Granted it was a big undertaking, and not without its disappointments. But enough went right with this year's Berkeley Festival and Exhibition, held last month on the University of California campus, to make one hope the billing "inaugural year" was not too far off the mark.
Subtitled "Music in History," the June 10-17 event crammed a lot into its eight-day schedule. The biggest disappointment was the non-appearance of West Germany's Musica Antiqua Koeln, the illness of whose director, Reinhard Goebel, forced the cancellation of three concerts, including his baroque violin recital. Even so, that left 23 concerts, five symposiums and three master classes to keep attendees busy. As well as the annual meetings of both the Music Critics Association and Early Music America, timed to coincide with the festival as a whole.Early music has, of course, become a growth industry in recent years. We've come a long way from the days when it was considered daring to include a harpsichord as part of a performance of the Fifth Bach Brandenburg Concerto. Now entire orchestras are composed of what their proponents like to call "original instruments," a wave of the future (or is it the past?) that is swelling to include period performances of even such 19th-century masters as Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Mendelssohn. One wonders, can Wagner and Brahms be far behind?
Happily the "authenticity" debate that might have been expected to break out at this conference never materialized, virtually all the participants agreeing that was a dubious goal.
"To submit that there is an `authentic' is to say that there is only one way to do it," posited festival general manager Joseph Spencer in one of the panel discussions. "And of course they were just as diverse in their day as we are now. There were people who were considered mannered, people who were considered conservative and dull. . . . That's the way it was, because that's the way musicians are."
At the same time he acknowledged the importance of "doing our homework" and learning as much as possible about the instruments, attitudes and performing conditions of the time. But, as other participants were quick to observe, sometimes the result can be an authentically bad performance.
"I would not want to do an `authentic' performance" of a Bach cantata, declared Jonathan Dimmock of the American Bach Soloists, citing the composer's own dissatisfaction with the time and resources available to him.
Performances at the festival itself sometimes trod the line.
That was certainly true of the June 17 presentation by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of Handel's early Italian oratorio "La Resurrezione" ("The Resurrection") under Nicholas McGegan. At least it is hard to think the orchestra at the 1708 premiere, under Corelli, would have sported such squawky woodwinds or that singing styles would not have been better matched.
On the other hand McGegan managed to avoid the "sewing-machine-style" of performance decried in yet another panel discussion, his brisk tempos underlining the drama of the work, which itself walks the line between opera and oratorio. Likewise the vocal soloists, from the darkly Mephistophelean Lucifer of bass-baritone Michael George to the Mary Magdalene of soprano Judith Nelson, whose experience in this repertoire told mightily. (A case in point: her beautifully ornamented "Ho un non so che nel cor," whose melody the composer himself recycled in "Il Pastor Fido.")
Between them came the Mary Cleophas of mezzo Patricia Spence, with her chocolatey low register, and the brightly pointed St. John of tenor Jeffrey Thomas, especially his evocation of the lamenting turtle-dove (here with traverso flute).
The upshot was that, although on a smaller scale than "Messiah," the freshness and immediacy of Handel's inspiration came through - and that despite some well-documented borrowings. But that is also true of "Messiah," and it is with some delight that one discovers the final chorus of Part 1 of "La Resurrezione" popping up again in the "Water Music." Handel was never one to turn up his nose at pilfering, especially when the music was his own.
Another composer known to have made good use of others' ideas is Carl Orff, whose "Carmina Burana," his high-power reworking of the medieval songs and dances of the monastery of Benediktbeuern, remains his most popular work. By the same token, the most sought-after ticket at the Berkeley Festival was to its presentation of Thomas Binkley's imaginative reconstruction of the original "Carmina," on two nights in Wheeler Auditorium.
The original 13th-century manuscript preserves, in both Latin and German, everything from love lyrics and student songs to religious drama and poetry. Into this Binkley has folded elements from another sacred dramatic text of the period, the so-called Vienna Play. The result is an evening-long mixture of music, drama and dance that, although its naivete occasionally borders on the amateurish, affords an enchanting look at a broad spectrum of medieval art, from the sacred to the profane.
Anyone coming to this material for the first time may be surprised at (a) how often the two mingle and (b) how much of it resembles the Orff settings, albeit on a far less grandiose plane.
Certainly on June 15 the Latin love lyrics were as affecting (especially tenor Neal Rogers' hymn to the "time of flowers"), as were the flavorfully accompanied dances - on vielles, recorders, shawms, harp and percussion - and strongly sung choruses. High marks also to mezzo Karen Clark Young's commanding projection of both the Angel's and Mary's solos. If some of the English-language transitions, and the acting that went with them, came across as a mite too colloquial, one could at least applaud the attempt to draw the audience onto what otherwise might have seemed alien turf.
Less successful, by most accounts, was the festival's other major revival, of Niccolo Jommelli's 1768 opera "La Schiava Liberata" ("The Liberated Slave"), generally acknowledged to be the inspiration for Mozart's "The Abduction From the Seraglio."
"Dreadfully dull," was how one colleague described this production, although everyone agreed that the singing was good. Criticism - some of it in the panel discussions - was also leveled at Joseph Kerman's deliberately anachronistic supertitles, which many felt undercut the drama actually unfolding onstage.
At the same time it was that same non-parochial attitude and the discussion it provoked that spiced the panels. Of those the liveliest was arguably one Kerman himself chaired the morning of July 16 on "The Early Music Debate: Ancients, Moderns, Postmoderns."
The questions raised there included:
- Have musicologists and their researches in fact narrowed our view of early music, imposing a period style on composers "who stood apart from their period"? (Laurence Dreyfus, University of Chicago)
- Has the early-music movement appropriated territory that rightly belongs to new music, by dressing old repertoire - Handel, Mozart, Beethoven - in unfamiliar guise, thereby satisfying our need for "novelty and familiarity at once"? (Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle)
- Has the real early-music debate moved from the antiquarian revivals this year's festival specialized in to challenging our ideas about the traditional 19th-century repertoire? (Richard Taruskin, Cal-Berkeley)
Whatever the answers, it is hard not to agree with Taruskin's main point, that more important than deciding on a purely historical approach to the music of the past is "finding our own way of doing things," an approach that takes into account not only what we can discover about that past but also modern sensibilities - i.e., what we know about ourselves.
In that context, this year's festival helped bring at least some of that music a little closer to us, and us a little closer to it. And that's a step worth taking not only once but, hopefully, at some other time as well.