It’s the Content That’s Instrumental in Concerts

Yes, they play original instruments, or copies of them. No, that isn’t the important thing, says Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra conductor Nicholas McGegan.

“Is the performance any good? Ultimately, that always has been the only issue,” McGegan said by phone from his home in Berkeley. “We are people living in the late 20th century, without wigs and with good dentistry and we have good hygiene. We can’t re-create the past, especially not in California, which is a state not particularly about the past.”

The danger in the historical practice movement, said McGegan, who leads the San Francisco-based orchestra tonight in Newport Beach, is that “style becomes more important than content. The fact that you perform on original instruments shouldn’t be more important than whether you have anything to say on them.

“Certainly, there was a period in the ‘70s when the original-instrument lot first started to record, when they seemed to be obsessed with style,” he continued. “Now early-instrument players are far more concerned with the communication of ideas rather than playing on the ‘right’ instruments.”

Communicating ideas requires getting a few things straight first.

“One is, we can actually get the notes right, which is not necessarily an easy thing to do,” McGegan said. “Composers kept changing their minds. Even a composer like Brahms, there’s a long tradition of playing wrong notes. There’s a wrong note in the horn part of Brahms’ First Symphony. Brahms didn’t spot it when he was proofreading.

“Handel changed his mind every week. You can’t say, ‘This is the original “Messiah.” ’ Every time he performed it, he rewrote it. You can’t be too pristine. But you can try to get the notes right. Still, I don’t think if you were going to the Royal Shakespeare company, you’d like to see an [advertisement]: ‘We’re going to get the words in the right order.’

“You’re going to be moved. The fact that it’s going to be correct is kind of assumed, isn’t it? We try to get the musicology right, but we don’t advertise it. The idea is that the audience will enjoy it. We are, after all, entertainers.”

Tonight’s program includes works by Vivaldi, Sammartini, Telemann and other Baroque composers, with Marion Verbruggen as the recorder soloist.

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A second issue is what to do about embellishments. “There is the freedom to improvise upon getting the notes right. Our players do ornament quite a lot. It’s spontaneous. I don’t interfere.”

Then there’s the question of picking the right venue, which should seat no more than 1,000 people. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, where the group plays tonight and returns Feb. 4, is in that ballpark, seating about 1,200. (“We had been playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is not the most ideal venue acoustically for music, although I have to say the staff couldn’t have been nicer,” McGegan said. “Through the good offices of people we know in Newport Beach, we thought we might try our luck in Orange County.”)

“A concert hall that seats 2,000 people and more is not necessarily the ideal venue for a Bach ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto, whoever plays it,” McGegan said. “In Bach’s day, halls would have sat between 100 and 800 people. The same with performing Mozart operas in the Met. That’s between three and four times the size of a Mozart hall. But singers aren’t three and four times that size. Well, most of them aren’t! Human beings haven’t changed that much.

“You have to be close to the music to hear all the intricacies, as opposed to an Ives symphony, which is designed to be played by a bigger group of instruments. Original instruments sound their best when you’re close to them. They’re not designed to project.”

McGegan acknowledges that if he were to adhere strictly to historical practice, he’d probably be out of a job.

“The one person who shouldn’t be there is the conductor,” he said. “It would have been the composer, most times. So you have the composer playing what was probably only written the night before.

“At the time, there was something called the Academy of Ancient Music, which meant music that was over 20 years old,” he said. “That’s slightly different to what we expect now.”

* Nicholas McGegan conducts the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in music by Vivaldi, Sammartini, Locatelli and other Baroque composers today at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 600 St. Andrews Road, Newport Beach. Marion Verbruggen will be the recorder soloist. 8 p.m. $20. (714) 740-2000.