Baroque show stars in Venice's orbit

Cellist James Bush has programmed and performs in San Marco-focused concerts with NZ Barok.

The Basilica di San Marco is an impressive building. Consecrated in 1094, San Marco is Venice's most important church, containing treasures beyond price, including what is considered the world's finest collection of Byzantine metalwork.

San Marco is also one of the most important places in the development of Western music, the unifying point for a tangled web of composers who grew up with, learnt from and were influenced by each other.

The subject is dear to cellist James Bush. He has programmed and performs in three San Marco-focused Auckland concerts and another in Christchurch this month for early music orchestra NZ Barok. The concerts feature music by Monteverdi, Legrenzi, Caldara, Platti and Vivaldi who all had ties to the basilica.

Bush's beginning point was Antonio Caldara, a composer best known for his sacred vocal music, some of which Bush recorded in Berlin: "I was blown away by [Caldara's] creativity. I started digging around him and his music and I kept finding connections with composers I loved, and all roads led to San Marco."

Caldara was a chorister at San Marco. His father was a violinist who played with Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, father of Antonio, composer of The Four Seasons. Giovanni Benedetto Platti, whose father also played in the orchestra, may have studied composition with the younger Vivaldi (when it comes to early music there are necessarily lots of may-haves and possiblys) who, in turn, could have learnt from Giovanni Legrenzi, the maestro di cappella at San Marco — a position held a decade or so earlier by Claudio Monteverdi. Confused yet?

"I love to imagine all these children running around the corridors of San Marco, before later going out through Europe and taking positions," Bush says. "Caldara went to Vienna; Platti went to Würzburg. Nowadays, if, in your local church, three or four of the kids grew up to change the world of music, you'd make a movie about it."

NZ Barok begins its concert with arguably the greatest of them all, Monteverdi, the composer who shepherded music from the Renaissance to the Baroque and who moved to Venice in middle age, writing some of his finest music there. Orchestra co-artistic director Miranda Hutton points out that when Monteverdi was composing, the violin was a recent invention.

Bush: "We forget it was the wild west as far as instruments were concerned. You'd have all sorts of different tunings, you'd have different bows, in every little village the 'A' was probably different."

The members of NZ Barok use instruments based on early models — Bush's cello is a copy of a Stradivarius and doesn't have an end pin to secure it to the ground, while Hutton's violin lacks the chin and shoulder rests of modern instruments — but Hutton and Bush agree that playing early music on a period cello or violin is less about the instrument than how you approach it.

"The music is about ideas," Bush says, "You could do it on a lot of instruments."

In recent years there has been a general move towards historically informed performance (HIP). All orchestras are expected to take early music scholarship and style into account, and many pioneers of the period instrument movement now work with symphony orchestras in a way they wouldn't have dreamt of 20 or 30 years ago, when there was a clear divide between approaches. That division, caused by dogmatism on the part of the period performance crowd and defensiveness on the side of the traditionalists, has largely evaporated.

"We have a whole generation of young musicians who don't distinguish between modern and Baroque," says Bush. "All of those lines are disappearing because the younger generation just doesn't care; they're only interested in ways of communicating. If being historically informed doesn't add vitality to the music, then it's not interesting."

Bush made his name not performing early music but by winning the Young Musicians Competition in 1994, when he played Dvorak's late-19th century cello concerto. Even now, after a decade in Europe playing Baroque music, he says he doesn't consider himself a specialist.

"You're a cellist, in the end," he says.

Still, Bush and Hutton are both drawn to the scholarship of the early music movement. The cellist compares uncovering lesser known composers to star gazing.

"At first you notice three or four stars," he says. "In early music those stars would be Handel, Vivaldi and Bach. But go out of the city and suddenly you're overwhelmed by the immensity of the night sky, and what you thought were three or four stars turns out to be galaxies."

Lowdown
What: NZ Barok — The Splendour of Venice
Where and when: Takapuna, October 5; Remuera, October 6 & 7; Christchurch, October 16. See nzbarok.org.nz