One of the joys of working on the STIMU [Foundation for Historical Performance Practice] symposium entitled Much of what we do is pure hypothesis: Gustav Leonhardt and his early music has been to discover just how subtle and consistent the thought processes of Leonhardt were over the course of his performing career. Indeed, he showed a marked difference to those in the early music business who believe they know what authentic performances should sound like.

Leonhardt was quite different, and although adoring fans were happy to see in him the reincarnation of J. S. Bach, he himself stressed, over and over again, the hypothetical nature of early music performance practice. That he offered solutions to problems presented by the music of the past to performing musicians of today is beyond question; that he found a musical language that spoke to generations of music-lovers in a profound way is almost a platitude; but that he himself realized the fragility of the entire early music construction is much less well understood.

The STIMU symposium brought to light just how great a difference there was between Leonhardt’s thought and that of the ‘authenticity’ movement on which American musicologist Richard Taruskin heaped so much scorn in the 1990s. Our intent was to explore the earliest portion of Leonhardt’s career (up until the presentation of the Erasmus Prize that he and Nikolaus Harnoncourt received in 1980 for the Bach cantata cycle), as well as to showcase the latest research into the Northern European repertoire he so loved: that of Sweelinck to Bach.

The symposium opened with a showing of the Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach by Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, introduced by the American musicologist Kailan Rubinoff. The theatre was full and the film made a deep impression on the audience, though it is by no means an easy one to digest.

Early Influences

The first session of the symposium examined the conflicts between the early music approach of Concertgebouw conductor Willem Mengelberg and the Naarden Circle (who founded the Dutch Bach Society in the 1920s in order to present Bach’s Matthew Passion as a liturgical, rather than as an aesthetic, masterpiece). Presentations by Frits Zwart and myself worked in tandem to compare this early material: Zwart played examples from Mengelberg’s very passionate and Romantic Matthew Passion performances and explained his philosophy of early music, which was not informed by notions of authenticity.

My own contribution examined Leonhardt’s musical education at the hands of Anthon van der Horst, who at that time conducted the Dutch Bach Society. Van der Horst, in contrast to Mengelberg, had a liturgical and ‘authentic’ approach to Bach’s music. In the course of the lecture I also presented new information about Leonhardt’s period at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, including a discussion of his master’s thesis. I argued that the Basel period was most notable for Leonhardt’s in-depth study of J. S. Bach’s notation, as well as for the discovery of much earlier repertoire (early Renaissance polyphony and monophony) in performances led by one of the founders of the Schola, Ina Lohr.

The second session of the day invoked the post-Basel period, in which Leonhardt’s career began to take off. Nicholas Clapton presented fascinating evidence of the influence that the English countertenor Alfred Deller had on Leonhardt, comparing recordings both artists made in order to draw conclusions about Leonhardt’s famous ‘rubato’ technique.

His lecture was followed by that of Kailan Rubinoff, who presented Leonhardt’s early career in the context of 1960s Dutch politics, the rise of new-fangled ‘hi-fi’ sound systems and the radical, historic events that shook the world in 1968.

The afternoon ended with a round-table discussion, led by Leo Samama, in which Ton Koopman, Menno van Delft and Richard Egarr summoned up memories of Leonhardt as teacher and source of inspiration.

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The North German School

The second day of the symposium, which was curated by Dutch musicologist Pieter Dirksen (who has published important works on both Sweelinck and J. S. Bach), was devoted to the study of the works of composers from the so-called North German School. Dirksen and Stephen Rose examined the works of Georg Böhm; Lars Berglund and Geoffrey Webber explored Italian influences of Baltic composers and on Buxtehude; and Ulf Grapenthin (who gave a moving personal testimony of Leonhardt as colleague and source of inspiration) and Peter Wollny looked at Johann Adam Reincken’s work and influence.

These presentations all looked at stylistic characteristics of the music Leonhardt had so loved, and they hypothesized about how musical styles were transmitted from country to country and between composers, during the course of the 17th century. Michael Maul however, in the first presentation of the day, revealed new information from the archives of the Thomasschule in Leipzig that undoubtedly will have ramifications for the one-to-a-part theory of Bach’s choral works. Leonhardt himself was violently against the one-to-a-part theory, and would certainly have been pleased to know that an important new contribution to the debate was made during a symposium dedicated to his legacy.

Leonhardt’s career

The final day of the symposium saw a return to the theme of Leonhardt’s career.

It began, however, with a lecture by Thérèse de Goede which showed how the study of hexachords and the contemporary rules of voice-leading can result in fresh and exciting performances, a perfect example of how theory and practice can go hand and hand to create exciting music-making.

In the afternoon, Martin Elste, of the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung PK, Berlin, talked about the differences in conception of the harpsichord in the work of Wanda Landowska and Leonhardt, giving each performer their due without judging one or the other.

Gaëtan Naulleau spoke of the Bach Cantata cycle and its influence, and exposed some of the clever marketing techniques which would eventually steer the course of the entire early music industry firmly towards ‘authenticity’.

In what was surely, for many in the audience, the highlight of the afternoon, John Butt gave a thrilling talk, in a typically virtuosic fashion, on the larger context of the early music movement, and proposed its best way forward.

I also presented a selection of film footage drawn from the Dutch Television archives. [Leonhardt was shown, in his very early days, playing continuo while someone else conducted; playing in a children’s programme of fairy tales and in a Saturday night variety show – wearing tails – after the BBC Toppers (famous for the Black and White Minstrel Show) had performed a pseudo eighteenth-century dance routine. Finally, we saw him being interviewed at home, looking slightly ill at ease, in the early seventies.]

This was already an embarrassingly rich programme of events, but there was more: Johan Hofmann and Kathryn Cok both presented hour-long Summer school events, the former about a reconstruction of Sweelinck’s harpsichord and the latter on little-known Dutch basso continuo sources. Both of these topics would have interested Leonhardt deeply.

Summing up

As I mentioned above, the symposium was meant both as a retrospective of Leonhardt’s career and influence, and as provoking thought about the future of the early music movement. But here, once again, Leonhardt was ahead of us. He himself had thought about the way forward. When he told a friend and former student in 2010 that he wanted all of his recordings to turn to dust, he did so because he believed that it was for the good of the movement itself: he had no desire to become an icon, and in so doing, become an obstruction between a new generation of performers and the works themselves.

Leonhardt knew that the masterpieces of the past must continue to be approached directly, not through the medium of editors or interpreters, no matter how great or revered such editors or interpreters might be. He understood that the way forward lies not the preservation, but in the destruction, of the immediate past.

No matter how great the legacy of Leonhardt, imitation is not the path before us.

Here’s a video of Leonhardt playing the harpsichord that he used in his last concert in Italy.

 © Jed Wentz 2012

 © Semibrevity 2012

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Last week I sampled two small slices of the Emma Kirkby master class, on Purcell and his predecessors, held for two days at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.

The second was much more to my taste, as it was undiluted by the extensive coaching of the instrumentalists which spoiled the first day, and sometimes left Emma with nothing to do. To all intents and purposes, the second session was a singing lesson, which is what it was supposed to be. Lovely.

Emma, charming and polite to a fault – always beginning with “ Sorry, …” – obviously knows this repertoire inside out, and it showed, even when she was not that familiar with a particular piece.

Hearing her sing even a snatch of melody in her immediately recognizable, undiminished flutey tone, was pure joy; and seeing how she could help others to make this music really speak was quite extraordinary.

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Her comments about where to breathe, singing from your core, and her emphatic and exemplary Italian and French pronunciation were as appropriate as you would expect. In each case, Emma understood completely what was going wrong and knew instinctively what to suggest. It was striking how much changed in the students in the course of the class.

Creating the right mouth shape is key, as was shown in Barbara Strozzi’s Le Tre Grazie a Venere, the all-girl trio with a rather racey text, in which the merits of clothes and birthday suits are compared. Though still “half-cooked” (Emma’s description), and accompanied in the rehearsal room on a Taskin copy, it was a delight, and just got better with each repetition.

Pulling a face, though, even for your art, comes at a price. I was reminded of hearing Emma speak previously about the horrific snapshots taken of her in full flight, where – as ever – she was focusing on getting the right sound and making sure the words were understood, rather than being early music’s poster girl.

As one of the students commented, it is all about expressing the meaning of  the words, and not just singing the music on the page. Obvious, really.

In everything she said, Emma was very kind, encouraging and supportive of the choices made, even when rather artificial-looking French rhetorical hand movements – which seem currently the flavour of the month here – threatened to scupper otherwise good performances.

Of course it is very hard to change the way in which you’ve practised a piece. Standing stock-still won’t work either, as was ably demonstrated in a Purcell number about a jilted lover. “An angry, complaining hand by your heart, makes it easier to sing”, she said.

The rule, with movements – according to Emma – is eye … hand … voice, and going with what feels natural.

Speaking of the same piece, she also said “ take time over these ingredients”.

Although she is a most definitely a prima donna (see also this article), there was no trace of ego or of affectation of any kind. Her genuine, down-to-earth teaching style was as pure as the quality of her voice.

Copyright © 2012 Semibrevity – All Rights Reserved

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I’d been meaning to buy Personal Recollections of Arnold Dolmetsch (published in 1957) for ages, and finally it arrived just after the recent conference in the Netherlands on Gustav Leonhardt (report from organizer, Jed Wentz, to follow), in which one of the speakers described Arnold as an amateur!

This is, of course, not at all true, even in the most literal sense.

Although the book hardly mentions money, we know that Arnold charged fees for his violin teaching and frequently for his performances, and sold the instruments he made.

His loss-making project to popularize triangular harpsichords for £25, which he announced without making any calculations, showed “the buoyant optimism which (come what may) supported Arnold through fair weather and foul”. The outbreak of war in 1914 halted the influx of orders, allowing Arnold to adjust the price for what was to become a “very popular and serviceable instrument”.

As for the slight disparagement with which the word ‘amateur’ is so often loaded, a contemporary reviewer of Personal Recollections described Arnold’s place in music history like this:

“He was the first modern musician to have an unqualified faith in early instrumental music, and to put this faith into practice by performing it on its original instruments and in its original form, instead of doctoring it up for modern consumption with patronizing “improvements” of scoring and presentation.”

The author, Mabel Dolmetsch, was Arnold’s third wife, 16 years his junior, who had started taking violin lessons from him in 1896 and, within a year, had become part of the concert-giving “family”, mostly performing on the violone or the viola da gamba. At the same time, she worked as Arnold’s instrument-building assistant, as she’d been learning wood-working, on the quiet.

The book is crammed with detail – about journeys and concerts and how the rooms looked; the costumes worn by the children (who, from an early age sang, played or danced); the variable quality of the catering; explanations of who was related to whom, and how which musicians came to play which instruments and why. It’s all rather rose-coloured, and not much is made of Arnold’s fiery temperament or his bankruptcy.

Famous people

The narrative is quite stiff with famous names, reminding the reader that Arnold was something of a superstar, having played the clavichord for President Roosevelt. He was a friend of many, including the antiquarian Fuller Maitland (co-editor of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), Sir George Grove (of the Dictionary) and the pianist and composer Busoni (to whom Chickering – AD’s generous American employer – gifted a harpsichord).

His literary connections with W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and others are much less well known (to find out about them, see this blog). There’s also his involvement with the Arts and Crafts crowd (you know, the “green harpsichord” and all that), with Arnold playing the virginals to William Morris, as he lay dying.

Violin lessons

Arnold’s first violin teacher was a gypsy (really!), who disappeared one day, taking with him a violin borrowed from Arnold’s father’s music shop.  Later, Arnold studied with the famous virtuoso Henri Vieuxtemps at the Brussels conservatoire and followed this by enrolling at the Royal College of Music, in its opening year of 1882, where his teachers included Sir Hubert Parry for harmony and Henry Holmes for violin. He then became a rather over-qualified part-time violin teacher at Dulwich College, the posh boarding school.

Searching for repertoire for his newly acquired “honey-toned” viola d’amore, in the Reading Room of the British Museum, Arnold stumbled upon stacks of 16th and 17th century English music for viols, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Instrument-making

Arnold learned the family trade of piano-making in his father’s workshop and was a skilled cabinet-maker by the age of fourteen, when he made a mahogany-veneered chest of drawers which Mabel described as “so faultless that not a thing has been altered from that day till this”. It’s amusing that Arnold had to be reminded that he had these skills, as he’d just been playing music for a period of ten years, and had quite forgotten (reportedly) that he knew how to restore instruments.

The whole story of the loss of the Bressan recorder, on Waterloo station, is given here in detail, and young Carl wasn’t as remiss as suggested elsewhere, but was rather overtaken by events. Arnold believed that this instrument was the only surviving playable recorder and set about making a copy, which ultimately brought about a huge revival.

Reviews from 1958

In one review, Mabel is criticized for “provided little insight into her husband’s methods of recreating a lost art through research, the reconstruction of ancient instruments, or the performances in which his labor culminated”.

Another, kinder reviewer – who obviously knew the family well, and later wrote Mabel’s obituary – wrote that this book “will give much pleasure to those who knew and loved [Arnold] well … and convey a little of the remarkable atmosphere in which he worked, to those who did not”.

She ends by saying, “Mabel’s loyalty and her serenity had more to do with [Arnold’s] success than this modest story tells.”

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by Guest Blogger: Mandy Macdonald

A page from William Byrd’s My Ladye Nevells Booke

This recording of the lovely Fifth Pavane, played by the English harpsichordist Colin Tilney, is one of the 42 compositions for virginals by William Byrd (c. 1540–1623) in My Ladye Nevells Booke of Virginal Music, one of the most beautiful Tudor manuscripts in existence.

When it was acquired for the British Library in 2006, at a total cost of almost £1 million, it caused scarcely a ripple in media circles, even in Britain. Six year on, it seemed worthwhile to revisit the story and explain the significance – and the high price tag – of this small but precious volume.   

Written in 1591, twenty years before Britain’s first printed book of keyboard music (Parthenia, 1613), My Ladye Nevells Booke is unique among early English keyboard collections in being devoted entirely to one composer. It is not only a precious artefact and a very significant historical document showing Byrd’s great importance as a trail-blazing composer of music for the virginals, but also a shining example of the successful preservation of Britain’s musical heritage.

Although clearly intended for personal use, My Ladye Nevells Booke is not just a commonplace book. The rich binding and superb calligraphy show that it was a presentation volume. The dedicatee, ‘Ladye Nevell’, has only fairly recently been firmly identified as Elizabeth, wife of Sir Henry Nevell or Nevill of Billingbere, Berkshire, and later of Sir William Periam. As Lady Periam she was also the dedicatee of Morley’s First Booke of Cazonets to Two Voyces of 1595; so we can imagine that she was, if not a patron of music, certainly an enthusiast.  

Saving private music

My Ladye Nevells Booke spent much, but by no means all, of its life in the possession of the Nevill family, the earls of Abergavenny. It was considered sufficiently precious to have been thought worthy of being presented to Queen Elizabeth I possibly only a few years after having been created for Lady Elizabeth Nevill. Passing out of royal hands before 1603, it returned to the Nevill family around 1668, where it seems to have stayed till the end of the eighteenth century. In 1814 it turned up mysteriously in the library catalogue of the famous musicologist Dr Charles Burney.

After being sold on a couple of times, it made its way back to Henry Nevill, Lord Abergavenny, by 1833, and from then on remained in the family until 2006. In that year the manuscript was accepted by the British government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the British Library, with additional funding from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, The Art Fund and many other  institutional and individual donors. The fundraising effort that resulted in the acquisition was led by Chris Banks, then Head of Music Collections at the British Library.

This was a great coup for the Library. As the early keyboard specialist Christopher Hogwood said: “It’s one of the prime sources of some of the finest keyboard music produced in England, and contains some of Byrd’s best pieces … It’s the best reference we have.” (Guardian, 31 December 2005).

In 2009 the British Library digitised the manuscript and made it available as a virtual book on its website

A work of art

John Baldwin signed off his work as

finished & ended the leventh of September in the yeare of our Lord God 1591 & in the 33 yeare of the raigne of our sofferaine ladie Elizabeth by the grace of God queene of Englande etc, by me Jo. Baldwine of Windsore. Laus deo.

Even if the music it contained were insignificant, My Ladye Nevells Booke would still be a work of art in its own right. It has remained astonishingly undamaged for more than 400 years. The ornate cover and binding are original and unusually elaborate for the period,  and were made at the workshop of John Bateman, royal bookbinder to Elizabeth I. See also this link

The manuscript itself was written by John Baldwin, a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, almost certainly closely associated with Byrd, and himself a competent composer: 17 of his compositions are to be found in the Royal Library. Baldwin’s calligraphy is very beautiful and consciously decorative, but also accurate – where he made errors they seem to occur in places where he was unable to resist making patterns with the notes, especially later in the book as his calligraphy became more confident. The occasional marginal comments and corrections are possibly by Byrd himself, the handwriting being identified by comparison with Byrd’s own hand in legal documents that he is known to have written.

The notation is both old-fashioned in the use of the six-line stave (although this stave continued to be used for keyboard music up to the time of Purcell) and forward-looking in the use of bar lines and key signatures. There are also many fingering indications, making MLNB a valuable piece of evidence also for Elizabethan practice in this respect.

The Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Ton Koopman has noted that “the countless fingering indications are an invaluable guide to early fingering and articulation systems” (English Harpsichord Magazine, 2/1, 1977).

The music

The music itself, however, is anything but old-fashioned. Hilda Andrews, editor of the first modern edition of  My Ladye Nevells Booke, calls Byrd the true founder of English virginal music, regarding earlier examples such as ‘My Lady Carey’s Dompe’ (see below) and Hugh Ashton’s ‘Hornepype’ as ‘primitive’.

Byrd’s great innovation in music for the virginals was to amalgamate the polyphonic style of vocal music (a style which has earlier been translated into music for the organ, for instance in works by Tallis and others in the Mulliner Book); with the accented rhythms of dance and folksong.

According to the reviewer of Christopher Hogwood’s recording of  MLNB in The Gramophone, January 1977), this produced music of

astonishing rhythmic vitality … Triplet rhythms suddenly intrude as do syncopations of the most complex kind; they make the music both hard to play and wonderfully alive.

This was new, path-breaking music

The collection shows the development of Byrd’s keyboard style from the 1570s up to 1591, when Baldwin began work. Some of Byrd’s best-known keyboard compositions, including the sets of variations “Sellinger’s Round” and “The Carman’s Whistle”, are there, as are three pieces written especially for Lady Nevill. Christopher Hogwood suggests in the sleeve notes to his 1977 recording that the collection falls into two sections each beginning with a piece dedicated to Lady Nevill.   

The genres not included are as interesting as those that are. Apart from the programmatic “Battell”, the pieces are mostly sombre and stately, with (except for “Munser’s Almaine” – played here by Hogwood) none of the sprightly court dances such as the coranto or volta that we find all through the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. On the other hand, there are no examples of fantasias based on Latin plainchant (e.g. the “In nomine”). We don’t know whether this selection reflects Byrd’s preference or Lady Nevill’s, nor to what extent it was influenced by religious criteria, but it does convey a strong sense of having been planned as a collection by the composer.  

Here’s Lord Willoughbie’s Welcome Home played by Davitt Moroney

Ladye Nevell in performance and recording

We now have at least three complete recordings of  My Ladye Nevells Booke: by Hogwood (1977), Davitt Moroney (1999) and Elizabeth Farr (2007). But it’s puzzling that this music took so long to become part of the regular performance and recording repertoire of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Although a de luxe modern edition of My Lady Nevells Booke was published  in 1926 – the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book had been published even earlier, in 1899 – and although the music was written about by scholars such as Edmund Fellowes (William Byrd, 1936; The Complete Works of William Byrd, vols. 18–20, 1950) and Margaret Glyn (About Elizabethan virginal music and its composers, 1924), it seems not to have become popular in performance and recording until decades later.

There are just a few recordings of a handful of pieces between 1923, when the redoubtable Violet Gordon Woodhouse recorded “The Queen’s Almand”, “Lord Willoughbie’s Welcome Home” (aka “Rowland”) and other now familiar pieces, and the mid-1950s, from which we have Thurston Dart on LPs from Decca (1953) and Oiseau-Lyre (1955). But recordings of Tudor and Jacobean keyboard music only really took off in the 1960s and particularly the 1970s, the generation of Hogwood, Tilney and Pinnock.

Why was this? Perhaps the music was considered too academic or abstruse, or too difficult – much of it certainly is challenging to play! Whatever the reasons, My Ladye Nevells Booke shows that Byrd’s keyboard music was the equal of his sung music. He kept writing for many years after its creation, but this collection from the first half of his career contains some of his best pieces, works that established a new keyboard style and opened the way for Bull, Gibbons, Tomkins and other great keyboard composers of the age.  

© Mandy Macdonald 2012

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Boris Ord and members of the King’s College Choir, taken in the Chapel at King’s, 1956

In an earlier post I introduced Boris Ord, the conductor of King’s College Choir for nearly 30 years. But what else do we know about him?

His biographical details – including active service in both wars – can easily be found online.

Briefly, he was an accomplished organist while still at school and studied at the Royal College of Music on a scholarship. In 1920 he went as organ scholar to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he founded the Cambridge University Madrigal Society, which toured abroad and so memorably sang madrigals during May Week on the river Cam from 1928. In 1923 he was elected to a fellowship at King’s College.

In the same year that he took over from Dr Mann, he also became University Organist, and right up to the time Sir David Lumsden became his organ student in 1948, Ord was the organ teacher of choice in Cambridge.

During the 1920s and 1930s Ord was described (by Radcliffe) as

an excellent and much-in-demand conductor, a gifted pianist of wide musical sympathies … invaluable as a player of continuo parts, in Rootham’s staged CUMS performances of Purcell and Handel, … [who] had a sure instinct for what was unobtrusively effective.

Given his involvement in many productions, it was inevitable that Ord should be appointed conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) chorus and orchestra when Cyril Rootham retired in 1937.

According to Sir David Lumsden, he “produced electrifying performances of the major choral society repertory … again his experience in the opera house shone through”. 

For CUMS, he conducted many successful stage performances, notable among them Vaughan Williams’ Pilgrim’s Progress, Handel’s Solomon and Saul, which was described at the time as a “magnificent triumph”.

In the fifties, the composer, Professor Peter Dickinson, sang in his Verdi Requiem, which he described quite simply as “unforgettable”.

As an organist, according to Sir David Lumsden (who was his organ student for six years),

Boris’ approach was more pragmatic then historical.  For example, he was firmly in the older school of organists who insisted that organ sound must be constantly varied to maintain interest. When Boris played, his sheer musicianship shone through but with no concern for the growing “early” [music] style, rather an unerring sense of colour and contrast and dynamic variety.

Sir David Willcocks told me Ord didn’t play much Bach. But he did perform the Art of Fugue every year – which, according to Hugh McLean (Ord’s penultimate organ scholar), he read from an open score!

But was Boris Ord a pioneer?

Although Ord was described by Raymond Leppard (who took over as conductor of his Madrigal Society from 1957) in his On Music as “an authority on early music [who] conducted marvelously”, it’s difficult to know to what extent Boris Ord was actually part of the early music movement.

He was certainly an expert teacher in the intricacies of 16th-century counterpoint and, at one stage, he owned a Purcell manuscript (which passed to Thurston Dart), containing some Monteverdi madrigals and works by Bull, Gibbons and Coprario.

He apparently had plans to research some lute-song composers (though one wonders how much was left after Edmund Fellowes’ forays into this repertoire), but practical music-making always came first.

On balance, though, I have to conclude that, despite playing the harpsichord and conducting baroque rarities, Ord wasn’t an early music specialist. He was, however, a highly successful musical jack of all trades, whose range encompassed Dunstaple, Gibbons and Tallis, Britten’s A Boy is Born, Mozart’s Idomeneo, Purcell’s The Tempest, Dioclesian and King Arthur, Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.

Sir David Willcocks said that he was always keen to try new works, particularly if he knew the composer, as was the case with Herbert Howells.

Recordings

There are no solo organ recordings and the only chamber music he recorded consists of two 78 rpms, of Purcell violin sonatas, with Jean Pougnet and Frederick Grinke. He played continuo on an amplified “whispering giant” on the 1945 recording of Dido & Aeneas, conducted by Constant Lambert (which is still available) and also on a record of Couperin motets, directed by Anthony Lewis with the opera divas Jennifer Vyvan and Elsie Morison.

Here’s Ord conducting a solo group consisting of Isobel Baillie, Margaret Field-Hyde, Gladys Winmill, Rene Soames and Keith Falkner in Wilbye’s madrigal Flora Gave Me Fairest Flowers.

The disc that he made (in 1957) of the repertoire from the annual “harpsichord jamborees” at the Royal Festival Hall is our only chance of hearing the “ lightness of touch” of his orchestral conducting, which Radcliffe describes as being so perfect for eighteenth-century music.

Summing up

Variously described as “legendary”, “formidable”, someone who was “very very strict” and “ a genius utterly devoted to his work”, Boris Ord was (nevertheless) held in great affection by the choir at King’s.

Brian Head (who was Ord’s head choral scholar in his last year) said “Boris didn’t fully understand the immense contribution he made to choral music in England and to the King’s legacy”.

Radcliffe mentions that he was very sociable, gave lavish parties and “kept his friendships in constant good repair”. Sir David Lumsden described Ord as “a man of great charm and charisma, with a dry sense of humour”.

This last trait is certainly borne out by the many funny stories I’ve heard about him and the fact that he established the Bene’t Society, solely for performing hilariously successful concerts of “Bad music” – which attracted such eminent visitors as Gustav Holst and Edith Sitwell

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Grayston Burgess, Professor Peter Dickinson, Brian Head, Michael Keall,  Sir David Lumsden, Hugh McLean, Sir David Willcocks and to staff at the Archive Centre and Development Office at King’s College, Cambridge.

See part 1 of this post here

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Despite having amassed almost twenty thousand signatures on an internet-based petition, Sigiswald Kuijken’s baroque orchestra, La Petite Bande, has been definitively told that it will receive no more money from the Belgian government.

According to the committee which decided to pull the plug, the orchestra is no longer “innovative enough” and has outlived its usefulness, as there are now plenty of other similar groups!

The fact that the band is built around the personality of its leader, pioneering violinist Sigiswald Kuijken, is given as another reason why support has been withdrawn.

It’s a sad irony that Sigiswald Kuijken, who was one of the people who – along with his brothers Wieland and Bart, plus Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen and Nikolaus Harnoncourt –  brought “early music” back to life and has taught countless students all over the world, is now effectively being thrown on the scrapheap by his own country, and is described as “one of many”!

This decision is, in fact, a repeat performance of the negative advice given in 2009, which was ignored by the then Minister of Culture, Bert Anciaux, who maintained funding until 2012.

Interestingly, the government has found 7 million euros extra at the last moment to support other cultural projects of perhaps dubious value, in decisions which have been labelled as “friend’s politics” by local commentators.

La Petite Bande was founded in 1972 by Sigiswald Kuijken for a recording project  of Lully’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, conducted by the late Gustav Leonhardt. The orchestra takes its name from Lully’s own orchestra, Petite Bande des Violons du Roi at the court of Louis XIV. The core of the original group consisted of members of the Leonhardt Consort along with Sigiswald Kuijken and his brothers.

Although La Petite Bande was not originally meant to become a permanent orchestra, the success of their recordings was such that they have been giving concerts regularly for the last 40 years. More information can be found here.

Arts funding cuts are nothing new of course. But it’s quite shocking that this world-class ensemble may now simply disappear unless the shortfall of €600,000 can be found from other sources.

In a radio interview (in Dutch),  Sigiswald Kuijken has said that he intends to continue, and I do hope that he’s successful.

But, as the business manager of the orchestra said in the local paper De Tijd, “in terms of finding private benefactors, Belgium is not America”.

You can keep up to date with what’s happening with La Petite Bande, on their Facebook fan page.

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Alfred Deller was born on May 31, 1912 in the seaside town of Margate, in Kent, England and died on July 16, 1979 while on holiday in Bologna, Italy.

 
Alfred Deller can truly be called a pioneer of early music, developing his own voice and taking it to the public sphere in the face of frequent misunderstanding and even prejudice from his hearers. Considering the superstar status of Andreas Scholl and Philippe Jaroussky today, it’s odd that the clear, high-pitched voice of Alfred Deller was thought peculiar, even unnatural, during the early days of his career.

 
Here’s Alfred Deller with his son Mark singing Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet, accompanied on the guitar by the very versatile and largely unsung early music pioneer, Desmond Dupré.

It’s often forgotten that, at the time that Deller became famous, he was by no means the only male alto around. In fact, there was a veritable army of them – particularly in English cathedral and church choirs.  
 

Sir Jack Westrup, musicologist and teacher:

 
Until Deller, the [male] alto was regarded as a sort of vice [as they were associated with an unpleasant hooting sound] that one had to put up with. Many cathedral organists have groaned under the burden of their altos … particularly as they did not become more pleasant with age.

Deller was very unusual among modern singers in that his voice still hadn’t broken at the age of sixteen. He developed his own technique for singing in the lower register, when his church choir master suggested that he stop singing as a boy soprano and become an alto. The whole fascinating story of how he created his own sound, and moved from being a furniture salesman to become a world-famous singer, is told in great detail in A Singularity of Voice (the 1968 biography of Deller) by Michael & Mollie Hardwick, which has been the source of much of information used here.

 
As the authors of this book say, “Had women been admitted to cathedral choirs, it is possible that there would have been no alto revival for Alfred Deller to lead.” 

Deller, Tippett and Purcell
 

It was the composer Michael Tippett who was to help launch Deller’s solo career. Tippett was a worthy successor to Gustav Holst at London’s Morley College (the working person’s educational temple), and continued the tradition of reviving forgotten works, particularly by Purcell.
 
Tippett was looking for a countertenor, as he was very “wrapped up” in the the music of all the early English school at that time, and the two were brought together by the precentor of Canterbury Cathedral, Canon Joseph Poole, while Deller was still in the choir there. Tippett recalled hearing him for the first time, singing Purcell’s Music for a while, in the choir practice room, which had hardly changed since Orlando Gibbons was there in the early seventeenth century, and said, “In that moment, the centuries rolled back.”
 
Deller’s London debut followed in October 1944, aptly in the Holst Room at Morley College, where he sang in verse anthems by Gibbons and Purcell and ended with what was to become his trademark solo: Music for a while.

 
Tippett also organized an appearance for Deller at one of the famous wartime National Gallery concerts, and introduced him as “the possessor of a remarkable countertenor voice [Tippett was reportedly the first to use this term in modern times, reviving it specifically for Deller] … and that he had also trained his two sons to sing”.
 

The first part of that comment was intended to prevent whispering or giggling which might have “put the  obviously nervous Deller out of his stride and prevented him from making a telling impression”. The purpose of the second part is pretty obvious.

In the 1940s, some people thought his voice so strange that they felt compelled to write to him, insisting that there must be something wrong with him! Apparently, Deller’s stoic response was always to send a photograph of himself with his wife and three children, to those who included their address.

 
Along with Tippett and his collaborator Walter Bergmann, Deller can be credited with helping to bring much of Purcell’s music out of the shadows. The conductor, Sir Anthony Lewis, who was responsible for Deller’s breakthrough radio broadcast of Purcell’s Come, Ye Sons of Art at the inaugural concert of the BBC’s Third Programme (which was to be entirely devoted to classical music) in September 1946, commented that “The work was hardly known, and, if Alfred had not come along, would probably have remained so.”
 

He went on to say:
 

Alfred Deller, by his first-class interpretation and unassailable technique … helped to open up a great repertoire of Purcell and Handel [to] a highly sophisticated and critical public. Many works which had simply been regarded as historical relics, not normally accessible to the concert hall, came forward  into the ranks of acknowledged masterpieces.
 

Another important landmark in Deller’s career was the invitation from
Gustav Leonhardt, who was then still teaching in Vienna,  to participate in the ground-breaking 1954 Vanguard recordings of Bach cantatas and Elizabethan music, together with the Deller Consort, which Deller had founded in 1950. The ensuing contract with Vanguard brought Deller into contact with many other groups and made him famous everywhere – except in the UK, where the recordings were not distributed.

Here’s Alfred Deller and Margaret Ritchie with the lovely Act II duet from Handel’s Sosarme, “Per le porte del tormento”.

Despite his success, it was not until 1962 that Deller finally left the choir of St. Paul’s Cathedral – which he had joined in 1947 – feeling, at the age of 50, that he could finally support his family as a freelance musician.

How times have changed.

Read what Toby Deller has to say about his grandad here 
 

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Part of an official photo of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, taken c. 1950; Boris Ord is in the light suit with choral scholar Grayston Burgess on his right. You can just make out the top hats on the knees of the boys sitting on the ground.

When Boris Ord became director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1929, he took over a “fine choir” which had been developed by Dr A.H. Mann during his period of office, which had spanned 53 years! It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Dr Mann’s nickname was “Daddy”.

Although Mann had “a personality of great charm and kindliness [and] Boris had the highest respect for the achievements of his predecessor, he himself had a wider knowledge of music and a more comprehensive approach”. This is a quote from the slim postcard-sized commemorative booklet, written by composer Philip Radcliffe and privately printed for King’s College in 1962, the year after Ord’s death.

In addition to this prime source, I’ve recently spoken to several people who knew Ord, as organ scholars or members of his choir at King’s. In all these conversations, I have been struck by both the warmth with which he is remembered and the immediate recall that people have of events which took place from the late 1930s to the 1950s.

Michael Keall, head chorister in the 1940s, who knew Pat McGee, the head chorister during Mann’s final years, commented that when Ord took over, a big change was necessary, as Mann was steeped in the Victorian tradition. Some of the sentimental “war horses” which had outlived their usefulness were amongst the first to be swept away by Ord.

More sixteenth-century music (from editions prepared by Edmund Fellowes) was added to the repertoire, along with other changes to the daily evensong services. Ord’s reforms were helped, no doubt, by “a firm bond of sympathy in matters of musical taste” between him and the Very Reverend E.M. Milner-White, the then dean of King’s (who devised the famous Nine Lessons and Carols service).

Writing of his time as a choral scholar from 1932 to 1935, Eric Hall describes Ord as “a tyrant and friend”. He goes on to say that “The memory of Dr Mann’s long and notable service … was still sufficiently vivid to act as a spur to Boris to justify his succession and to build on the traditions of his predecessor.” But “choristers are creatures of conservative instincts”, and his changes were not always favorably received. One of the boys, in one of his weekly letters home, referred to Boris as “that loony Ord”.

Sir David Willcocks, who was Ord’s organ scholar both before and after the second world war and succeeded him as director of music in 1957, told me that he was moved to tears when he first heard the choir sing Tallis in King’s College Chapel. Even though he had been a chorister at Westminster Abbey, he had never heard a choir sing so perfectly in tune.

Ord was indeed passionate about intonation. He also “assumed that perfection was possible and drew it from the choir”, according to the countertenor Grayston Burgess, who had been brought up as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, with Alfred Deller, and who joined King’s as a choral scholar at the age of seventeen, in 1950.  Eric Hall wrote of his experience in the 1930s, “whatever our achievement, Boris could always imagine something better [and] it is doubtful whether any performance ever quite satisfied him”.

Within a very few years of taking over, Ord had made King’s College Choir world-famous,  greatly assisted, according to Willcocks, by both gramophone records and BBC radio broadcasts – most notably of the Christmas service of Nine Lessons and Carols, which began in 1928. Here’s Boris Ord conducting the first ever televised Carol Service from King’s College Chapel in 1954.

In 1936 the Foreign Office, under the auspices of the British Council, organized the first of many choir tours, to Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm. This certainly demonstrated a “wider recognition of the choir’s excellence”.

On the road: the Choir of King’s College at Hamburg Station, March 1936

According to Sir David Lumsden,

His opera experience [he spent a year at the Cologne Opera] showed clearly in the quality of sound his singers produced. The older men in the Choir obviously transformed the overall sound compared with normal undergraduate voices, their precision of ensemble and tuning, their sensitivity to phrasing, dynamic contrast and communicating not only the words themselves but their meaning and significance. 

Though there was a system of internal conducting, he must surely have been the first choirmaster to spend more time in the choir stalls than in the organ loft, which is now the norm and greatly to the benefit of standards all round.

In terms of his conducting style, “he could convey his meaning and obtain the results that he wanted with the minimum of movement”, according to Radcliffe. Everyone that I interviewed confirmed this. Grayston Burgess told me that Ord also spoke very little and could bring out a phrase simply by using his hands.

See part 2 of this post here

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This is an extract from a 1971 interview, in which Frans Brüggen was asked to explain the “phenomenon Leonhardt”.  At that stage, they had already been friends for more than 10 years and had become internationally famous through their records and for giving concerts together.

Leonhardt is Bach

For me, Leonhardt is the personification of Bach. I imagine that Leonhardt is just like Bach must have been: strict, fair-minded, mild, with a good sense of humor, someone who was occasionally rebellious and, at the same time, very disciplined. Bach must also have had a remarkable memory and, like Leonhardt, he was absolutely congruent in everything that he did.

Asceticism

Take his house, for example [the Bartolotti House, built in 1617]. That house fascinates him immensely, and he simply has to know everything about it. He has spent a huge amount of time at the Municipal Archive, looking through old inventories and documents, which he copies out himself. He refuses to make photocopies. No, it must be done by hand. He has a sort of monk’s mentality! [In 1979, Leonhardt wrote a meticulously researched book about his house, called Het huis Bartolotti en zijn bewoners.]

Very much against his will, he allowed the Hendrick de Keyser Foundation [owners of the Bartolotti House] to install central heating. Leonhardt really doesn’t believe in such things and, because of this, he keeps switching everything off. Central heating is nonsense … and (according to him) it spoils your brains! If you go there for a rehearsal in the winter, then you’ll often see Leonhardt sitting in front of the harpsichord, wearing a scarf and his winter coat, because of the cold.  Everyone else just has to accept it. It is a bit annoying, but that’s just the way that it is.

Authoritarian?

Absolutely not. But he may perhaps come over that way, to people who don’t know him well. But he’ll never attempt to impose his views. He will simply say what he thinks, and leave it to the other person to decide. But you know that he is always right.

What I really admire in him, is the congruent way in which he lives his life. He will never do anything that he has not completely mastered, he will never lie, and he always becomes very involved in whatever he takes on.

Improvisational ability

As a continuo player, he has no equal, in terms of inventiveness. He is someone who will never make a mistake. But technique is not really important to him, it’s nothing more than a means to an end.

He believes that you should be “reasonably handy” on your own instrument … One of his greatest strengths is his ability to improvise, particularly when playing continuo. And his sense of rhythm, that flawless subtle rubato, is what gives his playing such a strong forward impulse!

I am constantly learning from him, and his absolute certainty that he is always right [in musical matters], is such a great inspiration.

He has a memory like an elephant, and can memorize music very easily. But he will never play a piece by heart, as he thinks it’s unnecessary.

He can [also] tell you about practically every house in Amsterdam that has been restored, what was involved, and what was not done well. [In 1996, Leonhardt wrote a book about this, called Amsterdams Onvoltooid Verleden]

Perfectionist

Leonhardt is a perfectionist. His attitude is that if you’re concerned with the past, you should also try to be the past. 

Music is only part of his life, it is certainly one of the things that he values, but it is not the most important. But, for him, it is imperative that a house is properly restored, an historic organ is saved from destruction, or that something old has been appropriately preserved. Actually, these things are much more important to him, than that he plays a piece of Bach.

He delights in beauty, not the sort that’s preserved and stored in museums, but something that is alive and flourishing – just like his own playing. He definitely couldn’t live without beauty, and if it doesn’t exist, then he will he create it himself!

A man of his times? No, not really. Rather, he is timeless. He is one of the last patricians. And to me, he is the personification of Bach. Leonhardt is Bach.

© Frans Brüggen 2012
Translation © www.semibrevity.com 2012

Thanks are due to Frans Brüggen, who kindly gave his permission for me to translate and publish this interview.

In terms of Leonhardt being Bach, see this mini-documentary, made in 1967, about the filming of Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach. It includes a short interview with Leonhardt, in which he talks about how it felt to play the part of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The full film, without subtitles, has been uploaded here.  

Purely by chance, I came across this video in which the producer of Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, Gian Vittorio Baldi, tells the funny story, recorded at a film festival in 2006, of how he managed to raise the money for the film.

More memories of Leonhardt

In contrast to the many Leonhardt obituaries which focus of his influence, Professor Davitt Moroney, who studied with Leonhardt more than 30 years ago (and, incidentally, was also a student of Thurston Dart), has just published a fascinating and very extensive  piece (downloadable here as a pdf) which “is intended as a tribute to his complexity and to the difficulty of identifying what made Leonhardt Leonhardt”.

To end with, here’s a rare TV recording, from 1966, of Brüggen with Leonhardt playing a modern-style instrument, probably an Ammer.

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Mary Potts and Gustav Leonhardt

© Estate of Mary Potts 2012
 

Following on from my last post on Mary Potts, the forgotten harpsichord teacher of many, including Christopher Hogwood and Colin Tilney (who, like Professor Peter Williams, went on to study with Gustav Leonhardt), I’ve been looking into who else, from Mary’s circle, is remembered – or not.
 
What’s clear is that being commemorated apparently has little to do with recordings made, concerts given or academic posts held. Many musicians who were very famous in their lifetimes have now disappeared almost without trace. Perhaps it’s more important to have tenacious musical executors who are determined to keep someone’s memory alive, or at least get some recognition for them.
 
For instance …
 
Thurston Dart got a memorial volume, 10 years after his death, published by the company for which he did much editing. But, as I mentioned here, only a handful of pages is devoted to describing his life, and the rest consists of erudite articles by his students on subjects that would have interested him.
 
Howard Ferguson, the composer and prolific music editor, who was also a long-term friend of Mary’s, didn’t. But apart from his “tight-lipped memoir”, he was heavily involved – just before he died – in the publication of Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson, which represents a hefty slice of his life. There is also a very fulsome 70th birthday tribute, written by Howard Schott in Early Music.
 
Captain Raymond Russell, author and instrument collector (of the Russell Collection in Edinburgh) didn’t get a memorial publication; and there’s almost no biographical information about him at all, though I did find someone who knew him from childhood.

Please comment below. Who else, in your view, is an unjustly forgotten early music pioneer?

 
David Munrow, more than 30 years after his death, still doesn’t have a biography – though there is quite an extensive website with a forum – and a symposium is now in the pipeline.
 
Professor E.J. Dent, the musicologist, writer and translator (whom Mary Potts must have known, as he had a keen interest in early keyboards, and owned a clavichord of sorts (see page 6 of this pdf) is remembered in Duet for Two Voices: An Informal Biography of Edward Dent Compiled from his Letters to Clive Carey, published in 1980. But before that came out (he died in 1957), there was only a 30-page booklet printed in 400 copies.

Boris Ord, the conductor and organist, and another regular in Mary’s kitchen, is remembered in a similarly slim tome, privately printed and by the same author, composer Philip Radcliffe. Ord was a brilliant choir-trainer who was “revered” by Thurston Dart and greatly influenced Sir David Willcocks, who succeeded him as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge.
 
Interestingly, though, Charles Cudworth, the music historian and Pendlebury librarian who was a protégé of Dent’s (and best known for his scholarly articles and his kind reviews in the Cambridge newspaper, and for writing notes for record sleeves) is celebrated in a substantial volume called Music in Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Christopher Hogwood and Richard Luckett. The fascinating foreword to this book outlines Cudworth’s very unconventional career.
 
Last, and definitely not least: Gustav Leonhardt, who has sadly recently passed away. Given his pre-eminence, it’s surprising that, although there are many interviews, there’s only a single book written about him, in French. Oddly, even The Keyboard in Baroque Europe, compiled as a Festschrift for Gustav Leonhardt on his 75th birthday and published by Cambridge University Press, might not have seen the light of day without financial support from a Dutch music dealer.

Printed matter apart, we can also remember Leonhardt through his 200-plus recordings, mostly listed in this online catalogue (type in “Gustav Leonhardt”). And, despite the poor quality, I must admit that I’m glad that we do have some videos of him – taken with mobile phones. But what I’ve never really understood is why his performances, many lectures and master classes were almost never professionally recorded; particularly given that his LPs, from as long ago as the early 1960s, have been endlessly reissued. Surely, there must have been a market …
 
To end with, here’s a rarity, with Leonhardt, in his prime, conducting a Bach cantata in the Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam in the 1970s, with a band of top-notch players, including Ton Koopman on the chamber organ.

See also these posts:

The forgotten harpsichord teacher of Christopher Hogwood & Colin Tilney

Gustav Leonhardt (1928–2012), the end of an era

“A Long and Beautiful Life”: A tribute to Gustav Leonhardt by Ton Koopman

How famous is scholar, conductor and harpsichordist Thurston Dart, 40 years on? Part 1

How famous is scholar, conductor and harpsichordist Thurston Dart, 40 years on? Part 2

Please comment below. Who else, in your view, is an unjustly forgotten early music pioneer?

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