Paul McCreesh says that what drew him to early music in the first place
was the urge to be a revisionist, to "start looking at areas [in the repertoire]
that need a lot of pioneering work" — and, yes, to "set people's
feather's rustling." So it's not really surprising that when he began seriously
exploring Johann Sebastian Bach's great vocal works, McCreesh ended up on the
side of the renegades — Joshua Rifkin, Andrew Parrott and their
followers who argue that Bach composed the bulk of his church music for a
"chorus" of one soloist on each part. andante editor Matthew Westphal
talks with the conductor about his position in the fiercest musical battle to
have arisen since the period-instrument revival began.
Matthew Westphal: Have you always felt like Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott were right or was it a more gradual thing for you?
Paul McCreesh: I've always had an instinctive feeling that the fundamental hypothesis Rifkin proposed was the right one. I had done these pieces [in the past] with small choirs, as you would expect; I've just become more hard-line. Really, the evidence seems to be just so overwhelming that we've got to start rethinking the whole process.
What annoys me in some sense about the whole "Early Music" business is that ... you know, I have no objection to people performing Bach with a large orchestra-and-chorus or a small orchestra-and-chorus or quartet of saxophones. It doesn't worry me in the slightest. It's when people try and create spurious musicological arguments to justify things that are basically just musical taste.
I understand the practical arguments: performing the St. Matthew Passion with solo singers requires a certain type of voice; the pragmatic demands of touring may prevent that approach. I also acknowledge the argument that in large concert halls, it's harder to bring that sort of thing off (although I don't think it's as hard as people often make out).
MW: A lot of presenters still run shy of this single-voice Bach business.
PMcC: I was very happy to lose a date once at the Philharmonie in Berlin because I refused to use a chorus of 48 singers, which is what they wanted. I said "This is absolute rubbish! I'll take 24 singers, absolute maximum. Have you heard my choir? They're the loudest choir in Europe, so if that's what you want to do, you can get someone else to do it!" And as Andrew says, you don't earn money by doing the single-voice Bach thing. [Parrott has observed that "the greater the number of performers involved and the larger the venue, the more I tend to get paid."]
The big problem is that, at the end of the day, we have a huge industry of Bach performance. It's people like Herreweghe and Koopman and Gardiner and all the "Bach specialists" of the 1980s and '90s that have a huge professional interest in preserving the status quo.
MW: They have choirs to feed?
PMcC: They've got choirs to feed; they've put their stall out; they've grown up with 25 years of this particular style of performance. It's much harder for them to actually change. But I'm convinced they're wrong.
Another issue is, if you're going to fight for the single-voice hypothesis, then why, why, why, WHY, WHY would you pick the B minor Mass? It's the most atypical of all Bach's works, completely out of the normal canon of his experience. Why do you try to prove it with that piece?
MW: You mean why did Joshua Rifkin go that route? To get attention?
PMcC: Right, but had he done it with the St. John or the St. Matthew Passion, I think the musical result is so much more convincing that people would actually sit up and say, "WOOOOWW!!" And I cannot believe that the St. Matthew Passion has not been recorded by solo voices before now. That is the piece of all the pieces which is crying out for that approach.
One interesting thing is that we did the St. Matthew Passion [in 2000 during the Folles journées Bach in Nantes] in front of 3,500 people — and at no point during the weekend was the issue of solo voices even mentioned. That actually means there was nothing that sounded unnatural to that relatively mixed, educated audience. Andrew tells many stories of the same issue: you do a concert in a German church and somebody comes up who sat behind a pillar [and couldn't see the performers] and says, "Oh the choir was wonderfully unanimous" [MW laughs] No, no, it's true, and [Andrew] said, "but there was no choir" and he says, "but it sounded so full." So obviously if you close your eyes, it's not important.
MW: What is different, as opposed to the early days when you did Bach with a choir, in terms of rehearsing it and putting it out in a hall?
PMcC: It sorts itself out, in a sense. I think one of the things you have to do with the band is cut away the years of over-accentuated, aggressive playing — it's that sort of "dramatic" approach to the turba choruses [in the Passions], where everybody is shouting every syllable. It happens very easily and very naturally when you have solo voices because they have to project in a very dramatic and direct way. But then you have to say to the band, "Don't feel you need to thrash the same way you would if you were supporting a choir of 25 or 30."
The second thing is very practical: the singers have to be put in front of the orchestra. This was absolutely standard way up into the 19th century for all vocal music, almost without exception. And yet we still insist on putting the choir behind the orchestra — it's the silliest thing in the world.
MW: What response have you gotten to the Magnificat/Easter Oratorio recording?
PMcC: Basically, it's been much less controversial than I would have thought. A lot of the reviews have said 'I tried very hard to write this off, but I can't because it works reasonably well.'
Having said that, I am very honest about recordings: I think they are all, to a certain extent, experimental. There are lots of things in that recording I don't feel happy about; I'm a very self-critical person, and I really regard that [CD] as transitional. There are a lot of good things: good singing, good playing ... But part of the problem of this new approach to Bach is that one has to discover a new aesthetic. It's not just the question of putting five singers in front of a microphone and then just playing as you'd normally play with a choir, there are lots of things that one really has to develop and work at.
MW: What exactly weren't you happy about?
PMcC: Part of the problem is to create an aesthetic of vocal production which is uniform across the team. That's quite difficult, and I don't think we got it entirely right on that recording. That's not an issue of having one-to-a-part — I think it's fundamentally a problem with virtually every Bach recording you buy. And with all early music recordings: we all tend to use a mixture of singers from the collegiate choir tradition, the early music tradition, the oratorio and opera traditions ... it's nice to have a variety of expertise behind you, but it's quite hard to create that uniformity of approach.
MW: You mean in terms of vocal production?
PMcC: Well, I feel that if Handel were to come down from above on a cloud to listen to my performances of oratorio and opera, he would be relatively unsurprised at the sort of voices I use. I think that if Bach came down on the same cloud, he would be deeply bemused and possibly horrified.
MW: Do you think that's true of your colleagues' work?
PMcC: It's an endemic thing. We have a different aesthetic today. I think I know in my head how Bach's music might have sounded — and obviously part of that aesthetic is using boys' voices — but I despair of creating that in the 21st century. And if we did, I wonder whether it would have anything like the authenticity of expression one actually could have appreciated in the 18th century.
MW: Boys' voices didn't break until age 16 or 17 then — we don't have boys old enough.
PMcC: That's part of it, but it's also an aesthetic problem. We don't relate emotionally to the texts in general; therefore we tend to listen to it as art music; therefore we have much higher expectations in terms of technical expertise. If you were in church, devoutly listening to a croaking boy alto singing a St. Matthew Passion aria, it could actually have been a very emotional experience — but would you want to listen to that repeatedly on CD? Probably not.
MW: In your experience, how do the singers like doing Bach with solo voices?
PMcC: Oh, they generally love it, because they can sing it in the way
they feel they ought to sing it, instead of conforming to a slightly
bland norm — which is, unfortunately, what tends to happen in a
performance done chorally. The possibility of the singers forming those
wonderful lines in a more soloistic way is something I find very
exciting.
