Hearing It Like It Was

NEW YORK — “I hate this word ‘authentic,’ ” says conductor Paul McCreesh, visibly bristling in his hotel room chair. “It bores me rigid. Historic background is always a tremendous resource, but there’s always the danger of falling [too deeply] into ‘authenticity.’ While we’re probably more scholarly than many of our competitors, we’re still fundamentally entertainers.”

Welcome to Early Music, the Next Generation. Where names like Norrington, Harnoncourt and Hogwood once preached the gospel of period performance with fire in the belly, today’s figures often take their helping of historical accuracy with dogma on the side. Now that the two main tenets of those early pioneers--the sonorities of period instruments and a return to the original manuscripts--are ubiquitous, members of today’s early music movement are free to extend the franchise.

For McCreesh, whose Gabrieli Consort & Players perform this afternoon at the Wilshire Christian Church, the quest has led to concerts he calls historical reconstructions--programs, particularly of liturgical music, that add social and occasionally architectural context to period instruments and original scores. Today’s program, for example, imagines a Vespers service as it might have unfolded in the 1640s in St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, with the Doges in attendance. As a Chamber Music in Historic Sites event, even its setting is part of the show--a church whose Northern Italian Romanesque and Byzantine details echo Venetian style.

McCreesh’s carefully researched reconstructions emanate from a single thought: that most early music was written for a specific liturgical use, not as individual pieces to fill an abstract, 19th century-type concert program. In practice, they prove that the guesswork involved in authenticity puts the conductor in a particularly modern dilemma.

“If you go through [the choral] repertoire where the pieces are all between five and 10 minutes--you have to ask, ‘Why did the composer set the text this way? Why this number of voices? Where would it fit in the service?’ ” he says. “Now, I can’t imagine for one minute that [Renaissance and Baroque] kapellmeisters agonized half as much as I do about fitting pieces together. For me, it’s not just a question of filling a Sunday morning; it’s finding an interesting framework.”

Going through the choral repertory of a particular period also puts the great composers in context, he adds. Today’s program places Monteverdi, the father of modern opera, next to some of his contemporaries in the liturgical realm, with results that McCreesh finds illuminating.

“I’d have to say that while Monteverdi was a towering figure who wrote some of the greatest works of his era, he was not a towering figure in every area of music,” he says. “His liturgical music is attractive and well written, but no more so than Cavalli or Rigati or a host of other composers at the time. If you want to play parlor games, Monteverdi on a bad day is not as good a composer as Rigati on a good one.”

The Vesper service also works well as framework, he adds, because in Venice it was treated for all intents and purposes as a public concert. “It would last maybe two hours, with maybe seven minutes of chant and the rest all polyphonic music,” he says. “And in 17th century Italy, they would frequently replace the chant with very erotic motets, making a clear correlation between the sexual imagery in Venetian painting and text settings, which were at least theoretically addressed to the Virgin Mary. Needless to say, the Roman authorities tried to ban it. But what are you going to do? Excommunicate a whole city?”

Nothing in McCreesh’s early musical life hints at his later early music life. Growing up in the London’s East End, McCreesh spent his childhood as a cellist in local youth orchestras playing standard symphonic repertory. His studies at Manchester University focused primarily in 20th century music, until he fell into the highly politicized early music world by way of vocal music, which quickly became his passion. While at Manchester, he formed a chamber choir and period instrument ensemble that became the Gabrieli Consort & Players in 1982.

The Consort caught public attention in 1989 with its first reconstruction, “Venetian Coronation 1595,” consisting of music by its namesake composers Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli performed at the crowning of Doge Maria Grimano at St. Mark’s. The program garnered the group first recording, on Virgin Classics, which won the 1991 Gramophone award for early music.

McCreesh’s love of vocal music made the emphasis on context inevitable. “I’ve always been adamant that singers be aware of not just how they sing, but of how the text relates to the everything else that’s going on,” he says. “There’s so much bad singing that’s either histrionically over the top, or refuses to address the meaning behind the words. I feel that a composer sets a text because it draws on some personal experience. I don’t think that Monteverdi could’ve written those searing laments had he not known the loss of his wife and child. You have to address that. If you can’t imagine the loss of a child and get that emotion into the singing, then you’re wasting your time.”

That emotional connection gets right to the heart of the paradox inherent in McCreesh’s musical approach: that each performance must be at once faithful to the original score and yet a product of its own time. That philosophy led to some serious reconsiderations of Handel’s “Messiah,” his recording of which was released on Deutsche Grammophon’s Arkiv Produktion label in mid-October. The score was the 1754 Foundling Hospital version, the performance used period instruments, but the conductor’s preparation included a substantial number of recordings from the era when no “Messiah” production could be too big.

“There’s a wonderful story about [the mid-20th century conductor] Malcolm Sargent, whom I gather was a deeply believing Christian, telling a singer, ‘Madame, if you’re having problems with the meaning of this text, I don’t think you should be singing this piece,’ ” he says. “Therein lies a very interesting question, because the reality is that the majority of people listening to ‘Messiah’ today probably have no profound religious convictions at all, so we have to work twice as hard to get that meaning across.

“I was asked on American radio recently, ‘Do you have a profound religious commitment to bring people to God through music?’ I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I’m committed to paying my mortgage.’ But it got me thinking. Historic religion is one of our great resources in viewing ourselves through the centuries. And it has tremendous power, even if one doesn’t have the belief.

“I listened to recordings from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s,” he says, “and I sometimes got the feeling that the past 20 years has been a great irrelevance. In spite of things that aren’t ‘correct,’ [the old recordings had] a feeling of communication, of drama and sensitivity to words that we’ve lost in our purer-than-pure period.”

Once upon a time such words ‘I listened to recordings from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, and I sometimes got the feeling that the past 20 years has been a great irrelevance.’

Paul McCreesh would have been considered early music heresy. But then, McCreesh could answer, all those modern Handel performances must be considered part of the work’s context today. After all, unlike the music on his Venetian programs, which is only now making its way back into listeners’ consciousness, audiences have rarely had to wait for Handel’s “Messiah” to return.

*

GABRIELI CONSORT & PLAYERS, “Vespers From Venice,” Wilshire Christian Church, 634 S. Normandie Ave. Date: today, 4 p.m. Prices: $15-$28. Phone: (310) 954-4300.