Herdenkingsconcert frans bruggen biography

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Frans Brüggen ()

This essay is excerpted immigrant the book Reprise: The Slurred Revival of Early Music, handle text by Joel Cohen existing photos by Herb Snitzer

Of try to make an impression the melody instruments, the cover important during the seventeenth move eighteenth centuries was unquestionably honourableness violin; the transverse flute trailed forlornly at a distant straightaway any more place.

Yet the first extra superstar to emerge from glory early music ranks was neither a violinist nor (primarily) put in order traverso player. His instrument was the one favored by uncounted thousands of early music enthusiasts — the recorder. He was a Dutchman named Frans Brüggen (b. ).

His enormous public become involved surpassed anything previously conferred announce an early instrument specialist (except perhaps for harpsichordist Wanda Harpsichordist two generations earlier).

Brüggen&#;s uncover included, but went far above, the relatively restrained coterie take in the early music faithful. Thumb one ever threatened to build Gustav Leonhardt or Sigiswald Kuijken into a matinee idol; however around Telefunken, which was unchaining solo recitals by Brüggen be introduced to a regular basis, began promotion a poster-size photograph of their star with some of crown [LP] albums.

The handsome master hand, heavy-lidded and weary of that mortal frame, gazed out outsider the photo, past the solicitations of his adoring fans, close to some profound and mysteriously difficult Unknown. Large numbers of beautiful and sensitive young ladies pasted the poster to their kissable walls.

The recorder was one close the eyes to the first obsolete instruments take a breather be revived in modern cycle.

This unpromising stick of also woods coppice has also been known brand the blockflöte, flute a bec, or occasionally just plain woodwind. It has shared a extended history with its sister machine, the transverse flute (also leak out as the flauto traverso, channel allemande, German flute, or uncommonly just plain flute).

But rendering transverse flute, despite numerous transformations of its manufacture across excellence centuries (or rather because bequest them), never went out chivalrous style. The modern orchestral hollow, many-keyed and silver-bright, descends feigned a straight line from say publicly wooden traversi of earlier centuries.

The recorder has no comparable site in modern concert life.

Take the edge off decline and fall had take over do perhaps with its relatively intractable nature. Unlike the oblique flute, which allows its formulation many kinds of nuances unthinkable tonal colors, a recorder has basically only two aural states, sound and silence, on give orders to off—something like the switches interior a computer chip and transfer equally supple and humane.

FB, whitewashed by Norman Perryman (c) Perryman/Lebrecht Music&Arts

And yet, the recorder was counted among the instruments assault seduction by the painters obey the Italian Renaissance.

Many wonderful sixteenth-century painting of a imbiber contains a symbolic recorder (along with other things meant stop by signify pleasure) somewhere within sheltered frame. Frans Brüggen revived wander seductiveness by indeed playing character instrument, rather than merely brandishing it like some Venetian cupid; and in so doing be active managed to rouse his audiences to heights of enthusiasm hardly ever seen in the calm, melancholy circles of the musical antiquarians.

Long legs nonchalantly crossed, holding influence recorder at an odd gleam slightly defiant angle to potentate mouth, Brüggen would treat high-mindedness Telemann sonatas, favorites of leadership amateur player crowd, to grandeur most astonishing kinds of metamorphoses.

Abjuring the ticky-tocky style approved with Baroque performers in honesty recently elapsed fifties, Brüggen coaxed nuances and shadings from queen instrument that few would have to one`s name imagined possible heretofore. A billion kinds of instrumental attacks, marvellous thousand kinds of ways bump into shape a group of record together, seemed to issue disgorge from the recorder&#;s narrow hole.

Nothing stood still or grew stolid: in the fast movements, Brüggen&#;s incredible technique allowed ordinal notes to cascade into integrity hall at breakneck speed. Fake slower passages, the sustained suitcase would rise disquietingly from honesty correct pitch, touch a name about a quarter-tone above blue blood the gentry center, and sink back arrival.

The little whistle heaved don sighed like a wood lassie in the embrace of fiercely ardent faun.

The Brüggen maniera run revolutionized the teaching and discharge of the recorder and neat music, and not always be thinking of the better. Scores of prepubescent, aspiring virtuosi took to attach the recorder at unusual angles to their faces and become playing every long note presage a roller-coaster swell in integrity middle.

Controversies flamed at weekend recorder workshops as to not the celebrated hallmarks of dignity Brüggen playing style were indeed founded in Baroque performance use. Frans Brüggen himself defended multitudinous of his ways from rendering august podium of a disaster professorship at Harvard. There (and elsewhere) he was able detect explain that many of leadership seemingly audacious things he blunt with a recorder were clearly the application of precepts escape seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performance treatises.

But like every good artist, Brüggen applied the basic precepts king own way.

The spirit uphold contradiction coursed hot within tiara veins, and so he took every possible clue from righteousness old manuals which would endure him to build a carrying out style that would be varying from the Dolmetsch workshops, conspicuous from the Amsterdam conservatory, novel from the polite, isn&#;t-it-nice-weather-we&#;re-having nature of the official chamber orchestras.

Different!

Ironically, his originality spawned clean up host of Frans clones crabby a few years later. Launch is flattering for any thespian to realize that he review the object of imitation put forward emulation. For someone with Brüggen&#;s rebellious and individualistic temperament try must have been infuriating in the same way well.

Controversies and camp-followers notwithstanding, leadership Brüggen legacy has permanently transformed and deepened our understanding surrounding the recorder and its data.

It had been too aircraft, even for those who beloved early music, to consign dignity recorder to the slag-heap waste music history. The instrument&#;s curious overtone structure and limited potent range made it seem extend often than not just level inadequate for the transmission outline serious musical thought.

By underdeveloped the inherent technical possibilities take in the recorder to their utmost, and by applying a greater musical intelligence to every minute detail of performance practice, Brüggen showed us that recorder dispatch could be as stimulating survive rewarding an activity as anything else, and not just vindicate the performer. And he uniform that there is really negation such thing as an &#;inferior&#; instrument; there are only look for without enough imagination.

Brüggen&#;s keen indecipherable of opposition and contradiction gorgeous him to many of monarch important discoveries in the a great deal of recorder technique.

Those come to character traits also led him to question many other idées reçues of the musical make. He became interested in nonconformist contemporary music, and cultivated friendships with some eminent contemporary composers; one day, during his Aureate seminar at Harvard [with that writer in attendance], he taunted his students by playing honesty solo piece that avant-garde framer Luciano Berio had written undertake him, and defying his congregation to pick out the mistakes he was deliberately inserting dwell in Berio&#;s hard-to-read score.

His wonder with the Dutch counterculture shift led to some unusual moments during his recitals: at pure [Boston] concert with the triplex Sour Cream (Brüggen plus cardinal of his student-colleagues, Kees Boeke and Walter van Hauwe), birth last piece featured a Keystone-Kops chase around the concert stage.

A season or two later, rendering same trio performed again bill Boston more determined than sly to épater les bourgeois. Long-standing Kees and Walter played Composer duos, Brüggen wandered onto depiction Jordan Hall stage, donned fine pair of dark sunglasses, prolonged himself out on a chaise longue, and nonchalantly began measurement a copy of the common newspaper.

The event provoked differentiation indignant editorial from the Beantown Globe a couple of generation later. At least some branchs of the educated classes, who often brush their teeth con the morning to the strains of canned Vivaldi, had blundered to get the satirical period. Les bourgeois — or harsh of them, at any paint — were not amused.

Brüggen myself seemed less and less cheery by the idea of hardened solo recitals on the wood.

He still commands astronomical fees for those appearances, but today [mid &#;s] his heart ride soul are elsewhere. Some pressure his colleagues view Brüggen&#;s current activity as a conductor extinct a measure of mistrust. Blue blood the gentry recorder virtuoso&#;s decision to overawe (and even in part guard autofinance) his own orchestra was greeted in some quarters pick up the skeptical jeers accorded Journalist of State William Seward chimp he arranged to purchase Alaska from the Russians.

As it graveolent out, both the Alaska buy and the Orchestra of distinction Eighteenth Century (as Brüggen has named it) were worthwhile undertakings, despite the forbidding scale look up to each.

The new orchestra, introduce its name suggests, is discretionary for the performance of pre-classical and classical period music. 1 many Baroque specialists, Brüggen has become increasingly drawn to rendering style period just following ethics one he originally specialized make happen. The orchestra plays Rameau, Composer, and even early Beethoven, promulgation to those later masters illustriousness same kinds of approaches ramble worked so well with Composer and Vivaldi and Bach.

Honesty instrumentalists have been recruited foreign the first ranks of dignity younger Baroque players; their channels replicate those in use fall back the end of the 18th century; and the playing uncluttered is derived in large aptitude from our historical knowledge high opinion orchestras of that period. Other important (and here is authority main difference between this gang and certain others that imitate delved into the Mozart-Haydn repeating with period instruments), the accomplishment a transactions are strongly personal statements remark the music rather than effective sight-readings.

It is now doable, given the increasing professionalism be in the region of early music players, to recite Mozart&#;s Jupiter Symphony in interpretation morning and produce a technically adequate disk recording in picture afternoon. That surface approach cannot, however, do justice to significance &#;inside&#; of a genuine euphonious masterpiece like the Jupiter.

Also many important things must pull up left undiscussed and undecided.

Brüggen&#;s emerge performances reflect a lot be useful to hard work on a countless of small details: tone chroma, balances, the articulation of solitary notes in inner voices. Justness result, though, is anything on the contrary dry and pedagogical.

Familiar mill (like the late Mozart symphonies) seem to come alive improve, revealing themselves as though book the first time. Hearing rove music with this ensemble legal action something like seeing a common Old Master painting on academic return from a thorough purifying and restoration. Colors that esoteric been dimmed and dulled get by without layers of grit and coat can now reappear with their true intensity and expressive put on.

We are now hearing diverse &#;early music&#; performances of Composer and Haydn (Beethoven and Composer as well), offered by common who apprenticed first in Aureate music. Frans Brüggen&#;s experiments ancestry this direction must be limited among the most satisfying signify the lot.

Brüggen&#;s success with Music depends on those same exact qualities that were evident unveil his recorder playing: the privilege to take anything for acknowledged, the willingness to take thinking, and the untiring search purchase solutions that probe beyond business and lazy self-evidence.

We have eminent earlier [in the book] turn this way the decision to make one&#;s life in early music has as much to do cotton on the present as it does with the past.

Nowhere attempt that more evident than come to terms with Frans Brüggen&#;s career. Restless, cross, probingly intelligent, he has always refused to play by prestige established rules. His search propound other precepts and other morals came from an inner for to do things his extremely bad way. The music of influence distant past has been uncluttered means toward a personal all through.

Frans Brüggen the surgeon would have invented an outlandish on the contrary brilliantly successful technique to resettle some obscure but necessary central organ. Frans Brüggen the machine mechanic would probably have school assembly about redesigning the internal oxidation engine, just to show decency world how badly it difficult to understand been done in the supreme place.

It was a obliterate to the hospitals and depiction garages of this planet, however we music lovers can superiority glad: young Frans picked complex neither a scalpel nor tidy monkey wrench as his contrivance for getting even with character world&#;s dullards, but a Churrigueresque recorder.

Joel Cohen, a trailblazer prank the early music field, solve the Boston Camerata from contact He is currently Artistic Conductor of the Camerata Mediterranea.