touch through a lyrical approach to melody (phrased as beautifully as possible in different tempos) and to create their own suites (some short, some a bit longer). In so doing they will be a few steps further towards recreating the elusive and highly sophisticated art of Chambonnières.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi recording: "Francois Couperin: Pieces de clavecin", with Skip Sempé
"The method that I present here is a kind of restitution to the public, having profited as much as possible from the compliments they have so kindly given me concerning my art. I have added my little discoveries to this and thus I will feel that I have done enough in discharging my duty to them. Perhaps a few people will say that I work against my own best interests in these disclosures of my studies, but I will renounce them forever, without any reservations at all, whenever it is a matter of usefulness to others." (François Couperin, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin)
When François Couperin brought out his L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin in 1716, he was attempting to save a tradition of touch-inspired harpsichord playing which seems to have already been dying out. What did Couperin imply by the title? I am convinced that he is referring specifically to the Art of Harpsichord Touch, and only generally to the Art of Harpsichord Playing. Couperin was certainly aware that the two were inseparable, but, over the years, the issue has become confused.
Couperin wrote the Préludes of L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin as pieces to form the hand into making a certain very special sound - a sound he considered important from the very first contact with a harpsichord. Bach made the same point in his Inventions, where he refers to the central idea of "cantabile art", that very quality which makes keyboard instruments so illusionistic: the magic fusion of a lyrical effect and its accompaniment achieved by the diversity of sound created by the art of touch.
How can one best record François Couperin? The least imaginative and therefore least successful answer would be to record his complete harpsichord works. On the other hand, it would be equally unsatisfactory to portray the greatest eighteenth century French claveciniste as a miniaturist by recording only his popular encores. Couperin's 27 Ordres (Suites), published in four books, were not necessarily conceived to be performed one complete Ordre at a time: seventeenth and eighteenth century attitudes to publication and performance were very different to those of the present day. The composer provided the material grouped by key or genre and the performer made up his own Suite, observing or breaking certain traditions at will, to move his audience to laughter, reflection, or to tears: this is what is meant in the Baroque by "technique", as I have come to understand it. Though there is a current preoccupation with complete works, the seventeenth and eighteenth century performer often chose repertoire with which he could organize Suites in the "French" manner, the Suite thus providing a vehicle for personal choice.
Very close scrutiny of his four books will indicate how Couperin himself accomplished the task of leaving certain options open, despite the printed sequence, in the tradition of his predecessors: Chambonnières, Louis Couperin, d'Anglebert. The preludes of L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin are printed in measured notation only for reasons of visual organization, a practical consideration that does not necessarily determine artistic decisions in performance.
"To conclude about playing the harpsichord, in general, my feeling is that one should not remove himself in any respect from the character which is most suitable to it." François Couperin, in his L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, is again referring to the sound created by the harpsichord - its capacity of resonance. What he wrote is for all informed styles of harpsichord playing regardless of place or time: Byrd, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Bach, Scarlatti...
Skip Sempé
Concert program notes for a performance at the Boston Early Music Festival, with Skip Sempé and Capriccio Stravagante.
French chamber music of the Baroque period is one of the most important European decorative arts. The structure of the décor is that of the dance and expressive movement. The unfolding of events of the greatest variety is the key to the success of this exotic genre of musical composition in which virtuoso intimacy becomes the vehicle of both the composer and the interpreter.
Each age of composition and interpretation has its own especially developed manner of tempering agility with fragility. In the realm of decorative art, the magical conveyance of ephemeral imagery is the element that makes musical performance a one-time event par excellence. The listener is invited is invited to participate fully in the musical experience. In the Parisian salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this participation was one of ease and familiarity. In solo and chamber repertoire, the projection of lute, harpsichord, and viola da gamba results from direct contact with their powerful sonorities. In France , this worship of instrumental sonority as reflected in the composition itself was cultivated as late as Chopin, the last in the great line of keyboard composer-virtuosi reaching back to Chambonnières and the great eighteenth-century clavecinistes.
A concept of relative energies in performance is essential to French Baroque music. The elegance and refinement generally considered to be "good taste" are clarified and defined by a certain energy level in performance: the levels of contrast must be made evident before the listener is able to appreciate and enjoy. This is achieved by leading the ear about and “detouring” it with surprises. As Royer remarked in the preface to his Pièces de clavecin , "one can go from very soft effects to the loudest possible noises, even in the same piece”. Through interpretive adventures that include, above all, the systematic avoidance of system (such as uniform accents and beginnings and endings of phrases), the structure of the music becomes a memory (or souvenir) of a particular performance or interpretation, rather than a point of departure for analysis and argument.
There are no substitutes for action and expression in music that is specifically conceived to unite composition with interpretive performance. The idea of "non - interpretation'' developed by certain specialists of the last few decades is a particularly debased tradition. It is the unwillingness either to unite or separate profanity from profundity that has caused the grave misunderstanding and subsequent misinterpretation of certain earlier repertoires. Perhaps many later interpreters have steered away from the supposedly elusive French Baroque repertoire precisely due to the fact that its analysis has more to do with function than with form. This does not mean that the music is without form, or that the form is in some way poorly organized or obscure. But one must constantly be aware of the decorative ideal behind the conception and construction of the music in order to present it in a provocative way.
Rameau's Pièces de clavecin en concerts (published in 1741) belong to the curious genre of compositions written for solo harpsichord with violin accompaniment. The idea was developed by J. S. Bach in the Sonatas for obbligato harpsichord and violin, and by Rameau's French contemporary Mondonville . But Rameau goes a step further in scoring his concerts with the addition of a viola da gamba. The melody instruments serve to amplify the gestures and harmonic - melodic intentions of the harpsichord. The amplification of sentiment by a high voice (violin) and a low one (viola da gamba), all in the act of accompanying a harpsichord, can be interpreted as a conceit on the part of the ever-inventive Rameau: the idea of the goûts réunis and the boisterous debate over the respective, qualities of French and Italian music resonate in the Italian violin and the French viola da gamba, with the harpsichord in the middle as the moderator. Rameau was untiring in his provocative display of newly invented and novel effects (as opposed to affects), and his use of shock value within the framework of good upbringing and polished manners is clearly his idea of high style.
Marais , on the other hand, is a seventeenth-century virtuoso. In one of his most important virtuoso works, the Folies d'Espagne, he employs variation technique over a ground bass (the Folia) to produce spectacular decoration that is shared between the solo and accompanying parts. Marais , like François Couperin on the harpsichord, was the greatest master of his instrument, composing in a manner made possible only by his virtuoso understanding of the instrument's most exotic capabilities (and those of the bow, as well).
The repertoire of the eighteenth-century French clavecinistes is large and rich. The harpsichord took over where the lute left off, but all is inspired by the touch of the seventeenth-century lutenists. The so-calIed L'Art de toucher is therefore a bit of a double-entendre: toucher meaning to touch the listener and to touch the instrument. In the age of great harpsichord playing, these two ideas were inseparable.
In vocal music (air, cantate, and tragédie-lyrique) text and its projection are of prime importance. The decorative aspects are the ornamentation and the instrumental accompaniment, which are meant to serve the singer in maintaining the dramatic intentions of the text and the vocal line. The eighteenth-century French cantatas are mini-operas on either classical or bucolic subjects. The instrumentalists, though in small chamber music formations, were nonetheless expected to evoke all the passions of the opera orchestra: lightening, thunder, tempests, love, hate, abandon, and even earthquakes.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi recording: "Lully: Divertissements", with Capriccio Stravagante and Guillemette Laurens
Grand spectacle at the court of Versailles, with sublime costume, scenery and machines is well documented; yet the intimate chamber music of this period has received little attention. Both musical and historical sources indicate that chamber performances of Lully's music were frequent and very much in vogue. We know that this repertoire was among the most popular, most performed and most influential music of its time. A glance at the catalogue of Lully's complete works will show how rapidly this music circulated in both France and abroad in sought-after handwritten copies and published versions, in original and parodied forms, and in varying instrumentations. We have therefore decided to present this repertoire for the first time in a one on a part virtuoso chamber music setting. This recreates the Divertissements of the nobility - evening concerts performed by a five part string ensemble, with harpsichord, together with a celebrated singer' renowned for powerful expression in admired airs and recitatives. Reconstructing the Lully sources requires great skill and careful judgement and it is both surprising and unfortunate that there is no modern scholarly edition of the greatest seventeenth century French composer's works. Lully's marriage of poetry and music continues the tradition of his Italian forebears - Monteverdi's seconda prattica, the operatic tradition of Cavalli. The Italian tradition becomes Frenchified by Lully: vocal airs with skeletal harmonic patterns receive doubles (ornamented repeats) in the style of Michel Lambert (Récit d'Orphée, Plainte italienne with its Italian text); expressive and dramatic recitative becomes an absolute model for Rameau (Enfin il est en ma puissance). Instrumental music reaches similarly expressive heights: grand theatrical Ouvertures, character pieces in the guise of dance movements, the Passacailles and Chaconnes in which we pass through the whole gamut of emotions, sensuously and brilliantly arranged over a simple repeating bass of four notes.
When Lully's 24 Violons performed in their orchestral formation in five parts, they employed violins on the top part, three different sizes of viola on the three middle parts, and basses de violon on the bass line. Varying sizes of viola were common in the seventeenth century, as were varying sizes of string bass instruments of the 'cello family. The basse de violon was a largish 'cello, customarily tuned in B-flat, and was known throughout Europe . Nearly all seventeenth century 'cellos were large (and were subsequently reduced in size), and bass players were accustomed to transposing instruments, varied tunings and octave doublings. Though there were no bowed stringed instruments specifically constructed to play at sixteen foot (contrabass) pitch in the Versailles orchestra, it was nevertheless heard in octave doublings from the basses de violon , theorboes and harpsichords.
When performing five part music in a chamber setting, it is likely that different combinations of stringed instruments were considered acceptable. It is inconceivable that the viola da gamba, so highly valued and praised in France (with its greatest exponents in Marais and Forqueray), would not have played in a chamber consort with members of the violin family. Therefore, for this performance we have used two violins, viola, viola da gamba, ‘cello, and harpsichord, as it played the central role for continuo in chamber music.
If indeed Lully's 24 Violons of the Versailles court was the most celebrated Orchestre in Europe ("Orchestra" in the seventeenth century implying a greater variety of possibilities than in our own time) we can seriously consider that its first desk players were the finest instrumentalists in France. They possessed an exacting discipline and refined understanding of what virtuosity meant, and still means, in the French manner: an obsession with sonority, texture and colour, a constant seeking of textually inspired vocal rhetoric on which rhythmic and improvisational liberties are based. An understanding of their well-defined, though extremely flexible accentuation of strong textual or musical ideas through the lengthening of syllables or rhythmic units (rather than the now common placement of bar lines, weighted downbeats and metrical disciplines) is of inestimable importance in the sustaining of both text and melodic expression.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "Francois Couperin: Concert dans le gout théâtral ", with the Capriccio Stravagante Orchestra
An interview with Skip Sempé
Your aim was to show us the theatrical side of Couperin and therefore a Couperin who is very different from the usual image we have of this composer…
Couperin was reputed in his time for the intimism of his works; he was a man with a secret garden, a precursor of the great classical composers. Yet Couperin was Baroque through and through; he was a great society man, and perfectly skilled when it came to expression and dramatic effect in his instrumental works. I wanted to bring out that theatrical side of Couperin and (with a prologue, a few divertissements and a conclusion) recreate a world that would do justice to Monsieur François Couperin and his ‘Illustrious Musical Theatre’. But there was a problem. Although the Concert dans le goût théâtral was originally written as an acte de ballet, we had to face the fact that the Chaconne was irremediably lost, so we would have to replace it. We used L'Amphibie, a transcription for two harpsichords, which Olivier Fortin and I arranged from one of Couperin's passacailles.
What was the origin of your idea of putting together this programme? How did the adventure begin?
About fifteen years ago the musicologist Peter Holman put forward the fascinating idea that Couperin's Concert dans le goût théâtral was originally an acte de ballet in four or five parts, some of which had been irretrievably lost. That being so, then why not take it to its logical conclusion and create a real pastiche, bringing together Couperin's Concert dans le goût théâtral and his complete Airs de cour (Airs sérieux et à boire) to form a light divertissement, very much in the seventeenth-century spirit and modeled on the short operas by Charpentier or Rameau?
Your program, composed of a series of tableaux, departs from the continuity of the Concert dans le goût théâtral as it appears in Couperin's score.
It must be remembered that in sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century musical scores the pieces are not necessarily presented in the order in which they were meant to be performed. Sometimes we have no idea whatsoever of the order of performance in concert. And the pieces could also be performed individually. It was the musician who decided on the order, according to the constraints and opportunities of the moment. I remember reading in the preface to an edition of harpsichord pieces by d'Anglebert that in some cases, the Vaudevilles had been placed at the foot of the page simply to avoid leaving an empty space… It would be a mistake to believe that pieces were performed in the order in which they are written down. So when it came to deciding on the order we were going to use for our ‘soirée’, we had to rely entirely on our own experience of musical tradition. It could have begun either with a dance or with an overture. But an overture generally announces that the curtain is about to go up and many things can happen before that, so we decided to put off the overture until the first divertissement or ‘tableau’. The same goes for the Chaconne: it does not necessarily come at the end or at the beginning. As we had to make up for its absence, we had to decide where to add the ‘missing link’… Men of the theatre were familiar with such practices at that time: they would adapt to the requirements of the situation by re-shaping their work, taking inspiration from others, giving new meaning to old works. Isn't that what Molière did?
The Concert dans le gout théâtral is intended for ‘all sorts of instruments’. How did you choose which instruments to use, strike the right balance between the different sound textures and decide how to highlight each instrument?
Our prime concern in this project was the organization of the instrumental timbres. To my mind, expression is so much more important than all the rest. We shall never know how the music was prepared or how it sounded. There are, of course, conventions that cannot be ignored, but the idea we have today of the Baroque orchestra is very simplistic – ten to twelve instrumentalists and a harpsichord to make it sound nice and Baroque! An idea based on the orchestra Bach used in Leipzig for his Cantatas, Orchestral Suites and Brandenburg Concertos. But the orchestras used at Versailles or in Madrid, Rome, London, Vienna and Hamburg were much larger than that!
It is generally believed that the Baroque orchestra was directed by the first violin. But the lead in Baroque music was in fact determined either by the voice line (possibly played by the first violin) or by the bass line and its resulting harmony. In my eyes, that bass line is very important. It encompasses all the bass instruments: the bowed instruments – cellos in C, bass violins in B flat, six and seven string bass viols, violones in G and in D, double basses – and also of course the plucked instruments. Capriccio Stravagante brings together bowed instruments, bass bowed instruments and plucked instruments (two or three harpsichords, one or two harps, two, three or four theorboes) – that is one of its typical features. Our sound is based on that deep register, which provides a sort of rich cushion.
But you also pay very great attention to the voice…
For me, it is really the same thing. Both the voice and the bass line are necessary. There is a tendency nowadays, in Baroque performances on stage, in concert and on recordings, to give priority to the voices at the expense of the instruments, or vice versa. As if the aim of an interpretation was not to bring out all the elements of the score! In any case that is what I believe… Everything I do tends to defend and illustrate the underlying principle of bringing out all the elements in the score. But when it comes to bringing out the voice line, Jay Bernfeld is a real magician. He is in charge of Capriccio Stravagante's voice/continuo workshop. He is truly unique in the world of early music, equally at ease in the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque repertoires. He is passionately interested in rich vocal and instrumental sound.
Reconstruction, re-creation for orchestra… your interpretation is in fact a creation. Afterwards it is difficult not to hear the Concert dans le goût théâtral as anything other than an operatic pastiche!
As early as 1932 Alfred Cortot recorded his own version of the Concert using a wide variety of instruments. But from the 1960s onwards –except in the case of revivals of long-forgotten early works or first performances of contemporary compositions –interpretation was no longer regarded as an act of artistic creation. Excluding the act of interpretation from the field of creation was a very big mistake. But all that changed with the visionary ideas of Harnoncourt and Leonhardt. Thanks to their open-mindedness, interpretation became a real adventure in artistic creation. But the inventive and creative potential was no doubt kept in check by their Germanic culture – a culture permeated and governed (sometimes excessively so) by the influence of the sacred and secular works of J. S. Bach. Without underestimating the contribution made by those great pioneers, it is high time all that was demystified or demythologised – particularly where the interpretation of seventeenth and eighteenth century French music is concerned. Sometimes I get the impression that interpretations of those repertoires, which are highly popular with audiences both in France and elsewhere, still conform all too often to the ideas of those great pioneers of the 1970s and 80s. And without wishing to be controversial, I will say that forty years of conformism is a bit too much for musicians, concert audiences and those who listen to recordings. An interpreter who is sincere must constantly be able to experience and pass on the thrill of adventure, the ecstasy of discovery…
This is also the first recording by the Capriccio Stravagante Orchestra. Capriccio Stravagante is now also performing as a large Baroque orchestral group…
Whether as a small or a large ensemble, Capriccio Stravagante remains faithful to its original principles. It is never sees ‘the long arm and heavy hand’ of a conductor. I have never belonged to an orchestra and I shall never be a ‘man of the orchestra’. Capriccio operates like the seventeenth century ateliers run by painters or instrument makers. Teamwork is the key word, and the conductor is merely a man in charge, an artist amongst other artists. That idea is very important to me. One could compare Capriccio Stravagante to a secret garden belonging to all its members, but in which the garden is more important than the secret. The musicians of Capriccio, from all horizons and all of them among the finest instrumentalists of the day, come together for regular work sessions. We started playing together fifteen years ago, with a basic nucleus of six musicians. Then that basic nucleus became twelve, then eighteen. So the Capriccio Stravagante Orchestra was the next logical step – a final ‘extravagance’, so to speak! And very much in the spirit of seventeenth-century French music: the publications of instrumental works were intended for the finest musicians of the day.
CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "Canto Mediterraneo", with Capriccio Stravagante and Guillemette Laurens
Ad quest'acque,
Da cui nacque
Mia gran madre, e chiara Dea,
Citerea;
Ch'arde il mondo in questo loco
Del mio foco.
From these waters,
The birthplace of my great mother
and glittering Goddess Cytherea;
Here I have come to set this world alight with my fire.
The fabled Mediterranean voice's power has transported the listener from the time of Euripides to Enrico Caruso, our souls careening from tears to ecstasy.
Romance languages have been especially friendly to voices. From opera's creation Italian has traditionally been its language, a tradition unfettered by national boundaries: throughout the seventeenth century Italian opera took Europe by storm.
The conviction with which the finest singers performed reached their audiences through the powers of language, timbre, persuasion and seduction. The sung poetic text, when delivered by the best singers, is the touchstone of lyric communication. This compelling style of declamatory singing, relic of the antique theater, was championed at the Renaissance courts of the Medici, the Camerata of Bardi and on the Baroque operatic stages of Naples, Paris, Dresden and London. Instrumentalists, in their function as soloists and accompanists, developed their own refined art of phrasing by working closely with singers and listening carefully to the manner in which the voices articulated consonants, vowels and syllables and colored the various registers of the voice, molding the musical line in to all the acrobatic and exotic shapes necessary to provide sufficient expression.
Arcadelt and Juan del Encina attained an astonishing celebrity which they retained well into the succeeding generations, owing to the international popularity of their works. These great masters paved the way for Caccini, whose "Amarilli" inspired a veritable epidemic of paraphrases from every nation and for every instrument.
Catchy melodies and infectious rhythms enrich the sixteenth century repertoire in a flowering of popular poetic and musical forms: the villota, villanella, villancico. The formidable contribution of lesser known composers such as Scandello, Lambardi and Azzaiolo add great sparkle to these genres, striking in their mélange of wit and sincerity.
The instrumental music of the sixteenth century makes significant detours into the art of virtuoso ornamentation and diminution. This practice reflects the wide variety of Instrumental techniques in development and refinement. Many musical instruments were perfected in the sixteenth century: stringed, wind and keyboard, and the violins, viols, lutes, flutes, harps and harpsichords all had a singular richness and transparency which made them ideal as solo and consort instruments in repertoires ranging from dance music on standard bass patterns to polyphony. A real interpretive grasp of seventeenth century vocal and instrumental music is virtually impossible without a great familiarity with the earlier traditions of form, instrumentation, technique and the instantaneous recognition of rhythmic interest and freedom which never hinder poetic expression.
Caccini and Frescobaldi represent the new generation of monodists who favored and developed the basso continuo accompaniment as a means of magnifying the vocal text. This circle of composers pushed harmonic daring to extremes, and was criticized in its own time for the unbridled expression the style conveyed. Love and lament were popular themes, and the love song is equally present in the vocal expression of Frescobaldi and the instrumental equivalent of Marini. They both feature the virtuoso dialogue between soloist and basso continuo so essential to the ephemeral effect of spontaneous creation and improvisation, from control to abandon.
The Spanish works give us a glimpse into Iberian wonder. The simplicity of melody and text gives this repertoire an allure which recalls the music of centuries earlier, through the use of three part writing and the mystical influence of the Moors.
André Malraux remarked that "The music of Europe 's Golden Age is the sound of Paradise Lost", and the Mediterranean voice, in all its guises, is the crowning glory of this paradise.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi recording: "Monteverdi: Lamento d'Arianna / Combatimento", with Capriccio Stravagante and Guillemette Laurens
Skip Sempé in conversation with Thomas Mace
Mace: Despite the tremendous fame of the Lamento d'Arianna in Monteverdi's time, the music survives in shockingly incomplete form. This is an extreme case, but does the lush sound of your ensemble depend on reconstruction, or orchestration?
Sempé: If you mean that in the usual twentieth century sense, not at all. We use the surviving material as it would have been used then. Listeners are sometimes surprised to learn that nothing in our performance material is written out for the continuo. Even the instrumental passages for the continuo strings playing in consort are all completely improvised. Our style and the continuo instrumentation are shaped by many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musical sources like the 1589 Intermedi for La Pellegrina, L'Orfeo, Con che soavità (from Monteverdi's seventh book of madrigals), and the Combatimento as well as the instrumental ensemble music of Castello, Marini, and their circle. But did I sit down and recompose Monteverdi à la Stokowski? Not at all.
Mace: Do you see yourself as creating definitive performing editions of the Lamento d'Arianna and the Combatimento?
Sempé: First and foremost, what I've made is a performing version of the Lamento d'Arianna for a particular artist: our singer Guillemette Laurens, a singularly dramatic and impassioned interpreter. Here, I’ve followed the practice of any seventeenth-century composer by flattering the abilities of all our soloists, vocal and instrumental. All early composers had the habit of writing and arranging for specific performers and a capable twentieth-century interpreter must do the same. It's like casting a play - the art of putting fascinating interpreters together for a specific repertoire or a specific event and letting them do what they want to do. Our casting of Konstantinos Paliatsaras for the Combatimento is , for instance, based on the Baroque ideal of drama in its ancient sense, i.e., « action », as the concitato (agitated) style was foremost in Monteverdi's mind when he created the Combatimento. But as far as the idea of creating an edition goes, the idea itself is off the mark. The modern idea of Urtext - a musical work fully defined by notation - it's useless in all the dramatic works of Monteverdi. There is no Urtext when so much of the music was improvised by the performers. So much of seventeenth-century music is continuo playing - an art of total flexibility to serve the style of a particular interpreter. One chronicler reports of the first performance of the Lamento d'Arianna that the string accompaniment continuously changed its sounds with every change in the music. I understand this as the high art of improvisation, a freedom that I think has become the trademark of Capriccio Stravagante's performances.
Mace: With so much freedom, what happens to the commonly-accepted idea of "authenticity" in early-music performance?
Sempé: The whole idea of “authenticity" getting it « right » - is a sure way of getting it wrong. Music of the seventeenth-century - indeed, of any age - is always ephemeral and never finished. Catering to the modern idea that performance defines a static work, for example like limiting or omitting ornamentation on a recording because it will be heard more than once, is terribly distorting. Through rehearsal and experimental work methods, I'm trying to dismiss the modern idea that earlier performance conditions were standardized - pitch, temperament, standard continuo group, the lot. You can't take the 1623 print of the Lamento d'Arianna and create a definitive performing edition for our time. It totally misses the point. Of course, you have to look at all the sources, compare everything and know everything - as an example, the harmonic richness of the five-voice madrigal version of the Lamento d'Arianna is very influential in our performance. You’ll also find simple errors in early prints that need amending, for example by checking the Lamento d'Arianna print against an autograph copy in the hand of Monteverdi's important contemporary Luigi Rossi. But this process only creates the material we interpret. It can never be a substitute for interpretation. We rehearse like a jazz ensemble and concentrate on practice rather than theories. This is one of the secrets of preparing a work such as the Farina Capriccio Stravagante.
Mace: You are becoming increasingly well known as specialists in Baroque opera, and I've noticed that the press has consistently remarked on the success of your theatrical approach in concert. How do you bring this to the medium of recording?
Sempé: In the Lamento d'Arianna, Combatimento and Farina recordings, I aim first at restoring the theater. This comes through even to a listener who misses the experience of the public performance. We are seeking to create a theatrical performance rehearsed under theatrical circumstances where things always change. In short, we are trying to rediscover the drama in this music and knock people out with it. Baroque music should never have been considered a neoclassical movement - this was romantic, passionate at its creation and it must be now.
Essay for The Musical Times
Skip Sempé considers the need for a new kind of authenticity
My own preoccupation with the works of Monteverdi springs from a very simple observation: this music is desperately in need of interpreters. The best interpreters divide their time and energy between the composer and the public. The public (at least, that public for which influential interpreters strive to perform) divides its attention between the composer and the interpreter. Who therefore would dream of apologizing for linking the creators and the interpreters of great musical performances? Thus, Tchaikovsky and Nureyev, Scriabin and Horowitz, Bach and Landowska and Puccini and Callas are inseparably linked without either composer or interpreter being compromised.
The performance of Monteverdi did not get off to a particularly good start in the twentieth century. The old madrigal recordings by Nadia Boulanger, for instance, negligent in variety, sound and expression. are of purely historical interest (those interested in historical performance should not confuse her approach with the immense, innately virtuoso playing and understanding behind, say, Landowska's Goldberg Variations or Schnabel's Beethoven Sonatas). Subsequent Anglophone attempts at Monteverdi interpretation in the 1960s fared little better, relying on that deadly lack of expression and color which is the furthest possible option for any distinguished performance of this repertoire. Clearly then it is of the utmost importance that recordings should not be regarded as the rule for performance practice.
Only recently I read an interview with an influential orchestral conductor on the back page of the International Herald Tribune. He was asked why he had not entered the world of period instrument performance or baroque music, since his training (English choir school plus organ and piano) qualified him so perfectly for this. It was then that I understood that the no-risk, intellectual approach to packaging an earlier music performance completely misrepresented this music, predicated as it was entirely on academic standards that had little or nothing to do with shared musical experience and everything to do with standardization. The creative sterility imposed by relying on print rather than performance in what is a fluid and highly charged area of emotional expression is evident to any musically literate person who listens to works from this period. The idea of swift change from one emotion to another, from one affect to another, from one sound world to another, is completely contrary to modern conservatory training, in which sobriety and reliability have become the hallmarks of deadly and deadening performances, non-events which shun all virtuosity and refuse any possible risk of contact with the listener, where ornamentation and improvisation are forbidden because they can be criticized as part of a personality cult, and risk is to be eschewed in the name of non-interpretative conformity to a printed page - effectively the abandonment of the music by the performer.
At the premiere of Monteverdi's Arianna the public wept during the 'Lamento'. It seems to me that if a performance today does not leave the listener similarly dumbfounded and breathless, Monteverdi's magic is not being achieved. There can be no substitute for passion; the text and music of the Lamento d'Arianna demand a depth of interpretative expression that is faithful to its own truths and is not cribb'd, cabined and confined within the sterile boundaries of academic conformity. And in Combatimento too we are confronted with twenty minutes of dramatically changing human emotion, a range and intensity of feeling never experienced within such a small space of time before the premiere of this extraordinary and important work.
The whole idea of 'authenticity' - getting it 'right' is a sure way of getting it wrong. Music of the seventeenth century - indeed, of the any century - is always ephemeral and never finished. Catering to the modern idea that any performance defines a static work (by limiting or omitting ornamentation on a recording because it will be heard more than once, for example) is terribly distorting; such an idea owes more to modern concepts of reference and analysis than to the realities of music-making. You can't take the 1623 print of the Lamento d'Arianna, for instance, and create a definitive performing edition for our time. This approach totally misses the point. Of course, you have to look at all the sources, compare everything and know everything, - knowledge of the harmonic richness of the five-voice madrigal version of the Lamento can be very influential in performance. And of course one also finds simple errors in early prints that need amending - in the case of the Lamento by checking against an autograph copy in the hand of Monteverdi's important contemporary. Luigi Rossi. But this, process only creates the material from which we interpret; it can never be a substitute for the experience of interpretation. Indeed, as far as creating a definitive edition goes, the idea itself is off the mark.
The modern concept of an urtext - a musical work fully defined by notation - is irrelevant to the dramatic works of Monteverdi. How can there be an urtext when so much of the music was improvised by the performers? All early composers were accustomed to write and arrange for specific performers, and a capable twentieth century interpreter must do the same. It's like casting a play - the art of putting fascinating interpreters together for a specific repertoire or a specific event and letting them do what they want. This brings us to the key question: what is the point of Monteverdi's drama? In musical-historical terms, we might say that it is with the works of Monteverdi that we enter the arena of opera. Unfortunately the tics and habits which are part of the current vogue for performing and recording seventeenth century operas are based on a total and uniquely contemporary misunderstanding of what makes a truly great voice, a truly great instrumentalist or a truly great continuo player. Never before has the letter been so slavishly preferred to the spirit - an especially ironic situation with regard to baroque music, with its patterns of improvisation and virtuoso interpretation. Monteverdi's musical language (Italian, vocal and instrumental) is largely misunderstood in our time. For that matter, much of seventeenth century musical language is still under-interpreted. Why is this? Because there has been too much theory and not enough listening. The first thing is to forget everything theoretical. Any reliance on historical information or documentation is useless to the act and art of musical performance. That is not to deny their value as background knowledge, but such knowledge is useless unless it leads to beauty, through the skills of singers or instrumentalists who have got past the point of believing in anything but an enthusiastic public reaction to their own instincts.
Musical expression in the seventeenth century is exceptionally concerned with virtuoso sound production and projection as an integral part of the composer and performer's musical idea - as much part of the musical concept as form and content. All the best composers of the time expected the ultimate in variety of sound, expression and nuance, drama and emotion on a grand scale. This was, after all, the period that saw the birth of 'the grand manner'. Seventeenth-century music is also very much concerned with continuo playing - an art of total flexibility that serves the style of each individual interpreter (one chronicler reported of the first performance of the Lamento d'Arianna that the string accompaniment continuously changed its sound with every change in the music). Monteverdi's already fiendishly difficult vocal writing becomes impossible when subject to the kind of metronomic delivery we find in much of the early music movement's “anti-vocal" approach.
This approach has been responsible for the production of a strictly twentieth-century instrumental delivery, associated with the values instilled into conservatory students, competition winners and with 'professionalism' - all areas in which risk is to be eliminated, interpretation eschewed and strict conformism overvalued. Nothing could be farther from Monteverdi's dramatic intentions than the twentieth-century concept of 'right' and 'wrong' versions. In this respect one must never encourage fear on the part of the artists in a rehearsal, a public performance or a recording. We should use the surviving material as it would have been used in its own time. Listeners today are sometimes surprised to learn that nothing in our own performance material is written out for the continuo. Even the instrumental passages for the continuo strings playing in consort are all completely improvised. And recitativo, a musical form based entirely on language, not on upbeats, downbeats and cut-offs, should never be conducted. It is in its very nature to resist any form of interference with the language’s own rhythmic freedoms. So when casting a Combatimento one should make a decision based on the baroque ideal of drama (in its ancient sense, i.e. 'action'), since the concitato (agitated) style was foremost in Monteverdi's mind when he created this work.
It is evident that the only hope is to take a radical departure and follow instinct rather than 'credentials'. And here I must say that it is simply not true that 'anyone can play baroque music' - everyone is not an opera conductor, choir conductor, vocal coach, language coach, brilliant continuo player, brilliant ensemble player, brilliant harpsichordist, brilliant historian, brilliant instrumentalist, brilliant musicologist, brilliant singer, brilliant soloist. For brilliance was what counted in seventeenth century musical performance and creativity; the musical culture of the time was not concerned with modern standards of academic exactitude. It was concerned with the passionate expression of what were held to be valid truths.
Capriccio Stravagante's recent recordings of those marvels of their time, Combatimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and the Lamento d'Arianna, were offered as our own tribute to celebrate the Monteverdi year. We feel that they shed new light on current performance standards, but in this case neither the composer nor the artists were subject to the 'standardizing' approach commonly found in current attitudes to performances of early music.
Nothing that Capriccio Stravagante does - whether vocal approach, instrumental sound, ornamentation, improvisation and the use of effects which are successful only in free and expressive meter - is tied down to current 'traditions' of early music performance. We deliberately opted for the most exciting, beautiful, sparkling and rare Monteverdi performances we could imagine, since our reason for performing this music in public or on disc is to bring it into vogue for the widest possible music-loving and experience-seeking audience. In our preparations we relied on experience in preference to hearsay and conjecture. We also insist on breaking bad habits that have become the trademarks of unambitious and indifferent performances of baroque music. Enhanced animation and dramatic conviction on the part of the musicians who furnish the continuo are the key to the theatrical result (our style and continuo instrumentation are shaped by many sixteenth and seventeenth-century, musical sources, such as the 1589 Intermedi for La Pellegrina, L'Orfeo, Con che soavita from Monteverdi's seventh book of Madrigals and Combatimento, as well as the instrumental ensemble music of Castello, Marini and their circle), a result which we believe to be faithful to the composer's own theatrically colorful intentions.
In our Monteverdi recordings, our first aim was to restore that sense of theatre so much a part of all forms of artistic activity in the seventeenth century. This drama, this theatrical magic, must come through even on a recording. We seek to create an experience that has been rehearsed under theatrical circumstances, in which things are constantly in flux. One of our major tenets is that fear of error has no place in music - if you are uncomfortable with the repertoire, you should try performing something else. In short, we are trying to rediscover the drama and vitality of this music and knock people out with it. One of the greatest musical errors ever made was to consider baroque music as a neo-classical movement - it was always romantic, passionate music both in its creation and its performance, and it should be known as such today.
Capriccio Stravagante deliberately offers something very different. I believe strongly that the risks taken by real virtuosos, real soloists and first-rate chamber musicians provide the only honest solution for the portrayal and animation of Monteverdi's genius. That was how it was in the composer's day - why should we settle for less in the twentieth century?
Skip Sempé
Concert program notes for performances at "La Folle Journée " in Nantes , Bilbao and Lisbon , with Skip Sempé and Olivier Fortin
Since the rediscovery of Domenico Scarlatti in the nineteenth century and the revival of his keyboard works in the twentieth, the influences of Spain on his creativity and music have intrigued both performers and audiences.
How to convey these particular elements of Scarlatti's genius at local color and folklore? They are associated with melody, harmony, rhythm and their combined gestures, and the manner of identifying them on the harpsichord, on which Scarlatti was perhaps the most pyrotechnical celebrity that ever existed.
Virtuosity is identified as an amplification of the musical intentions of a composer or interpreter. The choice of instruments to "amplify" the harpsichord are, quite naturally, also sonic - acoustic. The most natural plucked instruments for effective accompaniment of a solo harpsichord work is in fact another harpsichord, and for the music of Scarlatti, the guitar - instrument inseparable from Spain . These melodic and harmonic instruments are further amplified by a further element inseparable from Spain : the castanets. So, these accompanying instruments are actually a basso continuo section which performs the exact function of amplifying all the gestures and sounds of the soloist, thereby increasing the effect.
"Duende" and virtuosity are both relative to the recognition of the brevity life on earth. As Lorca has pointed out, Bach and the bullfight can both have "duende”… Duende and virtuosity are therefore distinct but inseparable elements of great musical performance. Scarlatti, in his high-risk virtuosity, was the leading gambler- performer on the harpsichord in its heyday. The sleight of hand which he shared with Frescobaldi, Froberger, the Italians at Naples , Louis Couperin, Bach and Handel begs for interpretive redefinition and even "amplification". The effect is one of further enhancement, providing an alternative of increased dynamic and textural liveliness as well as an enhanced volume level which communicate the raw passion and unbounded virtuosity of the great Neapolitan who, under the spell of Spain 's magic, became Don Domenico Escarlate.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "Canto a mi Caballero: The Tradition of Antonio de Cabezon", with Skip Sempé and Capriccio Stravagante
The music of sixteenth-century Spain was just as cosmopolitan and varied as its culture, swiftly evolving under pan-European political alliances and long-distance trade. Even as gold poured into Seville from the new world, musical treasures were carried into the peninsula by the musicians of the capilla flamenca, the Flemish chapel that accompanied Charles V on travels throughout his northern empire and his kingdom of Spain . The capilla flamenca represented a kind of institution that flourished in many parts of Europe, for Franco-Flemish singers and composers were unsurpassed in the polyphonic art, and chapels as far away as Rome sought these Northerners to fill their ranks. Josquin des Prez easily the most celebrated of the oltre montani worked his way from the Papal Chapel to Ferrara, the French Court, and back to Flanders; Cipriano de Rore traveled South across the Alps to settle finally at San Marco in Venice; Nicolas Gombert visited Spain as part of the capilla flamenca (not to mention seeing quite a bit of the oceanic world during his punishment on the galleys); and Jacques Arcadelt worked for a time in both Florence and France. The imitative counterpoint of the Franco-Flemish was the lingua franca of Catholic church music, and their Masses and motets came to be heard and copied down and performed in Iberia just as across the rest of Europe .
Alongside sacred music, these Northerners popularized the polyphonic chanson in Italy and Spain at least in the elite circles of court and chapel and among the works imported into Spain were French-texted songs such as "Je prens en gré" and the famous setting of a poem attributed to François I himself, "Doulce memoire." Eventually Italy produced a polyphonic genre of vernacular song to rival the French chanson, and by 1540 even Flemish composers such as Rore and Arcadelt were writing madrigals. "Anchor che col partire" and "Il bianco e dolce cigno" are two exquisite examples of this new genre, ones that reached a phenomenally broad public thanks to the acceleration of Venetian printing ventures. The Spanish, however, never managed to gear up music presses to such a degree, or to create an indigenous music as ripe for export as the chanson or madrigal, and so their native forms rubbed shoulders with polyphonic imports throughout the sixteenth century.
What the Spanish did achieve was a uniquely Iberian assimilation of these northern goods to their own stylistic aims, a tendency beautifully exemplified by the life and oeuvre of Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566). Although blind from birth, Cabezón began his princely career as organist to Queen Isabella in 1526, serving thereafter in the Spanish chamber consort of Charles V, and, after 1548, in the chapel of Philip II. At court, Cabezón surely interacted with the musicians and repertory of the capilla flamenca, gaining familiarity with the music of Josquin, whose impeccable counterpoint Cabezón managed to translate into the idioms of his own instruments, keyboard and harp. One work by Josquin that Cabezón must certainly have known, if its nickname is true, is the chanson "Mille regretz," a song known as the "Canción del Emperador," or the song of the emperor, Charles V, which only goes to show how firmly Josquin‘s music took root in Spain.
Philip II valued Cabezón more than any of his other artists except, perhaps, Titian, and Cabezón traveled with the king to Italy , Holland , and England , where he played at the wedding of Philip to Mary Tudor in Winchester Cathedral. Cabezón wrote keyboard fantasies (tientos), arranged Spanish tunes, chansons, and madrigals for keyboard (glosadas), and composed variation sets (diferencias). His genius at variation technique in particular seems to have influenced the English composer and harpsichordist William Byrd, whose emulation of Cabezón reversed, to some extent, the flow of influence into Spain from abroad. But for the most part, Cabezón, his son Hernando, and Cabezón‘s contemporary, Luys de Narváez, tended to arrange the music of Northerners for keyboard and vihuela.
The practice of echo, gloss, and transference resounds in the musical theme of this program, Canto a mi caballero, which refers to a complex of Spanish songs based on a monophonic folksong that surfaces among other places in a play by Lope de Vega, "El caballero de Olmedo" (written circa 1620). In the play, the knight hears this song, which warns him not to venture out into darkness, a warning he disregards. The stark juxtaposition of light and dark in Vega‘s verse shows the atmosphere surrounding the death of the hero to contain a psychological darkness, and the implication of ghosts behind its chiaroscuro suggests a spiritual lesson to be wary of occult and hidden influences on the soul. Among the composers attracted to this song and its series of settings were Cabezón (who arranged the tune in his inimitable style for keyboard), Cristóbal de Morales (who based his four-part Missa Dezilde al cavallero on the tune), and Gombert (who, in his only setting of a Spanish text, used the tune as a cantus firmus). Thus this uniquely Spanish melody charged sacred polyphony, secular song, and instrumental variation with its magnetic allusions to the spirit world.
(Commentary by Kate van Orden)
Interview with Skip Sempé
Kate van Orden: What motivated you to make an instrumental recording of music from Cabezón‘s time?
Skip Sempé: The place to start is with performance. Cabezón‘s temperament was attuned to a poetic truth beyond words. Here text projection works through the magic of sonority rather than language. The reason to play this repertory on instruments is not because Cabezón and his contemporaries did it that way, which we know to be the case; the reason goes deeper, to why virtuoso instrumentalists insisted that meaning resides in sound before language.
Kate van Orden: Certainly the Medieval and Renaissance instrumentarium of shawms, lutes, and vielles basically came to Europe through Spain . Likewise, the vihuela de arco (which became the viola da gamba) and vihuela de mano are the earliest characteristically Spanish instruments. Is the notion of music without words particularly Spanish?
Skip Sempé: Federico García Lorca gives a beautiful explanation of Spanish style in terms of "duende," that demonic seizure by the muses whose transcendental impulse Lorca sought to define: "The duende‘s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm." (Lorca, In Search of Duende). Through glossing, the duende of the interpreter brings new form to a known work with daring and virtuosity. Cabezón, I believe, had duende, which, in the sixteenth century, would have been called possession, the ability to ravish the souls of listeners from their bodies.
Kate van Orden: So instrumental music Spanish or otherwise transmits meaning in a language beyond words?
Skip Sempé: It is not by chance that the sixteenth-century instrumentarium was perfected at the same time text setting began to take precedence over the rules of expert composition. To perform a sixteenth-century vocal work instrumentally turns the instruments into voices in a very particular way. My idea of interpretation is to do what an interpreter does, to translate, in this case, to the instrumental idiom. Text has always had the reputation of fostering the most powerful expression, but this is not so for an instrumentalist. All true virtuoso instrumentalists create an opulence of sound and gesture to convey meaning. My new attitude toward this repertory is, in a word, affect. Affect presides over text.
Kate van Orden: Do you feel a special affinity for Cabezón because he played keyboard and harp?
Skip Sempé: All great instrumentalists know that their instrument is their voice, and that their sound is their text. This program pays homage to the missing voice of Capriccio Stravagante, Michel Murgier, who projected that magic of sonority.
CD liner notes for the Alpha recording: "Venezia Stravagantissima", with the Capriccio Stravagante Renaissance Orchestra
Skip Sempé in conversation with Denis Grenier
Denis Grenier: You were born in California , but that was no more than an accident: in actual fact you grew up in New Orleans , a place that, to judge by your temperament and your music-making, sometimes gives me the impression of being a Mediterranean port; to be honest, there seems to be a lot of the Italian in you.
Skip Sempé: Well, I am just a member of a long tradition of musicians Dufay, Josquin, Froberger, Bach - who have been inspired and affected by Italian temperament and tradition.
I suppose that as far as "time travel" is concerned, there is almost nothing more Italian than the "Grand Tour", so passionately charged with curiosity about the antique world. Remember Thomas Coryat, the eccentric Englishman who walked to Venice on foot? He wrote what can be considered the first travel guide to Europe , "Coryat's Crudities", published in 1611, and indeed he mentions his especially spectacular musical experience in the "Observations of Venice".
"The third feast was upon Saint Roches day being Saturday and the sixth day of August, where I heard the best musicke that ever I did in all my life both in the morning and the afternoone, so good that I would willingly goe an hundred miles a foote at any time to heare the like... This feast consisted principally of Musicke, which was both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so superexcellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like. But how others were affected with it I know not; for mine own part I can say this, that I was for the time even rapt up with Saint Paul into the third heaven... Sometimes sixeteene played together upon their instruments, ten Sagbuts, foure Cornets, and two Viloldegambaes of an extraordinary greatness; sometimes tenne, sixe Sagbuts and foure Cornets; sometimes two, a Cornet and a treble viol." Coryat then goes on to mention "two theorboes, to which they sung also, who yeelded admirable sweet musicke", as well as that "every time that every severall musicke (that is, all the musicians) played, the Organs, whereof there are seven faire paire in that room, standing all in a row together, plaied with them".
Denis Grenier: In the period that interests us here, the sixteenth century, was the center of musical and artistic creation in Europe . Are you not yourself a Renaissance man, a creative performer? The score is your raw material, a sketch that you complete, that you transfigure...
Skip Sempé: The score is the work of the composer. The performance is the work of the performer. In the creative interpretation of works from this period, it is absolutely essential that performers reject the restricted conception regarding the role of the performing musician which has become the norm in our time. If the listener is not completely carried away by the performance, the "message" of the composition cannot possibly be perceived. The composer's message has come down to us on the page, and the performer's task is to interpret that message. The current idea of musical "creation" has become too synonymous with either the work of living composers, or, in the field of earlier repertoire, the act of reviving forgotten repertoire.
One must remember that the act of interpretive creation also exists, and that it is the most essential ingredient in the recipe for outstanding performances. So we don't neglect this aspect of performing. The extraordinary ornamentation (in the diminution tradition) in which the musicians engage here is part of the performer's task. In our time, musical directors may well ask the performers to avoid ornamentation, but in the seventeenth century, an instrumentalist or singer who could not ornament brilliantly would have been perceived as an amateur. In addition to this sort of invention, we have also transcribed vocal music for instrumental performance (as was done at the time), and there are quite a few important secrets to this kind of arranging. Even with music that appears relatively simple on the page, many musical decisions have to be made. These decisions are neither intellectual, historical nor musicological. They deal exclusively with interpretation and performance. The printed indication on many of these scores suggests performances "per ogni sorte di strumenti" for all kinds of instruments. The different instrumental possibilities provoke different varieties of solutions and arrangements, so we have calculated that into the performances accordingly.
The past four decades have been particularly rich in the discovery of forgotten repertoire and have fostered a tremendous acceleration in momentum for both musical instrument making and a clearer understanding of the fundamental problems that affect the performance of earlier repertoire. Sadly, significantly less progress has been made in the realms of efficient interpretation and effective musical communication. This fact can be quite possibly attributed to the negligent necessity of engaging in certain evils, but having reached the limit at which new possibilities of effective musical continuation and artistic rediscovery require the reconsideration of current rules and norms, many of those rules and norms must be abandoned. Now that "together and in tune" are considered a matter of taste rather than a matter of fact, only one question remains: is the performance expressive or not?
Denis Grenier: Venice is neither Rome nor Florence : the Renaissance in Venice has its own character, and Venetian music has its own palette of sounds. How would you define this Venetian musical universe, and its specific qualities, both intrinsically and as reflected in this project?
Skip Sempé: Venice , as Coryat reminds us, enjoyed splendid and robust sonorities. We know about the cornetti and sackbuts of San Marco, we know about the Gabrielis, Monteverdi and all their collaborators and contemporaries. Venice was also a major publishing capital of Europe at the time, so the diffusion of repertoire from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century is part of Venice 's cultural contribution to the history of music. Musical instruments invented in this period tended to come from , and even Venice : cornetti, sackbuts, viols, lutes, harpsichords, organs, regals...
Let us imagine a young viol player from London , who visits Venice for the first time around 1600. Canzonas, dance music, madrigals and their instrumental transcriptions form the entertainment. He produces a pavan of his friend Holborne, just off the press, and asks the Venetians to play it in "the Venetian manner". Generally content with five viols and a lute, he is surprised to hear twenty - three instrumentalists perform "consort music". The Venetians, impressed by the composition, ask who wrote it, and the tourist replies "Antonio Incerto", to test his Italian.
Denis Grenier: The style of Capriccio Stravagante is based on a quest for sound, for an original sonority. This multi-faceted approach is notable for its vigorously assertive musicality, its playful side, its experience of sensuality, its phrasing, its own special bouquet, its sumptuousness...
Skip Sempé: Many important and exciting developments occurred in instrument making during the sixteenth century. For example, bass instruments were invented. Previously, large instruments (like the bass viol and the bass sackbut) were unknown: the earlier instrumentarium was more or less divided into "soft" (indoor) and "loud" (church and outdoor) instruments. These two categories of instruments created a certain dynamic, but did not permit the sumptuousness that the invention of the bass instruments in sixteenth century allowed. The invention of bass instruments made a new sound, and therefore made way for an entirely new territory in musical composition and musical performance, from accompanied monody to the instrumental ensembles and orchestras throughout the seventeenth century.
Denis Grenier: What is the role of the instruments? The Capriccio Stravagante Renaissance Orchestra?
Skip Sempé: Almost all of the musical instruments that we now refer to as "Baroque" instruments are actually Renaissance inventions, which had been perfected by the middle of the sixteenth century. The question often proposed concerns whether the musical instrument or the musical composition came first. I am convinced that the invention of the musical instrument generally came first, meaning that the invention of the instrument inspired the manner of instrumental composition. The idea that the composer invented everything (including the instruments?) is a false notion which began in the nineteenth century. Landowska said, early in the game, that "the power of sonority is not a novelty". Without knowing it, Landowska virtually invented the entire early music movement with this one observation. In other words, dispassionate sobriety deprives the musical performance of its essential qualities of intention, power, drama and nobility. This is all we can really say about the music, because interpretation is inseparable from performance.
Denis Grenier: When we get down to basics, doesn‘t this highly colorful music, which is both robust and agile, relate to the jazz you were immersed in when you were younger? Doesn‘t it share the same spirit of improvisation as that spontaneous style of music, which would be desecrated by excessive codification, definition of its outlines, organization of its flow, pre-planning of its gestures? Aren‘t we dealing here with music of the instant? With the dance?
Skip Sempé: In fact, despite my background, Renaissance music is what I listened to the most. The ideas of improvisation, spontaneity and "making it look easy" are the elements which I inherited from the jazz tradition. Dance music forms an important part of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. What is innovative in an effective performance of dance music is the contrast between regularity and irregularity of rhythm and of gesture. The surprise and brilliance which are required in dance music are based on planned as well as improvised phrasings and gestures.
Performances of Renaissance (and Baroque, for that matter) dance music on "automatic pilot" only serve to convey a weak impression of the repertoire. The best instrumental virtuosi reject being forced into an unexpressive framework, because their instruments speak so much more effectively when they are allowed to treat them as musical instruments in allowing the advantage of varying degrees of resonance including optimum resonance without damaging the quality of the sound. It is not a matter of dynamics loud and soft but of resonance. This idea of mastery of resonances, on a solo instrument, in chamber ensembles, or in orchestras, is part of the lost art of playing on "period instruments". Many so-called "Baroque Orchestras" these days could care less about applying this essential technique, so, these orchestras are effectively modern groups playing on period instruments. I only mention this because Capriccio Stravagante has set out to do something which is radically opposed to this standardized way of thinking. The instruments themselves are not enough. It is important to mention that this mastery of resonances is also one of the many secrets to great singing, and this is what instrumentalists imitated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Denis Grenier: Caprice, extravagance, fantasy, these are the principles your ensemble‘s "trademark" claims as its own. Doesn‘t this "inspired lunacy" reach its apogee in the superlative of "Venezia Stravagantissima"?
Skip Sempé: The "historical performance practice" debate has popularized and legitimized an intellectually weak and philosophically dishonest argument designed to remove the ultimate allure that has been crafted into much Western music, including "art music". This allure is achieved via full interpretive understanding of the imitation of everyday speech. The process is generally referred to as the "imitation of the voice", but what is important to understand is the difference between the speaking voice and the singing voice. It just so happens that this allure is based on the unavoidable intrinsic value of the identification, personification, and projection of magical interplay of masculine and feminine qualities of sound and gesture which governs the dramatic delivery and subsequent recognition of sensory, hence sensual, musical messages.
Denis Grenier: Wouldn‘t you say Capriccio Stravagante and its "leader" are now ready for seventeenth-century opera? After all, you‘ve already given performances of the Intermedi from La Pellegrina that were eminently worthy of preservation on CD... and that you should certainly revive. How about Monteverdi?
Skip Sempé: Opera is also one of Venice 's splendors. Though La Pellegrina was a Florentine (though published in Venice ) affair of the Medici court, the instrumentation of this last great Renaissance "pageant" is that of the extra-colorful Renaissance Orchestra. Monteverdi also used the Renaissance Orchestra in Orfeo, as the sound of the Renaissance Orchestra was intended to evoke antique fable all on its own. Later, in Poppea and Ulisse, times had changed and Monteverdi changed with them a few bowed strings, lutes and harpsichords.
We have rediscovered this extraordinary Renaissance Orchestra sound that has not yet been heard in our time. It was made possible not by the decision to perform on "period instruments". It was made possible by an assembly of extraordinary virtuosos who play with complete freedom of musical expression and invigorating instrumental abandon, encouraged by the fact that they are not afraid of the "chef". That is what I require. The letter is dead. Only the spirit survives, because all else is superficial. And, that is what the "Canto Mediterraneo" is all about.
CD liner notes for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi recording: "Dietrich Buxtehude: Abendmusik", with Capriccio Stravagante
I regard Wonder as the first of all the passions."' – Descartes
Our program includes selections from Buxtehude's only major printed works to have appeared in his lifetime - the Sonatas Opus 1 and 2, the Contrapuncti based on the chorale "Mit Fried-und Freud fahr ich dahin", and the Klag-Lied.
For what express purposes was this music written? We may well consider the publication of musical scores before the era of the gramophone as simply an early form of recording - that is, the composer (who was almost always also a celebrated performer) and his publisher brought out for their public a portable static document, frozen in time and rarely free from errors (like many modern recordings) in the hope that the composer-performer's reputation would thereby be enhanced. The scores were aimed at delighting amateurs, enlightening connoisseurs and inspiring virtuoso performers.
Music publishing, even as late as the 1690s, was still something of a wonder in itself, standing with mapmaking, encyclopedias and other reference works which informed and enlightened the educated portion of pre-industrial Europe. Buxtehude's Sonatas , conceived in the most refined and elegant manner according to the taste of his day, evoked wonder and admiration. They provided a compendium of rhetorical musical Affekt, with novel instrumentation (violin and viola da gamba as obbligato instruments rather than the two violin texture in more common usage), a conscious mélange of Italian, German and French styles throughout, contrasting sustained melody with small figures used as melodic elements, contrast of affect (Adagio, Poco Adagio, Allegro, Andante, Vivace, Grave, Lento, Presto, Poco Presto, Concitato, Con discretione), contrast of form (Arioso, Variation, Courante, Gigue) and contrast of dynamic events (Forte, Piano).
However, a most revealing indication in Buxtehude's Sonatas is "con discretione" as it brings us precisely to the point of much seventeenth century music. It would be a mistake to translate "con discretione" literally, "with discretion" as we often think of the term, meaning with accepted good taste that will not give offense to anyone. Discretion in its classical sense means "choice, ability to decide". In Baroque rhetoric, therefore, it can be seen as a signal for some form of subtle or wonder-provoking indiscretion, something one wouldn’t normally expect...
This can be identified as a Mannerist approach. Throughout seventeenth century Europe , "high style" existed in all the arts. It thrived on luxurious novelty to provoke a sense of wonder on the part of the beholder: the unusually large or small, the extremely rare, the exotic, the abnormally or grotesquely shaped or the spectacularly beautiful, all were consciously used to manipulate the spirit of the onlooker or listener as participant. In music, as in the other arts, the rhetorical principles expounded by Aristotle were the basis for the employment of unexpected or surprising effects to increase the impact. In short, the high style of the seventeenth century, Mannerist and sophisticated, required superior imaginative powers and extensive display of virtuosity.
Near the end of October 1705, Buxtehude, the famous Lübeck organist, composer of vocal and instrumental music and organizer of the "Abendmusiken" concerts, received a visit. We do not know if this visit was announced or not: all we know is that the visitor, twenty year old Johann Sebastian Bach, had made the journey of more than 250 miles on foot, allegedly to hear Buxtehude play the organ. But 250 miles on foot just to hear an organist? Impressed by Buxtehude's reputation, the young Bach went not only to hear, to learn and to play, but also to marvel. Buxtehude, at sixty eight, was well-known, well-educated and prosperous. He possessed, consequently, all the musical and worldly powers of the Mannerist composer-performer of the period. It was fascination with this Mannerist approach which impressed and informed the young Bach on his fabled visit, and indeed throughout his creative life.
"Mannerist? Bach?!"
Yes, and demonstrably so - and we must come to terms with this concept in order to have a richer and more profound understanding of his works. Bach demonstrates his debt to the seventeenth century German "Stylus Phantasticus" in examples from his early, middle and late works: the Fantasia & Fugue in G minor (BWV 542) and the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C (BWV 564) for organ, the harpsichord Toccata in D major (BWV 912), the cadenzas from the D minor Harpsichord Concerto and Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, even the 14th, 28th and 29th Goldberg Variations. Bach, therefore, carried this style into the eighteenth century.
The Music
In Buxtehude's Sonatas , the overriding aesthetic is that of deliberate rhetorical effect, derived from, the cumulative impact of varied subjects and details and the successful juxtaposition of apparently dissimilar elements. The element of seventeenth century Wonder is revealed by succeeding to perform the seemingly impossible. We have tried to be virtuous virtuosi, engaging in all the risks of live performance, the very element on which this repertoire depends, ignoring the microphones. Microphones, like the printed publications of Buxtehude's and Bach's time exist to document and we prefer to capture rather than censure.
In marking his three part-books "Violino", "Viola da gamba" and "Cembalo", Buxtehude did not necessarily imply only three performers (or precise continuo instrumentation). As the viola da gamba was considered both a solo and a continuo instrument during that period, the reason for marking the bass part "cembalo" instead of "continuo" could have been simply to differentiate the role of the viola da gamba, here in obbligato usage, from that of the continuo. We prefer the texture, depth and luxury of an added stringed instrument, a 'cello, to sustain the bass in addition to the "cembalo" continuo part.
In addition to the printed Sonatas for violin and viola da gamba, unique manuscripts from Uppsala University transmit alternative instrumental textures for other sonatas: two violins, obbligato viola da gamba and continuo - here marked "continuo" rather than "cembalo" (BuxWV 266), with double stops for the violins in the outer movements, conceived to imitate four, five or even six part music. Particularly interesting is Buxtehude's sole surviving sonata for two obbligato bass instruments, in this case viola da gamba and violone, which here indicates a 'cello (BuxWV 267). By contrast, the Contrapuncti represent an advanced example of Buxtehude's use of invertible counterpoint. The Klag-Lied was composed on the death of Buxtehude's father and was printed together with the Contrapuncti in 1674.
The two keyboard works included are ostinato bass compositions which come to us in the Andreas-Bach-Buch, an important early eighteenth century keyboard manuscript from the Bach circle. Among the scribes are Johann Christoph Bach (Johann Sebastian's elder brother) and J.S. Bach - the so-called Bach circle has indeed transmitted a large amount of Buxtehude's keyboard output. The upper parts of the Passacaglia and the Ciacona are performed by one harpsichordist, while the other plays the bass part in addition to a continuo realization. Ostinato bass works like these reflect a particularly Baroque taste for metamorphosis - something unusually small (for example a four note descending bass) turned into something unusually large. Bach's Passacaglia in C minor is similar in theme and texture to Buxtehude's D minor piece. These pieces figure in our program not only because they are in fact trios, but also to illustrate the sonorities and textures available with two harpsichords playing together (heard more commonly in Buxtehude's time than in ours), and to illustrate keyboard transcription, arrangement, improvisation and the never-ending requirements of seventeenth century continuo accompaniment.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "Johan Schenk: L'Écho du Danube", with Capriccio Stravagante
Johannes Schenk was one of the leading viola da gamba virtuosi of the seventeenth century. He was born in Holland and spent about forty years in Amsterdam . From 1696, he served at the Düsseldorf, court of the Elector-Palatine Johann Wilhelm I. It is written that "Schenk was chosen by Monseigneur himself and transported from Holland shortly thereafter, for the purpose of rendering the harmony perfect and his ensemble complete. It is Schenk, a native of Amsterdam, whose melodious bow, promenading upon a viola da gamba, does not move walls like that of Amphion before Thebes, but engenders loveliness and charm by the sympathetic rapport which its vibrating strings have with the human senses and attentive aural organs of the ecstatic listeners over which he exercises agreeable dominion as over so many slaves acquired by his virtue. No one has ever played more delicately or with more refinement than he. The instrument sings beneath his notes, when from his hand there descend and ascend the entire gamut of notes run, or, more accurately, fly from chord to chord with such exactness; when they go from fret to fret either stepwise or leaping, in such a way that he is able to strike which astonishment whoever is able to follow his ear, so extremely rapid is he in his movement; for owing to the sound which is produced by the meeting of the bow and the string in the midst of unbroken silence, there is produced something so arresting that there does not exist the sadness, or distraction, or care which can prevent one's attention to it...
Schenk learned his art in Holland , and part of his art was one of importation. The Dutch appreciated, cultivated and imported French music and musical style as well as the Italian, just as they imported Orientalia in the category of porcelain and carpets, and ran their country on foreign exchange. In music, the style of the Italians and the French and the tradition of exportation to the Northern countries extend back as far as Josquin des Pres. But what probably influenced Schenk most greatly in the early life was the exchange between England and Northern Europe . English musicians regularly served the courts and the chapels of Holland , Northern Germany and Scandinavia : one thinks of Bull, Brade or Dowland, to cite but a few examples.
The works presented here illustrate the variety of instrumentations fancied by Schenk in his compositions for the viola da gamba. They are selected from three different collections: the Scherzi Musicali, Opus 6 (containing dozens of Suites for Viola da gamba and continuo); the Nymphe di Rheno, Opus 8 (containing duos for two viols without bass) and the L'Écho du Danube, Opus 9 (containing the Sonata in a minor for viol and continuo in the style of Corelli, who also played the viol, with an obbligato-style part for the continuo viol). Also included here are a set of virtuoso variations on a sacred air, by August Kühnel, who was Schenk's German contemporary of similar reputation.
Schenk's virtuosity on the viol was a later development of the viol's sixteenth century traditions. As the viols were the ideal instruments to accompany the voices in soloist or ensemble madrigals (indeed many of the works in this genre were heard played by the viols alone), the viol players had a tradition of melodic flair. A polyphonic ear was also cultivated by the viol players, working in close contact with the inner parts of polyphonic structures. And finally, the bass viola da gamba, the proud, rich, resonant member of the viol family, was the bass instrument par excellence in chamber music for the continuo function. Many a music master in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was responsible for teaching, preparing or directing "the voices and the violls".
As the bass viol attracted great virtuoso performers; and composers for the instrument, in the seventeenth century it surfaced as an instrument of tremendous possibility in the shaping of melodic elements, extravagant polyphonic playing in the form of double stops and chord patterns ranging from arpeggio to bariolage to massive thick chords ripped out of the instrument at maximum energy and with the richest sonority imaginable.
This is what Schenk, his German colleague August Kühnel, and the Frenchmen Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray did, and they all became celebrated for it.
Skip Sempé
Concert program notes for performances at the Berkeley Early Music Festival, with Capriccio Stravagante and Chanticleer
Part One
Speculative Reconstruction versus Fearless Abandon
For two decades, the music of the French Baroque has been one of the most elusive repertoires for performers and listeners alike. That great stylist Jean-Philippe Rameau firmly maintained that “art should be hidden by art itself”, and we are now ready to re-identify and re-interpret what this “art” is and, more importantly, how this elusive art can function at maximum effect for modern musicians and audiences and thus provide ever-more efficient “translations” of the notes that are found on the page into satisfying, charismatic performances.
Now that it is commonly accepted and agreed that speculative “reconstruction” of what occurred three or four centuries ago is both impossible and artistically fraudulent, a new process of creative translation is finally ready to take center stage. And, what has been until now referred to as “historical performance practice” must be reconsidered and reformulated in an attempt to simply and concisely clarify, refine, and, if necessary, transform the inventions, conventions, tendencies and traditions of both the performance practice – which should be coherently defined as rehearsal technique - and the recording methods that have become the established norm over the last forty years.
The past four decades (1962 - 2002) have been particularly rich in the discovery of forgotten repertoire and have fostered a tremendous acceleration in momentum for both musical instrument making and a clearer understanding of the fundamental problems that affect the performance of earlier repertoire. Sadly, significantly less progress has been made in the realms of efficient interpretation and effective musical communication. This fact can be quite possibly attributed to the negligent necessity of engaging in certain evils, but having reached the limit at which new possibilities of effective musical continuation and artistic rediscovery require the reconsideration of current rules and norms, many of those rules and norms must be abandoned. Now that “together and in tune” are considered a matter of taste rather than a matter of fact, only one question remains: is the performance expressive or not?
The “early music movement” as we know it, is indeed now over. Henceforward, it will be viewed as nothing more and nothing less than an historical phenomenon. To answer that frequently asked question, “Yes, it was a fad!”
Crusader-Performers
What motivated and galvanized the movement, a century ago and more, in the era of Dolmetsch and Landowska? A curiosity and a real passion for the efficient musical communication of a vast and unknown repertoire.
The repertoire was the chosen medium that particularly suited the ambitions of “message delivery”, artistic temperament and pioneering spirit of those inspired crusader-performers. Listener and performer alike must remember that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the composer acted as the crusader-performer: any attempt to confuse this issue with that of the “composer-performer” is to miss the point. Those first generations of crusader-performers expended the enormous efforts required to stimulate curiosity in a rather resistant public.
How did this “messaging” continue in the 1950s and 60s? Harnoncourt and Leonhardt “didn’t want to change the world” – as Leonhardt put it during a recent BBC interview - “but simply wanted to see what the music sounded like when it was played on the instruments of the time.”
So, what finally killed the movement and proved it a fad?
The attitude of a few individuals, mostly Europeans, their relatively few fans and followers (if we compare their numbers to the multitudes who idolize pianists, violinists, opera stars and conductors), and the marketing campaigns of a handful of recording companies, all of whom were altogether too supportive of the dreary and dispassionate topic of “performance practice”, more or less based on tendencies toward “non-interpretation”.
Their philosophies have proven to be a sterile and pedantic time bomb, falsely centered on the “period instruments” issue, a time bomb that has exploded because its manufacturers did not bother to address an essential concern of the technological culture of the waning years of the twentieth century: the choice between acoustic musical instruments and electronic substitutes.
Wanda Landowska said, “The power of sonority is not a novelty”. In other words, dispassionate sobriety deprives musical performance of its essential qualities of intention, power, drama and nobility.
The “historical performance practice” debate has popularized and legitimized an intellectually weak and philosophically dishonest argument designed to remove the ultimate allure that had been crafted into much Western art music. This allure is achieved via full interpretive understanding of the imitation of everyday speech. The process is generally referred to as “imitation of the voice”, but what is important to understand is the difference between the speaking voice and the singing voice. It just so happens that this allure is based on the unavoidable intrinsic value of the identification, personification, and projection of magical interplay of masculine and feminine qualities of sound and gesture which governs the dramatic delivery and subsequent recognition of sensory, hence sensual, musical messages.
Musicians of the Renaissance loosely refer to this phenomenon when describing the register breaks of singers: the manner in which singers manipulate the various resonating areas of the body – the head (mask), throat and chest registers (which they compared to air, earth and water) - as an essential aid in musical expression. The principles and techniques of artificial corporal detachment have never enjoyed a welcome or long-lasting place in the art of singing or of playing musical instruments. It therefore comes as no surprise that the most visible champions of the early music movement were the male altos, or countertenors, who employed a technique in which the timbre is produced exclusively by the head voice, that disregards the possibilities offered by register breaks and relies only on the wind supply that originates from the chest register.
Packaging
Now that luxurious packaging and sexy advertising have more or less overwhelmed the musical content they allegedly promote, music lovers have become increasingly impatient with the end of the fad, and they await new and innovative re-creative interpretations of such well-known masterpieces as Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Corelli’s Concerti grossi, Lully’s Tragedies-Lyriques, Rameau’s Ballet Music, new and innovative recreative interpretations that the musicians of tomorrow must provide and that the music lovers of tomorrow will expect to experience. These new and innovative interpretations, still to be created, will demonstrate newly imagined possibilities of acoustic and resonant musical instrument making, will be the fruits of the obstinate continuation of pioneering performing efforts (the sole responsibility of individual musicians, and not in any way the concern of concert promoters, agents, orchestra managers or record companies), and will enhance the interpretive skills of the musicians of tomorrow.
We have learned so much from the astute observations of historians and musicologists. We know how many cornettists Gabrieli had at San Marco. We know how many violins Lully had at Versailles . We know how Bach deployed his continuo group. We know how Monteverdi dealt with clefs and transposition in his Vespers. We know that Rameau did not use the harpsichord in his orchestra. We know that Bach intended his B Minor Mass to be sung by one singer for each vocal line. We know from Marini that it will not kill the spirit to rehearse. We know from Royer that the performer can span the entire spectrum of tempo and dynamics within a single piece. We know from Froberger that certain pieces can be played with complete disregard for the beat. As Leonhardt once told me, all this information forms the strict minimum of the performer’s challenge. Interesting presentation of inadequate information is always designed to make the irrelevant digestible.
Why repackage?
Because there are always important missing musical links.
First and most important: We do not know why certain things were done as we have been told they were done, and the lack of information needed to answer that question of “why” often serves to establish the refined musical subtleties on which the ultimate success of a performance is based. The second problem presented by the fruits of this profusion of research is that, despite interesting and informative details, the resulting conclusions are not generally inspiring on an evolved artistic level and therefore have virtually no effect at all on the message of the musical performance as it hits the ears and sensitivities of the listener. Historians and musicologists are just dying to know more about the private lives of Handel and Schubert (Lully and Ravel were accounted for a long time ago). Scientists have examined the skull of Johann Sebastian Bach at considerable length, in attempt to learn something. But as “the portrait is more compelling than the x-ray”, let us keep this in mind, especially when referring to one of the outstanding “structural” geniuses of Western music. At the very least, noted performers no longer announce that they “would prefer a bad performance on the right instrument to a good performance on the wrong instrument”. The observation that certain musicians are attracted to indifferent vehicles for musical expression can be strengthened by the reality that, in the early music movement, there has frequently been an identifiable proclivity to perform on undistinguished musical instruments, and sing with an inflexible and bland vocal technique.
Some thoughts on language, translation and charisma in French Baroque music
Often we are asked if one has to be French in order to perform French music effectively, Italian in order to perform Italian music effectively, English to perform English music effectively, or German to perform German music effectively. Such nonsense has become lingua franca thanks to a widely disseminated twentieth century European conceit that the aural translation of the art of composition does not require creative interpretation of the part of the performer. Robert Casadesus, a close friend of Maurice Ravel and himself a composer-virtuoso of stature, contemptuously dismissed that idea more than thirty years ago in a conversation with the noted performance practice historian, Teri Noel Towe: “For me you do not have a French school of piano or a German school; you have an international school”, Casadesus said. “Gieseking played Debussy and Mozart beautifully. He was German. He was not Austrian, and he was not French. For many people, you must be Austrian to play Mozart. It’s ridiculous. You can be Indian and play Mozart beautifully. Look at Mehta, Zubin Mehta. A wonderful conductor. Casals. The best Bach is Casals, and he is Catalan.”
The effective translation and communication of the French Baroque repertoire requires not only that those who perform it have a total command of the French musical vocabulary of well-defined and recurring gestures but also that they be completely familiar and absolutely at ease with that vocabulary. These gestures are integrated into the musical structure but they are not built into the notes that the performers see before them on the printed or the manuscript page. These gestures are presented to the performers in a manner that is completely foreign to current musical training, performance habits, and interpretive standards.
These well-defined and recurring gestures are foreign, if not hostile, to today’s approach to the “making” of “serious” classical music because the compelling and convincing expression of them depends so much on inflection and on unpredictability. This essential element of the “uncertain” and the “atmospheric” applies to all Baroque repertoire, but the French, who fostered it and disseminated it, also allowed themselves to cultivate it to the extreme. Lully, for instance, gives for an Ouverture the written instruction, “The theatre represents a magnificent palace at the edge of the sea.” Campra specifies that a sleep scene be set in “a place which is hardly visible, because the action unfolds in the dead of night.” These instructions are not just for the stage director. They are also for the musicians. These instructions provide both the tempo markings and the affect for the entire musical scene. In instrumental music, the effect of the atmosphere takes control; in vocal music, the text and the dramatic declamation of it take control. These postulates apply to the performance of all music of the French Baroque, from the most intimate solo works conceived for lute, harpsichord, or viola da gamba to the largest scaled sacred, concerted vocal works and tragédie lyrique.
As interpreters of their “own” music, the musicians of the French Baroque were consummate masters at combining their gestural vocabulary, their particularly rich harmonic language, and their unique, elaborate, and extraordinary catalogue of embellishments and ornamentation. When it came to finesse, suppleness, and the “push and pull” of rhythm and tactus, the French had no peer, and they were renowned for their astonishing ability to proceed imperceptibly and with the greatest ease from the grand and noble to the relaxed and casual. To accomplish this seemingly impossible feat they subtly varied weight and accent by lengthening and shortening syllables according to a system derived from their language as they spoke it. Instrumentalists exploited this formality of expression every bit as much as vocalists.
The reinstitution of the tradition of inégal (“unequal”) in performance and the subsequent, often vituperative debate about what inégal really means and how it is to be applied in performance has been the centerpiece of the on-going discussion of the interpretation of the French Baroque repertoire. Inégal, quite simply, is the overall effect created by extreme, perhaps total nonchalance. It is similar to the singing of Edith Piaf. Piaf never would have stressed every syllable of Michelle, ma belle the way that The Beatles did. The effective application of inégal represents craft every bit as much as it represents art.
Lully’s father-in-law Michel Lambert forged a direct link in the art of vocal music between the tradition of the Renaissance chanson and the air de cour of the mid seventeenth century. The harpsichordist d’Anglebert and the violist Marais employed and identified more ornament signs in their music than had ever been seen in print before. The careful study of the gamut of seventeenth century French printed music documents the gradual but inevitable transition from the fully written out ornamentation provided by Lambert to the ornament signs that d’Anglebert and Rameau used exclusively.
By 1700, it seemed as if the art of improvisation was disappearing quickly. The Prélude in Rameau’s 1706 collection of harpsichord pieces is “semi-unmeasured”, and just a decade later, in his L’art de toucher le clavecin, Couperin-le-Grand informs the purchaser that he has had his Préludes printed in measured notation since the practice of performing such preludes from scores presented in the earlier, unmeasured notation was no longer in vogue. By so informing his readers, Couperin provided solid foundation for the exhortation of Sir Thomas Beecham over two centuries later: “Disregard the bars, and look at the phrases. The bars are merely the boxes in which the music is delivered!”
From the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, the French made significant contributions to woodwind instrument making. The Hotteterre family invented, made, and played innovative and sophisticated flutes, recorders, oboes, and bassoons. These were exported to every corner of Europe . They were played at the courts of the English monarchs in Purcell’s day, and at the Saxon and Prussian courts in Bach’s. The workshops of Blanchet and Taskin produced clavecins of sensuous resonance for Couperin, Rameau and Royer; the atelier of Clicquot produced grandes orgues of sonorous magnificence and kaleidoscopic color for Grigny, d’Aquin, and Marchand, while the workshops of Bertrand and Ouvrard crafted magnificent seven-stringed violes for Marais and the Forquerays. The instruments supplied by the greatest French makers were the secret weapons of the great virtuosos; they were every bit as subtle, supple, and refined as the repertoire that was played on them.
Craftsmanship was the equal partner of art.
Tourism, Old World – New World , and a source of some aberrant traditions since 1950
The challenge of bringing to life the repertoire of Renaissance Spain compels the performer and the listener to ponder the relationship between the Old World and the New. 2002 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the legendary New York Pro Musica. This anniversary is of particular importance and relevance to the “early music” movement in Europe and America . Professionally at least, the locus centrum for the revival of the performance of the music of the European Renaissance and the performance practice scholarship that provided its underpinnings shifted from Europe to the United States after World War Two. The interest is the Baroque repertoire followed suit. Many of the early exploits in the Baroque field focused on “historic preservation”, not on the repertoire of a specific country or a specific time; the conservation, restoration, playing, and recording of historic European organs. The preservation of these organs and the whirlwind of debate that often surrounded the individual projects proved incontrovertibly that these instruments were to be considered historic monuments on a par with other historic musical instruments. The easily accessible “sound pictures” of the divergent sonorities of the great organs of the past that the worldwide dissemination of the commercial recordings made on historic organs during the 1950s and 1960s was of inestimable value to the burgeoning development of the early music movement: they were the first real “period instruments” to be taken seriously.
What was performed on these organs?
Baroque music, of course, and it was primarily the music of Bach and his precursors. Because the majority of “interesting” organs just so happened to be located in Germany and Holland, or so it seemed, the Germanic musical ideal of performance reigned supreme in the choice of the artists who would receive the honor of recording on these instruments. Meanwhile, few had heard a French classical organ, because the commonly held opinion was that French music was interesting but not important; and even fewer had heard an early Spanish or an early Italian organ, despite the treasure trove of Spanish and Italian sixteenth and seventeenth century keyboard masterpieces.
The Germanic attitudes that effectively suffocated all the competing aesthetic principles for the performance of Renaissance and Baroque literature gained the upper hand in great part because the historic organs, the repertoire, and the artists picked to record that repertoire on those organs was engineered to prove that the only solution to the “problem” of how to interpret “serious” European classical music, particularly the music composed before 1750, in the post World War Two era was the Germanic one, and that the music of the Latin countries, if it were to be performed at all, would have to be performed according to Germanic tenets of musical interpretation.
The aggressive and arrogant bigotry of this aesthetic argument naturally spread an unhealthy concern with “cleanliness” and “propriety” that was deemed to define the “correct” approach to religious music, and since the historic organs in question almost always were found in churches, it could now be decreed that the impersonal and uninvolved style of performing religious music had to be imposed on the performing styles devised for the secular repertoire.
Do not use a harpsichord in a church cantata or a
passion; harpsichords are for the theater.
Do not make a false accent.
Do not use rubato.
Do not pay attention to the bass line.
Do not draw attention to detail.
Do not engage in tension or surprise.
Do not gesture.
Do not take advantage of harmonic dissonance.
Do not excite the audience.
Do not play fast.
Do not engage in virtuosity, because virtuosity is vulgar and exhibitionistic.
And, last but not least, do not play like Pablo Casals,
Wanda Landowska, or a gypsy violinist.
These “do nots” spread from Germany , throughout Europe and to America , and contaminated musical training everywhere. Thankfully, there is now widespread and growing rejection of this false “ideal”, but the conscious and subconscious remnants of this bastardized and deadly tradition still haunt and demonize us today.
When it came to the Renaissance repertoire - including the formulation of a model for the creation of a professional early music ensemble, its administration and its funding - a versatile, enthusiastic and talented group of Americans called the New York Pro Musica entered the arena. From the beginning, in the early 1950s, the New York Pro Musica began presenting “theme” concert programs and releasing “theme” recordings which featured vocal and instrumental music, both sacred and profane – “Court and Chapel” anthologies of all the major Renaissance musical traditions, each program or recording focusing on a particular country and time period.
This model for the performance and recording of fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century music was to become the success formula to programming: the attempt at overcoming a barrier with a well-selected overview of a particular Renaissance repertoire accessible within the space of one LP. The first mission of the Pro Musica and the individual performers who formed the ensemble was the discovery of the music. They were not concerned with the instrumentarium per se. The director and all the individual performers considered the instrumentarium important, of course, but only as useful vehicles for their performances, both as individuals and as an ensemble. In concert and recorded performances of Renaissance repertoire, the American invention of individualist presentation did not, however, suffer the same fate that the music of Bach and his contemporaries suffered at the hands of the Europeans in the 1950s. Baroque music had the “period instruments” battle to fight, as well as the “stylistic” battle to wage.
The situation is complicated even more by the phenomenon of “musical tourism”, and this musical tourism applies to the ancient Germanic – Mediterranean mystique just as actively as it applies to twentieth century European – American traditions. This musical tourism had its beginnings about five centuries ago. From Dufay to Cimarosa, “Import-Export” among European courts and chapels, exchanges that included both composers and performers, was rife among the Franco-Flemish, the Spanish, the Italians, the English and the Germans. Travel, money and notoriety served to strengthen various artistic legacies and developed international standards in the art of composition and performance.
Finally, the Mediterranean repertoire has gained a foothold. Today’s torchbearers of the Latin aesthetic are reliable, distinguished and sought-after performers in Italian, Spanish and French music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. These musicians exhibit a new level of confidence in the creative vitality of this repertoire, and they will make a lasting impression as crusader-performers in today’s reality check on musical expression.
Skip Sempé
CD liner notes for the Astrée recording: "Pavana: The Virgin Harpsichord", with Skip Sempé, Olivier Fortin and Pierre Hantai
The three harpsichords chosen for this recording were all made by Martin Skowroneck. Since the mid 1950s, Skowroneck has worked in his Bremen workshop producing harpsichords, clavichords, virginals (and recorders) of almost singular allure. Early in his career, his pioneering efforts to create harpsichords based on the tonal and construction ideals of the great makers of the past caught the attention of Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who both commissioned instruments which they used extensively for concerts and recordings.
Skowroneck’s instruments were, in a fashion, the “Virgin Harpsichords” of the twentieth century, because for the first time a select few harpsichordists and harpsichord makers could hear new instruments which combined the vitality, richness, color and sensitive touch of antique harpsichords. Despite his reputation, many harpsichordists have neither played a Skowroneck nor heard one live. He is now seventy-five, and is still building with great curiosity and great enthusiasm.
The “star of the show” is perhaps the Ruckers style Flemish virginal (made in 1971). The Antwerp dynasty of harpsichord builders called this model, with the keyboard to the right and the plucking point near the center of the string, a “muselaar”, to distinguish it from the model with the keyboard on the left and the plucking point near the end of the string, which they called a “spinet”. The sound of this instrument is so highly charactered that it could most easily be qualified as unforgettable.
The Italian style harpsichord was made in 1959, and is the “twin” to the one Harnoncourt commissioned for the Concentus Musicus Wien. It appears on several of my recordings, and several reviewers have asked whether or not it is the “famous one from 1959”. In fact, Skowroneck made three of these Italian harpsichords in 1959, and all of them are currently in the hands of lucky connoisseurs.
The Flemish double manual harpsichord was made in 1963, again one of Skowroneck’s series of three instruments based on the work of the Antwerp maker Dulcken. The Flemish makers continued in a direct line of conception from the 1570s until the 1770s, and Dulcken was the last of these makers to produce instruments in that outstanding tradition. This harpsichord also has a “twin” which is well-known among harpsichord connoisseurs, which is the one made for Gustav Leonhardt.
The instruments were tuned in quarter-comma meantone temperament and maintained throughout the recording sessions by Anthony Sidey.
Skip Sempé
Concert program notes for a dedication recital of the Bruce Kennedy harpsichord at the Cleveland Museum of Art, with Skip Sempé
The revival of the harpsichord and its repertoire began well over a century ago. It happened due to curious exchanges between antique and modern builders, antique and modern composers and antique and modern interpreters.
Or was it, in the long run, simply antique versus modern?
Of prime importance was the match between J. S. Bach and the harpsichord.
But, what kind of harpsichord?
A German one, for obvious reasons, or a French one for Bach's music imitating or flattering the French style, or an Italian one for Bach's similar excursions into the Venetian and the Roman?
This idea of the "Bach harpsichord" has produced various flukes, the result of over-interpretation of historical instruments, documents and information. More often than not, the "Bach harpsichord" has turned out to be an unresonant and ugly German contraption made during the industrial era of the twentieth century. These instruments had the particular attraction of sounding, feeling and looking nothing like anything J. S. Bach would have enjoyed playing.
In the 1950s and 60s, it was the eighteenth century French harpsichord that got the most interest from makers. For decades, the idea of the "Bach harpsichord" was no longer the predestined trip for the makers and the players: the eighteenth century French model became the world's concert harpsichord, and the German generation of Hass, Zell and the sixteen – foot register was forgotten.
But, only temporarily.
In the early 1980's, several curious harpsichord makers began paying considerable attention to two early eighteenth century German harpsichords kept at the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin . And, they are both attributed (for geographic, decorative and musical reasons) to the Berlin maker Michael Mietke. The connection with J. S. Bach is that Bach traveled to Berlin in early March 1719 to pick up a new Mietke harpsichord for the court at Cothen. What is interesting about these instruments is not really the relationship of their maker to Bach. It is that they are excellent instrument designs from the time of Bach: they just so happen to be German, and Bach just so happens to have played on them.
Bruce Kennedy has based his eighteenth century German double manual harpsichord on one of these Charlottenburg instruments. Since he produced the first one in the mid 1980s, these Mietke-style harpsichords have become the instrument of choice for many of the finest harpsichord players for concert performances and recordings throughout Europe .
And not only for J. S. Bach.
On a good harpsichord, played in a manner which exploits all its musical tendencies, the entire repertoire works well.
This is why I have chosen a program based on variety of styles, rather than concentrating on a program of music written in Berlin and Cothen in March 1719.
The distinctive voice of an instrument is only reliable when the maker of the instrument and the maker of the composition place the performer in a position of great interpretive ease. In this way, the music of Bull, Dowland, the Couperins, Froberger, Fischer, Reinken, Bach and the eighteenth century French clavecinistes serve to unite the maker with the performer. This is, after all, nothing new. It is simply a reminder of the fact that instrumental music of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is all conceived in order to provide this ease of expression based on collaborative effort on the part of composer, performer and instrument builder.
Skip Sempé