Sunday, November 30, 2014
Nov. 30, 2014; Le Concert d'Astrée
Le Concert d'Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm conductor
Natalie Dessay, Cleopatra; Christophe Dumaux, Giulio Cesare
Alice Tully Hall, November 30, 2014
I've heard a bit of Haïm and her ensemble Le Concert
d'Astrée on recordings. They come across
to me like the conductorless ensemble Orpheus. That is, everything sounds very
worked out in advance. They must have rehearsed until they had the
feeling of the length of such pauses in their bodies.
That same precision also came
across in their Alice Tully Hall appearance.
All orchestra members were amazingly together: after pauses (for cadenzas and tempo
modifications) everyone resumed together, even Dessay and Dumaux. It was uncanny.
It also suggests that Haïm is less
of a traditional conductor and more of a facilitator who depends on the
sympathies of the ensemble. Choosing her
hands over a stick, she conducted less in a traditional way. She appeared to convey more of a sense of
encouragement and phrasing over time beating.
Sometimes there was an obvious change in dynamic. Surprisingly this was usually not indicated
in any obvious way by her hands (a sign that such details must be worked out
thoroughly in rehearsal).
According to the program
biography, she is getting engagements with a few major orchestras. Such orchestras usually afford a minimum of
rehearsal time, so it would be interesting to see how she fares in such
situations. William Christie has shown
that he's not an all-around conductor, and works best with his own
ensemble. That is also probably true of
Haïm. In a sense, they are like the
performers of the ensemble whose technique is refined just for a single
ensemble. (I wondered if in such a planned performance was it possible to
achieve a sense of spontaneity by not reacting to the music in the predictable
manner worked out in rehearsal.
Perhaps.)
The people sitting near me were praising the scaled down
size of early music ensembles while deriding the sound of the Metropolitan
Opera (why does everyone use the same terminology in calling the Met opera
house "a barn?") These nearby audience members were praising the
clearly-heard articulations that could be heard because of the smaller
ensemble.
Yes, the ensemble was small but they style was mid-19th
century romantic. The bowing was ample,
bordering on the excessive. In so doing
the group created a full and rich sound, something that I doubt would have been
achieved on original instruments (it appeared that most of the string
instruments were contemporary instruments tuned slightly lower). In addition, the same overly histrionic
movements I've seen in other early music groups is also used by this
group.
It all seems to shout for a way to make the music interesting
for contemporary audiences. Pick and
choose which techniques you want to master, make some musically excessive
decisions, add a little action, and voilà—an early music performance that will
keep people awake.
By Richard Taruskin's estimation, such efforts should be
applauded. They certainly have little to
do with trying to recreate early music.
Rather they are taking inspiration from certain aspects of the early
music movement and making it work for them—which is with a mid-19th
century patina. Perhaps that is the
future – many small cohesive groups where the "conductor" works with one
group of musicians for years, developing idiosyncratic performance
characteristics, all in the hope that music doesn't become locked in a unchanged
state forever.
