Leave it to Andrew Parrott to demolish the notion that an early-music specialist cannot also function successfully in other periods and styles.
This year, in addition to concerts and recordings with his London-based period-instruments ensemble, the Taverner Consort, Choir and Players, the versatile British musician conducted Renaissance polyphony and Peter Maxwell Davies at England`s Bath Festival. He also performed and recorded the Mozart Requiem with Boston Early Music Festival forces. In December he will direct the Mozart arrangement of Handel`s ”Messiah” with the San Francisco Symphony.
”I happen to flit happily between the two,” says the genial, 43-year-old Parrott, refering to a busy career that keeps him shuttling among original-instrument Baroque ensembles and the modern-instrument orchestras with which he performs music of the Classical, Romantic and contemporary periods.
This week with the Grant Park Symphony, Parrott will don his modern hat for something really unusual, the American premiere of the melodrama ”Medea” by the 18th Century Bohemian composer, Georg Benda. Actors Andrea Marcovicci and Kristoffer Tabori will assume major speaking roles, with Yuri Rasovsky directing. Beethoven`s ”Creatures of Prometheus” ballet music will share the bill. Concerts are 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday at the Petrillo Music Shell.
Melodrama, a form combining spoken text and music, is all but unknown to today`s concert audiences. But, as Parrott points out, melodramas were extremely popular in the late 18th Century until the genre was swept aside by opera and its vernacular cousin, singspiel. The 1775 ”Medea,” set to a text by Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter based on the classic Greek tragedy, was much admired by Mozart and for a time spread Benda`s fame throughout the drawing rooms of Europe.
Parrott says he came across ”Medea” in England some years ago and was impressed enough to track down the score.
” In its day it was considered very innovative. All these byways of musical history I find fascinating because they illuminate the obviously great works. Musically, the style is close to Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, not quite as distinctive as Gluck. There are seven or eight scenes, with the actors speaking over the orchestra or in the gaps between scenes. It lasts about 40 minutes, the perfect length for half of a concert program.”
Parrott is perhaps best known on these shores for the two dozen or so recordings he has made with the Taverner Consort, Choir and Players, the ensemble he founded in 1973. Their latest release on EMI Angel, CDC-49959, holds crisply invigorating accounts of J.S. Bach`s Magnificat and Cantatas Nos. 11 and 50.
The Taverner ensemble takes its name from the 16th Century English church composer, John Taverner, whose music struck Parrott as ”a complete revelation” when he heard it as an Oxford undergraduate. He formed the group at the request of Michael Tippett, who needed a choir to present concerts at his Bath Festival. As the Taverner became established, it forged a high reputation in pre-19th Century music, especially Purcell, Monteverdi, Handel and Bach.
The group, Parrott explains, has no fixed membership but expands or contracts depending on the requirements of a given assignment. Taverner personnel are drawn mainly from London`s pool of excellent early-music specialists-the same pool that serves Roger Norrington`s London Classical Players, Christopher Hogwood`s Academy of Ancient Music and other British ensembles.
”Most of the important work we do is either recordings or concerts abroad. In London we give only about two or three concerts per year. That doesn`t worry me, because I think London has got too many concerts as is. I feel I am making a greater contribution to the musical life if I`m going to places where people have a keener appetite for music than people do, oddly enough, in the musical capital.”
The fact that Norrington`s group also is under contract to EMI means that he and Parrott must stick fairly strictly to their particular corners of the repertory.
Says Parrott: ”EMI has divided us up: I am the Baroque person for them and (Roger`s) the Classical and Romantic person. We have a good relationship with EMI, but I definitely don`t have a free hand to record what I want. I would love to record the Benda `Medea,` but I haven`t a hope in hell, because EMI, like all record companies, is a commercial enterprise.
”So I will agree to record `Messiah` and the Brandenburg Concertos for them if they let me do a reasonable number of less obvious projects, like Handel`s `Carmelite Vespers.` Our sales figures show that the well-known and less well-known works sell more or less equally. I`m not sure what that proves, but it means that we can probably continue in this happy balance for some time to come.”
Whether Parrott is directing Machaut and Monteverdi with a period-instruments group, or Elgar and Stravinsky with a normal symphony
orchestra, his approach is fundamentally the same.
”I try to understand the conventions that obtained when the composers wrote the music. The skills of modern players have taught me a lot, and I can use that experience profitably with pre-Classical ensembles. But it works the other way around, too. With an open-minded chamber orchestra there`s plenty to work on-phrasing, tuning, articulation, timbre, all sorts of things.”
Parrott`s progress report on the early-music movement is typically outspoken.
”Clearly the whole movement is burgeoning. But I think its very success has brought it to a dangerous juncture. In London everybody is rushing around to record this and that. I know; I`m guilty of that, too. There is a great temptation just to produce records because there is a market.
”The unwitting public assumes these things are being performed on historical principles, when in fact very little thought has gone into a lot of them. Standards often aren`t nearly as high as they could be. There is a danger of performances becoming routine in a way that performances of Mozart were too often routine 15 years ago. Ironically, it was precisely against that sort of thing that people were reacting when they got involved with period instruments.
”There is another aspect to the problem. I`m certainly not criticizing people like Roger Norrington who are working on 19th Century projects. But by getting more involved with later music we shouldn`t think we have answered all the questions from earlier music; in fact, we have just scratched the surface of understanding.”
While conceding that today`s approach to early music has helped bring the worlds of scholarship and performance closer together, Parrott believes there is plenty of room for improved relations.
”It frustrates me when I see large groups of excellent musicologists expending energy on things that don`t advance the understanding of music. If they haven`t really heard old music in anything like its true colors, how can they go on to do their work with any degree of accuracy?”
As part of his plan to avoid being pigeonholed as an early-music specialist, Parrott of late has been developing his relationship with American ensembles. Actually, he already enjoys a strong tie with the former colonies: His wife, singer Emily Van Evra, is American. When the Parrotts are not restoring their newly acquired Oxford home (which dates, appropriately enough, from the 16th Century) they are relaxing at their summer retreat, a cabin on the Brule River in northern Wisconsin.
In this sylvan setting, the conductor collapses ”in a vegetable state”
after the rigors of the road. Not a cornett or sackbut in sight: heaven.
