When Australian conductor Alexander Briger arrived in Toronto four years ago to begin rehearsals for the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Leos Janácek’s From the House of the Dead, he brought along his uncle’s orchestral score.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
His uncle, the late Sir Charles Mackerras was a world authority on Janácek, and the score helped fill in the blanks between the printed notes and the final sound.
Briger took me on a walk through the score. Mackerras’s trail was marked in red pencil, highlighting tricky tempo changes, correcting wrong notes and providing additional insight on phrasing and overall pacing.
Each page of the slightly dog-eared book contained these notes, visually underscoring the disadvantage faced by a conductor who didn’t have the volume in his or her hands.
Even as an ordinary piano student, in my early teens, I remember my teacher pulling out two or three versions of a score to compare the differences with me. I quickly figured out how some publishers were reliably unreliable — Schirmer being the prime culprit.
Comparing different editions and, if it’s available, a facsimile of the original manuscript, presents a whole view of the notes. But not even the most diligent notes from a composer — someone like Mahler, for instance — provide all of the information on rests, breath marks, accents and the inevitable spots where the music needs to speed up and slow down.
Handel’s Messiah, which is in the process of being deployed all around us, is one of the prime examples of musical evolution.
There’s Handel’s original manuscript, which no one except for Toronto’s Aradia Ensemble seems to use (they call it the Dublin Messiah, and it’s coming up on Dec. 22). There are umpteen revisions by the composer, made for different occasions and different singers.
The Toronto Symphony and Tafelmusik invariably present different sequences of recitatives, airs and choruses, for example.
There is Mozart’s modernization of the score, which we’ll hear in the GTA on Dec. 15, thanks to Markam’s Kindred Spirits Orchestra.
And then there is the even more modern, downright whimsical spin that Sir Andrew Davis put on Messiah last year.
But the score — and its various permutations — is still only a starting point. If possible, one listens to several notable interpretations to see how others have translated print into sound.
And then, all information in hand, the artist sets about making their own statement about the music.
Nothing is black and white. Music is not a thing. It is a process.
+++
As an extreme example of this process, using Messiah, here is a snippet from a staged version brought to an unsuspecting Viennese audience by Florian Boesch & Ensemble Matheus at the Theater an der Wien three years ago:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
