Dead at 86. Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt Unverzagt (more simply known as Nikolaus Harnoncourt) was the great pioneer of what we have come to call historically informed performances. For all his fame in Vienna and Salzburg, he rarely appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, but when he did so in 1978, Peter Diamand’s farewell year as director, it was with his renowned Monteverdi triptych - The Coronation of Poppea, Orfeo, The Return of Ulysses - for which he was justly praised.
The productions, by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, had their superficial aspects, but it was the music of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, and Harnoncourt’s handling of it, that mattered. His performances, with the Zurich Opera, stick in the memory, and it was sad that we never heard any of his comparably enlightened Mozart opera performances.
In his memory, I watched the DVD of his Salzburg Festival Figaro, recorded in 2006, the other day and thought it as revealing as ever - not too fast (though he could be very fast), lucidly articulated, unsurpassingly cast with the alert young Anna Netrebko as Susanna, Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as a light-footed Figaro, Christine Schafer as delightfully childlike Cherubino, Bo Skovhus as a grimly perspiring Count, Dorothea Roschmann as the most forlorn of Countesses. It was a performance, polished on the surface but filled with undercurrents, that explored every facet of the music.
Luckily for posterity, Harnoncourt was a master of recording, in a way like Herbert von Karajan, whom he reputedly despised and whose musical obverse he was. The parallels between them - the Salzberg Festival connections, or disconnections, whereby he was banned by Karajan for twenty years, the devotion to Mozart whom Harnoncourt conducted infinitely better - were finally (though not until Karajan died) in Harnoncourt’s favour.
But it was the sheer authenticity of his conducting, something the smooth and autocratic Karajan never possessed, that mattered most. At a time when performances on original instruments, with the shunning of vibrato, seemed thin and weedy, Harnoncourt’s were alive, confident, utterly secure. His ensemble, the Concentus Musicus Wien - the Vienna Philharmonic of baroque chamber orchestras except for the fact that it contained many women - rehearsed for five years with his wife Alice as leader before it made its first public appearance and recorded all Bach’s surviving church cantatas.
His cycle of Mozart symphonies with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra employed modern instruments in a historically informed manner and the often explosive results were a revelation. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra spoke of winning him as guest conductor but got Charles Mackerras instead - a like-minded choice and a musician in a similar mould.
But we did need to hear more of Harnoncourt here, and it was a shame we didn’t.
10 March 2016
The productions, by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, had their superficial aspects, but it was the music of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, and Harnoncourt’s handling of it, that mattered. His performances, with the Zurich Opera, stick in the memory, and it was sad that we never heard any of his comparably enlightened Mozart opera performances.
In his memory, I watched the DVD of his Salzburg Festival Figaro, recorded in 2006, the other day and thought it as revealing as ever - not too fast (though he could be very fast), lucidly articulated, unsurpassingly cast with the alert young Anna Netrebko as Susanna, Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as a light-footed Figaro, Christine Schafer as delightfully childlike Cherubino, Bo Skovhus as a grimly perspiring Count, Dorothea Roschmann as the most forlorn of Countesses. It was a performance, polished on the surface but filled with undercurrents, that explored every facet of the music.
Luckily for posterity, Harnoncourt was a master of recording, in a way like Herbert von Karajan, whom he reputedly despised and whose musical obverse he was. The parallels between them - the Salzberg Festival connections, or disconnections, whereby he was banned by Karajan for twenty years, the devotion to Mozart whom Harnoncourt conducted infinitely better - were finally (though not until Karajan died) in Harnoncourt’s favour.
But it was the sheer authenticity of his conducting, something the smooth and autocratic Karajan never possessed, that mattered most. At a time when performances on original instruments, with the shunning of vibrato, seemed thin and weedy, Harnoncourt’s were alive, confident, utterly secure. His ensemble, the Concentus Musicus Wien - the Vienna Philharmonic of baroque chamber orchestras except for the fact that it contained many women - rehearsed for five years with his wife Alice as leader before it made its first public appearance and recorded all Bach’s surviving church cantatas.
His cycle of Mozart symphonies with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra employed modern instruments in a historically informed manner and the often explosive results were a revelation. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra spoke of winning him as guest conductor but got Charles Mackerras instead - a like-minded choice and a musician in a similar mould.
But we did need to hear more of Harnoncourt here, and it was a shame we didn’t.
10 March 2016
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