At this point I'm just about ready to declare this Messiah on its own level. There are a lot of objectively excellent ones that still are missing way too much. I actively dislike Gardiner and increasingly McCreesh, I just find them unpleasantly, confrontationally inexpressive. There are the ones that bore me, Hogwood and Pinnock and Parrott, all three of whose lack of affect sucks the air out of the room. There are really wonderful ones like William Christie (incredibly, meaningfully shaped), Masaaki Suzuki (unprecedented clarity so you hear EVERYTHING), Peter Dijkstra (a mindboggling amount of detail), particularly Harry Christophers (true music; a little too subtle, but there is detail and shape everywhere), and surprisingly Marc Minkowski whose many touches seem organic here rather than imposed, even if his tempos set a land-speed record. But not even Christophers comes up to this one's knees.
The only performance I've ever heard that comes up to this? My local which recorded it on Naxos with the old conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Chorus, Ed Polochick. He's been doing Messiah in Baltimore every year since the 80s, and it's a thing of wonder. I'll try to find the whole thing on youtube.
On a less tired, less busy morning, I would write about all the incredible felicities of this Nelson recording, which includes numbers and details from each of Handel's seven editions, and was clearly done while Nelson was dying. For once, part 2 is truly as dark as the music suggests, as though resurrection is not a foregone ritual conclusion. You hear that he thought about how to do this work for an entire lifetime. The sheer amount of detail here, unobtrusive detail, is unprecedented by a country mile. Live video or studio recording, you owe it to yourselves to hear this.
------------------------------------
Sitting up in bed still thinking of that John Nelson Messiah recording. It is quite simply the greatest Handel recording I've ever heard, and puts into perspective everything we think we know about HIP.
The problem with HIP is not the instruments or the style, the problem is the musicianship. Throughout the 20th century, the most talented artists did Bach and Handel, but they didn't take Baroque music as seriously as they took 19th century music. When playing Bach and Handel, everything about the tradition and composer's intention goes out the window. They didn't know, they didn't ask, and even if there was nowhere near as much information as today, there was enough to know that most of their ways of performing it were hopelessly uninteresting next to what they could be doing if they took the music more seriously. So instead, the musicians who do Baroque the honor of taking it seriously are often not artists as serious, deep or competent as those who focus on the 'meat and potatoes' of the repertoire like Mahler and Wagner.
John Nelson was one of the great and underrated podium artists of the passing generation, and he had clearly spent a lifetime meditating on a work which meant an enormous amount to him. The amount of detail in this recording dwarfs practically everyone else. The progress in Part II of spiritual darkness to light truly feels like just that rather than a ritualized abstraction of spiritual darkness.
Are there other conductors who were capable of revelations like this? Sure, but Handel clearly meant less to Nikolaus Harnoncourt than did Bach or Mozart, and with a few exceptions, most of his ideas in Handel were much more provocative than illuminating. Charles Mackerras was a truly great Handelian (turned 100 yesterday, so did Wozzeck, more on both this week), but he never re-recorded Handel's Messiah after 1966 except in Mozart's arrangement. He never got to use most of the important Handel scholarship. Suzuki and Christophers are wonderful if a little too respectful, and I bet they'd both be better now than 20 years ago. Meanwhile William Christie did it wonderfully even if the results a little chilly as they always are.
But except for Nelson, no one yet has taken on a Messiah recording who brings the best of both the HIP world and the mainstream music world together. You learn the rules so you can break them. Carlos Kleiber likened it to 'manners.' You learn to observe the forms of historically informed performance precisely so you can break its mold and create something truly individuated.
This is what true artistry requires, and now I realize that part of my occasional allergic reaction to early music is that I have the sense many Baroque performers don't think about Baroque masterpieces as deeply--Harnoncourt and his pupils, sure, but who else is willing to break the mold without breaking it to the extent of destroying it?
Until recently, many have still been too focused on presenting the instruments and the scholarly findings to worry about what happens in these works as music, and of those who are able to combine scholarship with artistry, many of them are still too young to have reached the ultimate artistry.
The fact that Baroque music is left for the specialists means that we are cutting ourselves off from most of the deepest artists being able to do it, and as a result, for all the recordings, I still don't think we know just how great this music is.
----------------------------------
The more I hear Hogwood and Pinnock in large-scale music, the more I think early-gen British HIP just sucked the air out of the room. It's just wooden, predictable, monodynamic musicmaking. At least Haroncourt had some ideas. Pinnock is an extraordinary keyboardist, but his conducting is just... fine? Sure, he's magnificent in the more bombastic environs of Handel, but otherwise? I never really 'got' John Butt or Kujkien much of Frans Bruggen either. Aside from amazing flute playing, Bruggen was best known for Mozart and Beethoven, and I always found his full orchestra stuff non-descript, generic and unphrased in the way of Hogwood. Not a single detail to be found. Nice blend, but why? Then I heard his B-Minor Mass and my jaw fell to the floor. That was musicmaking!
I can easily understand how Gardiner and Norrington were like a jolt of electricity after them. Gardiner at least is good at his job, even if I find a lot of his musicmaking manufactured with all the feeling of a sowing machine or a typewriter, he can be absolutely electric too. I've heard him live in two different series. I found a lot of his Beethoven cycle brutally unfeeling, but his Berlioz could have lit up all Manhattan. It's interesting that Gardiner is only getting in trouble for his temper now, because he seems like (relatively speaking) a much warmer musician today than he was forty years ago. Find his St. John Passion recording of roughly 10/15 years ago, at times it is almost romantic! I sort of feel the same about Paul McCreesh. In the absolute largest works: Creation, Elijah, Berlioz Requiem, he is absolutely, earthshakingly magnificent. But like Gardiner, the stiff martinet comes out. I once had a brief twitter debate with him where he was clearly criticizing Minkowski and Jacobs for excessive liberties without naming them. McCreesh could do with a little of their looseness.
But not all of it. I used to love Rene Jacobs and sometimes love Marc Minkowski, but they are so effect-driven that they go past mere insights into the realm of just using the scores as a pushpin on which they can hang their effects. Obviously both of them have their great moments: all these guys have these moments, even Norrington, but as I get a little older, there is something about their musicmaking that feels a little hollow and pretentious.
Herreweghe gets truly beautiful sounds, but he's a little... one note, no? I've never heard him live, but you don't get much in the way of dynamic contrasts or roughness. It's always the same beautiful blend that always seems to depend on church acoustics to make its impact. It absolutely astounds me that this guy has such a successful career in front of 'trad' orchestras.
Savall obviously is a master viol player, and a jaw dropping recoverer of lost treasures, but like Herreweghe, the idea that he's moving fully into 19th century is absurd.
I'm going to hear Ton Koopman finally next Thursday conduct Messiah at the now forbidden Kennedy Center, expecting more people onstage than the audience. Koopman is a wig-uncurling virtuoso of the keyboards. Perhaps too flamboyant for Bach, but who can argue with that exuberance? as a conductor he is... fun? Not much in the way of technique, but his enjoyment is infectious.
But if you want true HIP mastery, you have to find musicians whose spiritual vision equal the greatest masters of other fields. Perhaps it helps to be religious: Harnoncourt, Nelson, Leonhardt and Suzuki were/are all devout Christians, and the spirituality truly comes through in their musicmaking. It's a shame about William Christie, he really is a truly intelligent musician who always shapes the music interestingly, and almost always without going too far 'out there,' but like Gardiner, the lack of spirituality just comes out.
Harnoncourt and Mackerras are simply on their own levels. Mackerras is one of those magicians of music who can do anything he wants in any period (except Brahms). Harnoncourt is a giant: like Furtwangler and Bernstein, he is worth every technical flaw, every excessive romanticism and tic. Along with Lenny he happens to be my favorite 'giant,' giants with a human message that empowers the people under them. Harnoncourt to me is like a symbol of European rebirth, finding a new way of presenting, rendering, and rediscovering the music of old Europe's long heritage, and always searching for still newer ways. A musician who never stopped evolving, empowering, and challenging us to his dying day. A true artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment