Dutch perfectionist

The Edinburgh Festival, during the past month or so, has lost some of its great old stars.  The immaculate Lorin Maazel is destined never to return.  Now, at the age of 79, Frans Bruggen has also died.

First glimpsed as a spry young recorder player, darting on to the platform of the Freemasons’ Hall for a morning recital in the 1960s, during Peter Diamand’s period as Festival director,  he developed into one of the great Dutch conductors, far less flamboyant than Maazel, but impeccable in his ability to bring a classical purity of line and balance to everything he touched.

Recorder players are seldom sensationalists, though Bruggen did perform miracles with the encore piece, requiring two alto recorders to be played simultaneously, which his fellow Dutchman, Louis Andriessen, composed for him. He also inspired the vanguard Italian Luciano Berio to produce one  of the triumphs of modern recorder music in his masterly Geste in 1966.

But at that time Bruggen had still to show his skills as a conductor, which he later revealed in various concerts with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Edinburgh and Glasgow. By then he looked gaunt and fragile, even spectral, conducting from a stool on the podium with a minimum of gesture.

 Yet, as in his recordings with his own Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, created  from young specialist players, about sixty of them in all, these were performances of the utmost finesse. The pristine beauty of tone he obtained in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, his three great loves, will live on in our memories, as will the way he conducted Mozart;s Clarinet Concerto, fortunately preserved on disc.

Bruggen's was a career that went several ways, because he was also a great academic and baroque scholar, in Europe and America.  In his quiet way, he will be hugely missed.
16 August 2014