Programme over evenings of 8 – 9 December 2008 including Schumann Symphonies 1-4 and Berlioz Overtures to King Lear and Les Francs Juges
It may seem a conflict of interests to denote historically authentic performance as groundbreaking and openminded. How such careful and literal recreation of the past can be progressive and new seems a misnomer, until you’ve been spun off your feet and into the air by the fantastical wild spirit of the OAE.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a period instrument group, unique at its inception for a “radical open-door policy”, which welcomes both conductors and players equally from the modern orchestral world as from a period specialisation. The initiative snapped suddenly into life in the ‘80s as a response to the so-called ‘arthritis’ of London’s Early Music scene and continues today with a remarkable verve that is consistently recognised and rewarded on an international platform.
If these players are ‘revolutionary’, they are heartwarmingly so. They defy caution in their artistry and push the capabilities of their instruments fiercely beyond the modern conception of good taste. Their sound is gutsy and brazen. Despite academic presence of a highly controlled regime on ‘period performance’, the OAE gives no more sense of limitation in its ‘practice’ than through the limits imposed by the makeup of their tools$$s$$ specific playing style no more or less complicated than the natural, logical result of player relationships with their instruments. Instead, we see a determination by each member to feed a mammoth human energy into their beautifully simplistic machinery.
The group is fundamentally authentic in their choice of instruments, producing a consequent soundworld true to the ear of the composer. Stylistic and technical regulations have no place here, this is a group championing instead the full-bodied, big-hearted essence of this music, and doing so with the happy hindsight of 2008. They inject a passion and zeal into both their repertoire and the process of their music-making that is exciting, fresh and tender. The fragility and temperability of their instruments is, for me, a crackling delicacy that has me hanging off the edge of my seat in expectation, relishing every blip and burp as the hallmark of a truly human dimension.
The quite extraordinary colouristic and textural blends of the OAE were well paraded through the symphonic writing of Schumann and Berlioz. The grainy brashness of horn sound, the roar of sectional celli, the edgy brightness of bassoon were all particularly brilliant in both the season opener, Berlioz’s Overture to King Lear, and in the notably quirky orchestration and spontaneity of the original version of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, which followed. Such innovative instrumental partnerings give no credence to criticisms of pianistic conception, instead glorifying Schumann’s expertise as a lyricist, his creative originality in symphonic thought, and at the same time increasing the mystery of his coded melodic quotations and embedded insinuations to the beloved Clara, a peculiar Romanticism never too far from the surface of his composition.
Conductor Simon Rattle, ever the Peter Pan of the orchestral world with his youthful ecstasy and brilliant shock of white curls, has the capacity to move mountains with the force of his body and the electricity of his spirit. He is equally capable of bringing intent stillness as of feeding a raging fire. This beautiful man, with the world deservedly as his oyster, will toy with us at whim, will push and pull us with all the determined rubato of his definitive musical logic and his happy and righteous place as our country’s golden boy.
Such an intimate, sonorous scenario was created that I’m sure I was not the first to question the suitability of the gaping Festival Hall for period performance. For all the authenticity of spirit and the efforts involved in historical appropriation in a musical sense, it seemed something of a token gesture that the group be marooned in this dry contemporary arena, however prestigious. Let this captivating art of roleplay embrace its chamber mentality in true installation style: the Beethovenian ballrooms, Vienna’s Musikverein. If the lively throng of London supporters is any indication, packing them all in would be a performance-installation in itself.
