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Přemysl Vacek - teorba |
Exactly, and that was how I transcribed something from the Magnificat by Adam Vaclav Michna of Otradovice, for example, or some of his songs - I did it all from recordings because I had no notated material. Then I got the chance to take part in the music festival in Valtice (1991) that was focused on baroque opera and baroque music in general. It was a matter of a last-minute replacement for someone in the Musica antiqua Praha, and a fantastic opportunity, because I was lent a baroque cello and was able to try out its possibilities in practice, and I started to work with the ensemble. That gave me the idea of setting up my own ensemble - in Teplice where I was at school - and I managed to do it thanks to enormous help from Pavel Klikar who lent us various instruments, for example.
Why weren't you satisfied with Musica antiqua Praha?
Musica antiqua Praha was at that time the only ensemble in Bohemia devoted to early music, and it only performed works from one particular segment of baroque music. Since I already knew various recordings from abroad, I had a yen to try out other compositions.
The other members of the ensemble were your fellow students from the conservatory in Teplice. How did your teachers react to your activities?
There was no one there who was able to teach us anything in this area, except perhaps Professor Rudolf Zelenka who had a side interest in continuo on the harpsichord and Professor Darina Zarubova who showed students the way to this kind of playing, for example by recommending the courses that had just started to be organized in Valtice or in Germany in Blankenburg. Two camps formed at the conservatory - those who were highly critical of us and those who were our fans. It all started when we began talking at the school about the possibilities of our staying there over the weekends and rehearsing, and in the end we held our first concert in a Teplice church. It was really quite successful, which encouraged us. We saw that it was working, and began to make much more intensive efforts.
Is the composition of the ensemble always the same?
Obviously there are variations. Three or four people are permanent members, and the first violinist Dagmar Valentova, for example, has been in the ensemble since the beginning. We had a big problem at the time when most of us were finishing our studies at Teplice. We had difficulties getting together, and ultimately the ensemble's centre shifted to Prague where I now live. This brought other changes as well.
How many people make up the core of the ensemble?
Perhaps seven to nine people. For larger-scale performances we invite musicians and singers from our circle of acquaintances.
What do you regard as the milestones in the life of the ensemble so far?
I'm not the type to spend much time looking back.
You mean you live in the present and plans for the future?
I think so.
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Peter Krivda - viola da gamba |
We've just come back from Poland where we were invited to perform music related to the Passion. We were playing in relatively small-scale form - two violins, viola, cello and harpsichord, archlute and one mezzosoprano, and we were mainly performing music from the early and middle baroque, including interesting works by composers little known to today's audiences, such as the German composer Johann Rosenmueller (d. 1685), who was a huge model for Johann Sebastian Bach, or Johann Christoph Kridel, who was born in Rumburk in Northern Bohemia. We've made a CD recording of six of Kridel's concert arias (cantatas) from a collection published in 1707, with the soloist Anna Hlavenkova. The work is remarkable, with all the arias written in concertante style, and yet we can find practically nothing at all about this composer in the reference books.
What plans do you have?
If we manage it, then for the year 2000 we're planning a demanding and expensive project - a stage production of Jan Dismas Zelenka's Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis, composed for the Prague coronation celebrations in 1723. We performed the work in concert form three years ago, but we intend to present it in complete form, i.e. fully staged and with costumed actors and dance numbers, for the celebrations of Prague 2000. The production is based on the traditions of the Jesuit school plays that were performed in the precincts of the Prague Clementinum, which is where the historical premiere of Zelenka's work was presented. We are working on the project with a whole range of people. One big problem is that of costumes, since symbolic figures embodying various dispositions appear and every attribute had a certain particular symbol, colour, fabric and so forth, which all have to be researched and identified.
What do you see as you greatest success on the Czech scene?
I look at success in two ways. On the one hand, and above all, it's the fact that I keep meeting people, professional musicians, who used to be suspicious or even hostile to historically authentic performances but after the concert tell me that they've had to change their minds. As far as more tangible specific successes are concerned, then perhaps the greatest was our tour and recording with the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena of arias and cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. The CD (Polygram) won the prestigious Golden Harmony prize for 1997 as the best Czech recording of the year. Or else it was our victory at the International Festival of Central European Art in Zilina in 1998.
And abroad?
Our appearance at the prestigious Europalia festival in Belgium, where we performed the Mass of the Holy Trinity by Jan Dismas Zelenka. This was also our first CD recording. In this, the first of his five great masses, Zelenka brings together two compositional styles - what was known as the stile antico, which he usually employed, and the Italian concertante style. A fantastic work emerged from this linkage. It contains both perfect counterpoint work in the old style, and the new concertante style, with plenty of preludes and interludes recalling the virtuoso Italian concertos. We recorded the work in a hall where the temperature was 13 degrees - the wind instruments were terribly low and we had to go lower and lower with the organ until it was at chamber pitch - 410 Hz when normally we use about 415 Hz, which is precisely a semitone lower than today's tuning at 440 Hz - and in the end one flautist didn't know what to do and so took some sandpaper and started to shorten the flute, saying that he'd wanted to do it for ages anyway. Fortunately it can be done, since these flutes are made of wood. The recording was a huge success and won the highest rating in the French magazine Diapason.
What criteria do you use when choosing your repertoire?
It depends mainly on the resources of the organizers. I often have to create the programmes with a view to how many players we can afford, which means how much money the organizer can offer. Our ensemble can play with anything from three to fifty musician. Generally I enjoy the work of Jan Dismas Zelenka, and so we often perform his music. In Belgium we presented not only his mass but also some of his instrumental works, such as the well-known Suite in F Minor for Strings and Two Oboes or a piece called Hypochondria.
Does that really mean hypochondria?
Yes. It's a very difficult work, and almost unplayable especially for oboe instruments, and so it reminds one a bit of hypochondria in practical terms as well. Thanks to the experience that some of us gained in the Musica antiqua Praha ensemble, we have a special relationship to music of the early and middle Baroque. This means we create a lot of programmes with an eye to presenting this music, whether pieces with a link to the Czech Lands (a 3 CD boxed set of music from the Kromeriz archive) or works by foreign composers.
How did you discover the Kromeriz archive and what makes the music from this source attractive - apart from the fact that it is generally Czech music?
It was the singer and musicologist Michal Pospisil who directed our attention to music from the Kromeriz archive. It is an archive with a very interesting history, and came into existence after the Thirty Years War. Around 1664, Count Karel Liechtenstein Castelcorn became Bishop of Olomouc, and he tried to win further prestige by employing a music chapel led from the beginning by the well-known Czech musician Pavel Josef Vejvanovsky. This is why we dedicated the first disc in the boxed set to Vejvanovsky. In the romantic period a myth grew up about Vejvanovsky which claimed he was a Czech baroque composer of genius, but this is not entirely true. Especially in his first compositions he had considerable difficulties with musical grammar and had to teach himself by transcribing works by Italian or Austrian composers such as Antonio Bertalli, Antonio Rigatti, Girolamo Frescobaldi and Alessandro Poglietti. His importance lies above all in the speed and great industry with which he transcribed these works, so founding a fantastic archive which is of worldwide value. Thanks to Vejvanovsky's capacities as a transcriber, works by German and Italian composers which are not even known in the places where they were written, have been preserved. Vejvanovsky wrote several works that have a certain musical value, but not many. The whole problem started when many twentieth-century musicologists attributed to Vejvanovsky works that he had merely transcribed. Beside Vejvanovsky, there were other composers working in Kromeriz whose creative abilities were far greater, such as Philipp Jakob Rittler. Rittler is absolutely unknown despite the fact that he was a composer who mastered various compositional styles, could write in the French and Italian style distinguishes carefully between them, and even spoke Czech better than Vejvanovsky. Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (the second CD in the boxed set), was another who worked in Pavel Josef Vejvanovsky's capella for two or three years. He was born in Straz pod Ralskem near Ceska Lipa, later moved to Kromeriz and then emigrated to Vienna without official permission. Fortunately he was pardoned and maintained a correspondence with Kromeriz and this means that the pieces he wrote abroad have also been preserved in the Kromeriz archive. The third CD is of works by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, who was kapelmeister in Vienna. The Kromeriz archive contains a great many of his compositions.
You are committed to the ideal of historically "authentic" performance. Isn't this a bit of a fashion now?
Yes, but it's a fashion that has put down roots. I think music schools and academies for this kind of performance have been set up practically everywhere except the Czech Republic: in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, the USA and even Poland.
What does this trend have to say to the contemporary age? Isn't it an escape? How is the present time reflected within it?
A desire for authenticity and the natural is what leads us to perform music in a faithful way. For example, to make sure that a baroque painting has the right aesthetic effect, we put it in a frame that corresponds to the period when it was painted. This is what we are trying to do in the field of music, but without limiting the influence of creativity. The difference is simply, for example, that we use forms and means of expression that in the more recent phase of performance development have been suppressed or even forgotten entirely. It is also essential to realize that without contemporary science and technology, we would not be able to perform music in this way. It is only science and its methodology in the field of musicological and historical research that allows us to study and play early music at all. From this point of view it is obvious that the trend is a logical outcome of the contemporary situation. And so, in a slightly paradoxical way, we too are trying to keep up with the times. Also, the very fact that more and more people are taking the path of early music is a reaction to some kind of contemporary need, in the sense of something that people feel is lacking in the present.
Musica Florea Interviewed by Wanda Dobrovska
Czech Music
In Praise of an Emperor: A Zelenka Premiere from Marek Štyrncl
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| Marek Štryncl |
The venue and English translation of the full title, Under the olive tree of peace and the palm tree of virtue the Crown of Bohemia splendidly shines before the whole world (a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records?), give a pretty good notion of what to expect. The work was commissioned by the Jesuits, the text being the work of P. Matous Zill, himself a member of the Order. Zill’s drama juxtaposes biblical references with political, patriotic, and obsequious verse in praise of the attendant royal family, while for the interpolated music numbers the Jesuits turned to Zelenka, who had himself been educated by them in Prague. Zelenka, by now based at the Dresden court for over a decade, returned to Prague to oversee the musical side of the production.
The booklet included with this first recording of Zelenka’s music for Sub olea includes pictures of a staged production featuring the same performers. Via e-mail I asked conductor Marek Štryncl whether the performance included the play. “Yes, it did”, he replied, “I undertook the musical preparation of the work. In such an ‘educational drama’ it’s usually a question of teamwork on the different artistic levels. Although they are of course interconnected, each level retained an individual responsibility in the various fields of instrumental and vocal music, acting, and dancing. We worked powerfully both together and alongside each other. About 150 artists participated in our production, thus orchestra and choir numbers exceeded the standard practice of the time. With the present state of scholarly research we do not know how many musicians took part in the production in 1723, so we decided to augment the orchestra according to period European practice, with the doubling of wind instruments requiring a commensurate increase in the number of strings. Only the baroque trumpets weren’t augmented in this way (except in brass music employed during processions or such special cases as theatrical effects) because of their earsplitting sound. That’s why some dynamic indications of the period determined ripieno entries, particularly in the instance of oboes, and bassoons, but also in the string parts. The trumpets on our recording have no mechanism, producing the irregular archaic sound of the aliquot series and a reversion to a unique naturalness diametrically opposed to today’s technocratic world. These particularities are actually true of the majority of Baroque instruments”.
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Sub olea
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The sentiments of a work like Sub olea, part morality, part panegyric, are very far removed from the 21st century. I suggested to Štryncl that it must be difficult for performers to engage with such a libretto and wondered how they surmounted the problem. “Well, the 21st century intellectual climate is certainly quite different and in its hasty carelessness may make an erroneous judgment about the purpose and circumstances of this piece. In today’s materialistic world any celebration of “superior persons“ appears to contemporary man as undignified adulation. Mankind at that time was more aware of the fact that he was not the same as God. He comprehended life as more like service to the personal and public good, guided by a strand of “higher harmony“ represented here by Divine Providence, whose glorification was equally the glorification of God. So it would be wrong to attribute a negative political ideology to this piece. Certain traditions are remote of us, of course, but the heritage of St. Wenceslas is definitely not forgotten nowadays, and that’s why there is a place in our souls to articulate these sentiments. And I suppose that a good and skillful actor or performer should be able to readjust to different roles and characters”. I wondered what Štryncl’s personal response had been to the work as a whole. “I am very surprised by the pupil’s high level of education at the Jesuit schools, which obviously played a crucial role in raising cultural standards in this country. As to the play itself, the music is the best element of the piece, surpassing the quality of the libretto several times over”.
The final question mailed to Štryncl was more general. I was interested to know how he, as a Czech, feels that Zelenka fits into the overall picture of music in his country. “It was Zelenka and his colleagues of the Jesuit order who made possible the emergence of what we might term a Czech school of composers that includes such names as Adam Michna, Bohuslav Cernohorský, J. F. Seger, F. X. Brixi etc. Zelenka assimilated the stylistic trends of the period with great success, while at the same time taking an individual approach. He was able to react to such stimuli with the skill of an excellent practical musician who was among the most lavishly gifted of his generation”.
Brian Robins
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