Sensuous v spiritual
Post categories: Rick Jones
| 16:10 UK time, Wednesday, 28 January 2009
I met Marc Minkowski last week. He seemed to be glowing from the previous night's concert, reviewed here. 'You must be elated,' I say, 'it was an excellent concert.' 'If the audience thinks so, I am happy,' he says, hinting that from his perfectionist viewpoint there were rough edges. Principally he is worried about the programme's length with two St Cecilia Odes by Purcell and Handel and a Haydn mass. He records it this week in Grenoble, the home of Les Musiciens du Louvre. He apologised to the audience at the concert and hoped we would not take the second interval as an opportunity to depart.
I say I am particularly interested in Purcell and ask him what a) he and b) the French think of the composer. He says, 'The French admire Purcell as a great composer of the baroque theatre. They know the dances, the music from the masques and the opera Dido and Aeneas. But they are not aware of his church music as the British are.' In other words, the French get to know his physical, sensuous, greasepainted side rather than his intoxicating, spiritual, cassocked music. He points out that the French came to the baroque through the English, first Alfred Deller and his Deller School in the South of France, later John Eliot Gardiner with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists
'As for me,' Minkowski continues, 'my background is French only in upbringing. I have a Polish father and an American mother and so my heritage is diverse. I grew up with the music of Purcell, and Dido was the first opera I conducted. We recorded it for Erato with the Fairy Queen and King Arthur. Purcell's harmony is so rich and full of surprises. Lully can be predictable by comparison. For me Purcell is right up there,' says Minkowski, pointing at the ceiling.
We talk about the soloists, in particular the soprano Lucy Crowe. 'There is nothing she cannot do,' says Minkowski. 'It all comes so naturally.' The high tenor Anders Dahlin, 'a quite unique voice'. The bass Luca Tittoto makes a really fruity sound and 'there is no trace of accent.'
The concert was part of the BBC's Four Composers programme and Minkowski apologised a second time to the audience for not including all four on the bill. He had decided only at the last minute not to perform as an encore Mendelssohn's orchestration of the overture to Handel's Acis and Galatea.
What with Mendelssohn being such an admirer of the baroque, I ask, is there anything Mendelssohnian in Minkowski's interpretation of Bach's B Minor Mass which has just been released by Naïve? He laughs at the idea. His version uses only one or two singers per part. 'I have however chosen voices with great power,' he says, 'so that although it is intimate, it is also loud but all within the fantastic acoustic of Santiago de Compostela. If there is a Mendelssohnian quality it is in the freshness and excitement, I hope.' The soprano is Crowe and the bass Tittoto once more. One looks forward to hearing these two in a different context, joined by Nathalie Stutzmann, Christian Immler and Colin Balzer. //
Rob Cowan played Purcell's Jehovah Quam Multi Sunt Hostes this morning. It was performed by The Sixteen conducted by Harry Christophers: fabulous bottom F from the bass soloist. The French would have loved it - not just that rude low note but also the dancing ritornelli, the biting dissonance and caressing strings. It was, after all, in church that Purcell did all his theatrical experiments.
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