Off and on
MUSIC MICHAEL NYMAN
Most people have free passes to the ever-open Museum of Musical Culture. Some have taken up permanent residence there. But, for others, it is only the vestigial memory that most music was modern once, that the older it is the more it is misunderstood, and that compositional trends seem to repeat themselves cyclically from time to time, that can induce them even to step into the foyer to buy a postcard.
Last week there was an open day for the Baroque Department—a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, under John Eliot Gardiner, placar- ded 'Two Giants of the Baroque.' Choking down visions of a couple of tedious baroque giants out of Wagner dominating the proceed- ings, I was by the end of the concert more worried by the label 'baroque' itself; such dis- similarities had been revealed between the composers that they could have been writing on different planets, never mind at a distance of only fifty years. More disastrous was the fact • that, of the two giants, one Henry Purcell, a little performed English composer, was muti- lated before our very eyes. From the very first blurred over-vibrato notes of the 1683 Ode, 'Welcome to all the Pleasures,' one felt that perhaps the Keeper of the English Middle Baroque Room in our museum had not been wise in entrusting a public exhibition of Purcell to a conductor so obviously a dedicated wor- shipper of the fair Monteverdi.
Be that as it may, the instrumental sections lacked that massive downbeat so essential to baroque music (and the surely now obligatory tightening,effect of double-dot- ting). Harmonic and melodic details were generally overlooked, or were, in a couple of full anthems, so overstressed as severely to unbalance the flow of the music. Phrases which started manfully petered out in very unmanly diminuendos, slow speeds were reverential, soft passages were soft-centred—all of which gee- tively destroyed the fibre of Purcell's music. The Chacony in G minor, admittedly a very difficult piece to perform, meandered roman-
tically in and out of various short blind alleys, completely unsure of what direction it should move in. No, with Purcell as with Bach, one should shake the bottle really well, as long as the conductor has the audacity and feeling to interpret the instructions on the label (if you know where to find it).
So much for the first half of the concert. One doesn't know what they had drunk in the inter- val but, in the second half, with the tense still- ness of the opening chords of the madrigal, Ifor ch'el ciel e la terra: we were transported to an 'after' realm where any romantic indul- gencies gave the interpretations the intensity and colour so noticeably lacking in the wretched 'before' of the Purcell.
In two Vesper psalms, Gardiner showed his very real sensitivity to the range of Monte- verdi's `moods'—the passionate, the temperate and the calm—and his uncanny ability to trans- late these into clear musical terms. Where Pur- cell dragged, Monteverdi in the Ballo `Tirsi and Clori' danced buoyantly, and the proportional tempo changes were handled with just the right physical inevitability. Elsewhere speeds were tensely 'held back' and restrained, sounding as though short silences replaced mere rests. The simple implications of static dynamics were not shirked, and the eight-bar crescendo at the end of the madrigal was so beautifully handled that, as I remember from a previous performance, it seemed to last an eternity. And instead of the flabby, the virginal, the vocal tone throughout was hard, soft, decisive like a well-voiced baroque organ.
Perhaps that is all that needs to be said— that a young and inexperienced conductor can make gold out of Monteverdi and dust out of Purcell. Do we expect, say, a good conduc- tor of the crystalline Weber to be able to cope with Wagner's loaded and labyrinthine prose? But these are both 'Romantic' composers, just as Monteverdi and Purcell are both coupled under the 'Baroque' umbrella. Certainly they are both baroque when seen against the rich background of the mind-spinning opium of the best late sixteenth century polyphony. The re- action against the sinking of verbal texts and their meaning in a sea of crisscrossing voices led Monteverdi and his contemporaries to sim- plify the whole art of composition, so that each line of poetry generates its own self-contained musical 'moment,' and the linking together of these sections, as in Stockhausen, provides the form and shape of a madrigal such as Ifor ch'el ckl.' I would go so far as to say that it is the very inspired simplicity and directness of Monteverdi's music which would make it easier to perform—first grasp the 'mood' and then the notes on paper can be translated directly into sound.
With Purcell's music one first has to reach a stage beyond the notes—a performing concept —before the music can become really effective. This, I think, Gardiner had not done. For Pur- cell's music had reached a new, post-Palestrina stage of almost complete musical autonomy; as in Bach it is the working out of the initial idea, no matter how dependent it may be on a verbal idea, that provides the structure of the music. It all hangs on harmony, I suppose—Monte- verdi's consisting of chains of related chords, whereas the tension created between the har- monic foundation and melodic elaboration in Purcell's work literally thrusts the music for- ward, as it does Bach's. This would explain the failure of the Chacony, and the success of Gardiner's performance of the Ballo from 1/ Ballo delle Ingrate' where the repeated bass
sounds serve to support merely decorative upper parts.
And in a sense, just to show the guardians of the Museum that trends do repeat them- selves, one could make out a clear case that Monteverdi is a more `modern' composer than Purcell, for the way he lays out his later music is far more akin to the contemporary fashion for 'textural' sounds and masses, and contrasts curiously with the more traditional techniques of, say, serial writing (an unworthy parallel for Purcell). Without making qualitative compari- sons, I'm sure that Gardiner would be more at home with Xennakis and Tavener than he would be with Boulez and Goehr.
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