HIP is on my mind. Not that Historically-Informed Performance has ever been off my mind; I was an early and enthusiastic convert to the notion of seeking musical insight via historical re-creation, at least as far as possible or advisable. I came within a hair’s breadth of making the harpsichord my primary axe, but the piano won out.
As I refresh my computer-stored music library, I am reviewing recordings that I may not have heard in quite a while. Among those resuscitated CDs is a subset of the Harnoncourt-Concentus Musicus traversal of the Bach cantatas from the 1970s through early 1980s. I never bothered collecting the entire thing, given that I have complete sets from Ton Koopman, John Eliot Gardiner, and Pieter Jan Leusink, plus all of the Masaaki Suzuki albums released so far. I’m well fixed for Bach cantatas. But the Harnoncourts hold a special place as relics of HIP’s move from the fringe to the mainstream. Before the 1970s HIP recordings were limited mostly to music-history sets (the grisly Norton Anthology and its ilk) or specialist labels such as Lyrichord or Vanguard. Performances were so-so at best, sometimes considerably less so. My teeth still ache as I recall the torture of an abysmally rotten clavichord track from the old Norton Anthology; Herr Doktor Professor hadn’t even bothered to tune the damn thing first. Not that tuning would have improved matters much; the guy couldn’t play his way out of a paper bag.
High-class stuff such as Deutsche Grammophon’s Arkiv series or Telefunken’s Das Alte Werk offered abundant evidence that a bright future beckoned. The Harnoncourt cantata series (originally on Telefunken) bear witness to both the advantages and shortcomings of HIP circa 1975. There was plenty to celebrate: transparent instrumental textures, bright energy, peppy singers and instrumentalists, tasteful ornamentation and an overriding aura of pioneering initiative. However, the recordings were pestered with substandard playing, sloppy ensemble, and messy choral singing. But that’s all small potatoes compared to the two really overwhelming problems: screechy boy sopranos and an agenda so blatant as to be downright intimidating.
First up, those little boys. History is on the side of the angels here—boys did indeed sing the soprano parts in the patriarchal Lutheran churches of Bach’s day. That’s hardly evidence that Bach liked using those kids, and given his often sour remarks about performing conditions in Leipzig, it’s at least worth considering that he would have swapped them out for female sopranos at the drop of a hat. But Mother Nature speaks the last word on this topic: puberty came later in the 18th century than it does now, so Bach’s sopranos were teenagers. Thanks to modern nutrition and health care, Harnoncourt had to cast twelve-year-olds who weren’t ready for Bach’s technical and musical demands. Result: train wreck.
Now, about that agenda. It was uncompromisingly anti-tradition, anti-Romantic, anti-mainstream. Anything you might hear from the Berlin Philharmonic or Edwin Fisher or Pablo Casals was anathema. Musical lines were sacrificed on an altar of strict metric downbeats, everything fractioned out by notions of tactus and beat. God forbid anybody should have attempted a rubato. Playing and singing alike were choppy, rigid, metronomic, and often at alarming variance with the text. Every once in a while sensitive musicianship reared its head, particularly from the bass soloists, but was often squashed by relentlessly square accompaniment. Intimacy was replaced by mincing preciousness, grandeur by thoughtless aggression, grace by pointless jogtrotting. There’s some downright unlistenable playing on those recordings.
But it was a beginning, and the performances weren’t so utterly offputting as to strangle the nascent movement in its cradle. Moments of real magic emerged from time to time, clear indications that HIP was worth pursuing for musical, rather than merely historical, reasons. So HIP grew and flourished, and before long it became mainstream and shed its seminar-room mustiness. HIP became increasingly attractive to fully-competitive players and singers who saw in the movement a compelling career path, and technical standards skyrocketed. Hapless playing à la Norton Anthology became a thing of the past, as these high caliber players fully mastered their instruments. Farewell to billowing bloops from the horns or head-on intonation collisions. Ensembles and choruses snapped into synchronization and tonal beauty once again returned to early music after its temporary absence. Rehearsal went beyond just staying together. Conductors such as Nicolaus Harnoncourt went mainstream right along with the movement.
Agendas withered. Old divides shrank; non-HIP players have come to accept HIP styles while the HIP folk themselves are hewing more to mainstream values of technique, expressiveness, and preparation. Today, a Brandenburg Concerto played by a major symphony orchestra might be more historically au courant than a hardcore specialist group of 30 years ago.
Comparing Harnoncourt’s 1973 recording of Cantata 25 with John Eliot Gardiner’s 2000 worldwide Bach Pilgrimmage makes clear the stunning advancements that have taken place in the HIP world. Harnoncourt’s sloppy edginess is replaced by Gardiner’s grave majesty, appropriate to this brooding contemplation of human suffering that opens with a granitic choral movement of monumental splendor. Harnoncourt’s performance is all about HIP; Gardiner’s is all about Bach.
As I write this I’m sopping up the effervescent champagne of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons, recorded in 2003 by René Jacobs and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. It’s a stunning rendition that goes a long way to rehabilitate an unfairly maligned work. Yes, it’s HIP, but most importantly, it’s Haydn: strength and wit and flexibility and lyricism and variety and electricity. No suffocating agenda, no in-your-face ugly playing or screechy singing. Just classy music-making in the interest of restoring the peppy theatricality of a late Classical masterpiece. In a way the Jacobs Seasons strikes me as the ultimate triumph of historically-informed performance: nothing better justifies the movement’s long journey from its ivory-tower origins to its current vitality. Nor is The Seasons an isolated event. Over the past decade, some of my most magical musical experiences have been thanks to HIP groups.
Thus 35 years after my original conversion to HIP-ness via that one-woman Baroque industry and Pied Piper, Laurette Goldberg, I find myself more committed than ever, while at the same time quite comfortable with my dual service as program annotator and lecturer to both the mainstream San Francisco Symphony and the HIP Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. There was a time when such double-dipping would have been cause for considerable comment, but those days are past. Whether we play piano or sackbut, conduct or sing or manage or comment, we’re all musicians together. The ghetto walls have come down, and high time, too.