Nantes jamboree
Peter Phillips
An intelligent fellow from Nantes — this isn't meant to be the beginning of a limerick — has invented a new kind of music festival. One wouldn't have thought such a thing was possible after all this time, but his formula is novel: take a modern building containing a number of chambermusic-size concert halls, dot shops and cafés about the place and make sure there is a spacious main hall for impromptuseeming 'happenings'. Then choose a theme with broadly populist implications, like 'Russian music', or 'Mozart and Haydn', or, this year, 'Monteverdi to Vivaldi', and book about 20 leading groups in the field. Ask them to perform for no more than 45 minutes, but ensure that they repeat their show(s) five or six times during a long weekend. With careful colourcoding and gaily named venues you will then be able to stage something like seven different concerts at the same time, once every two hours or so throughout the day. The superficial effect is like that of a kaleidoscope of concerts; and it really does appeal to people. In the Nantes version of this jamboree, 120,000 seats were sold for three days of concert-making. The show then rolled on to Bilbao and Lisbon, where it drew equally impressive holiday crowds.
I begrudge this genius none of his success, though our participation remained something of a mystery to me since every note we sang (apart from some of the ones in the Allegri Miserere) predated the starting-point for the festival theme, and every other group taking part was performing Italian baroque music. Had he realised this in advance and was now embarrassed? He was scrupulously polite. Just as remarkable was that we were the only British group on the roster. An early music festival without British instrumentalists? Unheard of even ten years ago. What has happened to that substantial export industry we used to sustain, dominating whole areas of the repertoire?
I'm glad people flocked because the atmosphere in those small, 200-seat styleless modern boxes needed to be electric.
The unstinting devotion which people show towards the wittering baroque these days is one of the wonders of modern concert-making. The problem with focusing on the Italian baroque only is that the handful of really good composers of that era — essentially Bach, Handel and Purcell — are excluded. This leaves Corelli, Scarlatti and Vivaldi. It says something, I think, for the confidence Vivaldi inspires in planners that even in an in-depth festival like this there was no attempt to explore his operas or solo cantatas: just keep the concertos chugging through, especially The Four Seasons which were played repeatedly. With Corelli, whose output was tiny, there is nothing but safe. Padding programmes out with Geminiani, Pasquini, Ristori, Boccherini, Marini, Uccellini, Castello, Porpora, Sarro. Valentini, Locatelli, Caldara, Marcell° and so on and on scarcely helps either. Round go the interminable sequences, as predictable as the repeating patterns on wallpaper; round and round go the recycled harmonies, their stock-in-trade dissonances without any emotional charge 350 years ago.
Why do the people of today subscribe so willingly to the artefacts of one of the most cynical and trivial societies civilisation has ever thrown up? Why has the BBC just asked the planners of Radio Three's Music Restored to increase the wittering baroque element to 70 per cent of their output and doubled the number of programmes? Have
they been talking to Classic FM, who long ago realised that a Vivaldi concerto was the lowest respectable common denominator? At least when the symphonies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were everybody's favourite dabble the music itself had content. Oscar Wilde is supposed to have died from the poisonous side-effects of a malicious wall-paper. Music-lovers should take note. When the chugging starts, head for the wide open spaces.
Previous page
