We have detected that you are using an adblocking plugin in your browser.

The revenue we earn by the advertisements is used to manage this website. Please whitelist our website in your adblocking plugin.

Skip Sempé's insistent memo to musicians: Be personal or perish

By John Terauds on January 9, 2014

skip
(Régis d’Audeville photo)

The modern world is built on scientific reason, the premise that everything can be archived and all knowledge can be transmitted through the orderly and dispassionate means of text. Harpsichordist Skip Sempé has spent his richly productive adult life telling us that book learnin’ is not a prerequisite for great music.

More importantly, Sempé blames what some people call the decline of art music in the West on boring performances informed by slavish attention to printed instructions rather than birthing a living narrative.

The American-born Parisian expat is a rogue and a rebel. He preaches the art of rhetoric in a world obsessed with analysis. He is a phenomenally fine musician who imprints everything he and his colleagues touch with life and colour and personality.

Sempé is a scholar, too, but his reading and research percolate through the nuts and bolts of making music come alive on stage and in the studio, rather than being used as exact recipes for faithful reproduction of rules and traditions. The harpsichordist and conductor — leader of his period-instrument group Capriccio Stravagante — is an apostle, not a disciple.

His message to fellow musicians has been and continues to be to make each piece of music your own — a true interpretation rather than reproduction. His message to audience has been and continues to be: listen to this and then tell me you don’t like it.

It’s a forumla that has worked for him as well as every other successful soloist and ensemble — and not just those who specialize in period performance. Sempé usually restrains his magic touch to music composer before the mid-18th century —  from Early Music to tinkly solo harpsichord pieces by obscure French baroque composers and the madrigals and operas of Claudio Monteverdi.

He has distilled the essence of his aesthetic into a fabulous book-and-five-CD package Memorandum XXI, released on his own Paradizo label.

Like the careful programming of his albums, the nearly 200 pages of interviews and essays introduces the reader and listener not just to the state of baroque and Early Music performance, but to a way of approaching music that puts a living tradition and lively storytelling first.

memoXXIThere is something worth pondering on nearly every page. You can open the very nicely presented full-colour hardcover book (which includes all the materials in French as well as English) anywhere and find a nugget of insight. Reading it is, like listening to a fine, long piece of music, the beginning of a journey full of interesting sights and sounds. And, thanks to his deep engagement with the people and music around him, Sempé has managed to make it personal, as well.

We learn the meaning of affekt — the umami of baroque music and also the key to really and truly getting it as both a musician and a listener — through Sempé’s life and evolution in the master-to-student oral tradition (which includes some deeply touching reminiscences of life as a student of the late Gustav Leonhardt).

We learn that a composer’s instructions are but the start of a voyage of discovery. They are the GPS instructions that we must get into our head, then throw out the window and prepare for adventure.

We also learn of all the extra-musical detail that our category-making modern minds want to exclude from the picture.

It’s eye- and ear-opening to anyone with an interest in what connects sounds with imaginations and hearts.

A case in point, in a programme note, “The French Baroque: Music and Décor,” Sempé begins:

French chamber music of the Baroque period is one of the finest and most important of all European decorative arts. The structure of the décor is analogous to that of dance and expressive movement. The unfolding of events of the greatest variety is the key to the success of this exotic genre of musical composition in which virtuoso intimacy becomes the vehicle of both the composer and the interpreter.

There is a lot to consider in just these three sentences — a job that becomes a smile-inducing sequence of aha! moments if done while one of Sempé’s five CDs in playing.

The music is a compilation of more than 20 years worth of scholarship, craft, and wholehearted abandon by Sempé and a stable of eager, young disciples — a glorious contingent that for several years included our very own harpsichordist Olivier Fortin, a regular continuo player with Tafelmusik and founder of Montreal period-performance group Masques.

The fact that we can celebrate some Canadian content in this must-have item in a music-lover’s library is a bonus.

For more information about Memorandum XXI, click here. (To buy it, why not support Toronto last dedicated classical-music store, Atelier Grigorian here.)

This is the book-album’s promotional video, posted last week:

In case you want more of an introduction to the musical joys on offer here, here are Sempé and Fortin playing a passacaglia by François Couperin, arranged by Sempé for two harpsichords — note the very loose adherence to a tempo — followed by a viol consort performing a late 16th century madrigal by Cipriano de Rore:

John Terauds

Share this article
lv_toronto_banner_high_590x300
comments powered by Disqus

FREE ARTS NEWS STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY MONDAY BY 6 AM

company logo

Part of

Terms of Service & Privacy Policy
© 2024 | Executive Producer Moses Znaimer