Gentle readers (continuing my series of observations about my workplace): I like working in central B*st*n a great deal more than I like C*mbr*dge. Even though the pinstriped satraps of the financial district be public ratfuckers, whose wealth, power, and prestige are predicated on some of the least fair and and most awful moral blindnesses of this great country of mine, they are private angels. They are polite. They are personable, magnetic, stylish, generous (O raptures!). There's this one guy who wears too much cologne and has the world's crunchiest bleach job, but I suspect that he's from L.A. and doesn't work in finance. Other than him and the occasional haver-of-a-bad-day, I couldn't wish for charminger customers. I love you and your Brooks Brothers ties. I love you in your understated good breeding. May your good deeds in this coffee shop tip the scale when Thoth comes to weigh your hearts in the halls of the double Ma'at.
If I was a work of art, I would be Heironymous [sic] Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.
I am decadent and depraved. I have an eye for small details and love to fit in as much hedonistic pleasure as possible in everything I do. I buck authority and am not afraid to make a statement outside approved channels.
Which work of art would you be? The Art Test
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So I went ahead and bought Andrew Manze's Compleat HANDEL Violin Sonatas. I was right. It rocks. O, lordy, it rocks. Mr Manze fills a largish hole in the early music scene. There's a certain unanimity of opinion about the restraint of mid-eighteenth century "taste", which opinion has had a long and useful lifetime. This third generation of baroque interpreters has a much more lavish palette of sound at his disposal than the pioneers of the early string sound: when the first original instruments freaks came onto the scene in the sixties and seventies, the technique they developed was designed to stand in opposition to the sound quality which was then pervasive and applied indiscriminately to everything from Wieniawski to Vivaldi. Rather than continuous vibrato, they used almost none, and only in expressive locations; rather than playing with very overt dynamics which compares phrase with phrase, within the e.m. phrase exists a considerable variety of attack and volume, a fashion expressly modelled on the stress and release of speech patterns. At their worst, performances of eighteenth-century music using twentieth-century music instruments and attitudes were, and still are, loutish, simplistic, schmaltzy, and frustratingly false to the musical text (particularly in trying to make baroque music something it isn't: late nineteenth-century music); at their worst, period instrument performances of the 1980s were dry and inexpressive (string-tone particularly criticised for being icily thin), although they have the unquestionable advantages of being fresher and better-informed about the way music was played in its day.
These stylistic decisions taken by pioneers of original instruments and applied musicology were driven one-third by documentary and physical evidence (old treatises, old, unaltered violins and bows, gut strings), a third by personal taste (which tended to coalesce into national schools headed by the few original pioneers), and a third by a determined programme to sound as different as possible from the standard conservatory sound. All of these are valuable; the importance of the third quality, however, that of radical difference from its predecessor, loses cogency over time. There is undoubtedly a way, and much ink has been spilt on the matter during the 90s, in which the process of making baroque music sound identifiably baroque may have thrown the musical baby out with the bathwater of tasteless anhistoricity.
Which is where Mr. Manze and Mr. Egarr fit in. Manze usually is called a "gypsy", a "wild man", a "young turk" (all images Baroque europeans themselves would associate with the very fringes of taste). When Kuijken picked up a baroque bow in 1970, it was the a-historical, consuming musical culture of the 19th and 20th centuries that needed spearing; when Manze does the same in 2001, Simon Standage is just as gilded a heifer as Jascha Heifetz. Thus Manze is all sudden flares of old-fashioned violinistic 'fire', such as often doesn't get seen on gut strings. He swoops, turns, overplays, stretches things out, in a way which I found shockingly late-Romantic. Late-Romantic, ladies in gentlemen, is everything that the period-instruments revolution was supposed to be washing off the pristine face of eighteenth-century music.
Which is what makes this album so daring, although I'm afraid "daring" damns the musicality of his performance with faint praise, that it errs on the side of revolutionary rather than composed and centred in its style. It's tough: Manze is making a new sound for the baroque out of elements of new, old, and very old (the sources), reconsidering ab ovo the state of the scholarship. The intense rubato in the first track, for example, is as far a cry from the period-instrument performances of 20 years ago as Manze's understanding of rhetoric, ornament and the dance is from the modern-instruments Handel recordings of the 50's. Manze is not subtle about this. Compare Monica Huggett's recent reading of the JS Bach solo suites: absolutely exquisite, and [only if I were forced to choose, mind you] slightly better music-making than Manze and Egarr's recording of the continuo and obbligato sonatas from a year later. Huggett successes come from an unwillingess to play us shocks and fireworks: her playing is rational and refined and one is not led to believe that the music is the least bit technically challenging. This is not to say that her playing is not dramatic, but that it is dramatic in the restrained way that Racine is rather than the way Shakespeare is. Huggett's Bach is exquisite for the perfection of its early-music aesthetics; Manze wants to notice (maybe even be dismayed by) his double-stops and fast passages, his dissonances are played bold, singular and sculptural rather than ethereal. What matters is that he makes a musicologically-valid re-interpretation of the music, informed by sounds that have been avoided for twenty years out of a quirk of fortune.
I suppose the most sententious and quotable thing I can say about the new recording [not than i'm likely to get quoted here for it] is that Manze leads the way in the introduction "the beautiful note" to the period instruments movement, without losing the sense-making inflections of the classic early-instruments school. Unlike his peers in the e.m. subculture, though, he attempts to communicate with listeners of 2001 by explicit reference to 19th and 20th century musical language included. Which is probably a pretty successful way to get at the excitement and bravado of 18th century violin playing.
There's also the fact that it's breathtaking to listen to, for more reasons than I can go into now. I am dreadfully tired. Thank gods I have a day off tomorrow. I sleep now.