When William Christie brings his Les Arts Florissants to the Civic Opera House Wednesday night to present their delectable version of Henry Purcell`s
”The Fairy Queen,” audience members may wonder why a French-based vocal and instrumental ensemble directed by an American musician happens to be touring a ”semi-opera” by England`s greatest baroque composer.
Because Purcell`s masterpiece is in need of a scholarly reappraisal and he and his group are just the ones to give it that, Christie suggested in a recent telephone conversation from New York. He and his widely praised early music group were there last month performing Lully`s opera ”Atys” as part of a three-year exploration of French baroque music sponsored by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
”Purcell, like a lot of composers including Handel, has been sort of canonized, stuffed into an `English style` mold,” he explains. ”Over the years the attitude toward Purcell was that he was supposed to sound clean, a little bit English and a bit dull. This tends to play down the violence, extravagances and emotional variety that fill his music. It doesn`t at all jibe with the rest of the cultural scene in England near the end of the century.
”Of course, that”-meaning the chaste style of Purcell performance-”is something I don`t believe in at all. I like Purcell that smells a bit of garlic and olive oil. He obviously knew continental music very well and was very much beholden to its influence. His Englishness is a very different kind of Englishness than one gets out of 19th Century cathedral choirs.”
Listeners who have come to know, and love, Purcell`s free musical adaptation of Shakespeare`s ”A Midsummer Night`s Dream” from the recording by Christie and Les Arts Florissants on Harmonia Mundi France (901308.309, 2 CDs) should know that the touring version, sponsored in Chicago by Performing Arts Chicago, will be considerably stripped down, for various practical reasons.
The Harmonia Mundi version employed some 75 singers, instrumentalists and choristers, an ensemble that obviously was not feasible for touring.
For Wednesday`s somewhat abridged performance, about 10 instrumentalists and eight singers dressed in normal concert attire will appear on a platform atop the orchestra pit. Atmospheric lighting will take the place of scenery, and there will be semistaged movement to suggest the dramatic shape of each scene and act.
”An English friend of ours has prepared a narration to be delivered by Johanna Peters, a remarkably funny lady who`s director of vocal studies at London`s Guildhall School of Music; she`ll be doing a kind of Anna Russell presentation-a story line to link the musical elements.”
Those listeners who have always yearned to be on stage at the Opera House will be delighted to learn that audience seating for ”Fairy Queen” will be entirely on the stage, specially raked for this occasion. To put the audience in the proper mellow, midsummery mood, complimentary cocktails will be served before the performance and during intermission.
”The Fairy Queen” (1692) belongs to that peculiar genre known as dramatic opera or semi-opera, a fusion of music and drama that appealed to English taste of the 17th Century, as opposed to the entirely sung operas of the English and French; the closest contemporary equivalent might be musical comedy. Purcell`s adaptation takes such blithe liberties with the original play that the Bard would hardly recognize his work.
Christie believes listeners should approach this exotic entertainment expecting not a recreation of a Shakespearean comedy but an imaginative extension of the original. The score is richly varied, ranging from dance-derived songs and choruses to lyrical-pastoral solos and comic turns. If the music-making in this live performance is anything as lively as that on the recording, this ”Fairy Queen” should win many converts to Purcell.
And, of course, to Christie`s ensemble. That Les Arts Florissants has long since taken its place as one of Europe`s premier early music groups, an ensemble with nearly 30 award-winning recordings to its credit (see accompanying story), is in no small measure due to Christie`s canny leadership. Having founded the ensemble in 1979, the 47-year-old Christie has firmly charted the ensemble`s course through a wealth of French, Italian and English vocal music of the 17th and 18th Centuries, little of it familiar except perhaps to scholars.
”It was fate, kismet or what ever they call it,” Christie observes, when asked how he came to settle in France and start up the group. Educated at Harvard and Yale, he served a stint as a music history professor and director of the Collegium Musicum at Dartmouth, but that association ended precipitously.
”Essentially, they let me go. When that happened I thought I would give myself a busman`s holiday and go to Europe for a while. That was in 1971. Twenty-one years later, I`m still there.”
Eventually taking up residence in Paris, Christie found France hospitable to early music even though the French seemed more interested in preserving their musical heritage than actually performing it. So he considers it a major coup for the Paris Conservatoire to have engaged him in 1982 to teach historical performance; he is the first American to hold a professorship at that venerable institution.
He created Les Arts Florissants to perform the neglected works of the French baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, naming the group after one of Charpentier`s stage works. With a nucleus of 15 singers and a handful of instrumentalists that can grow to more than 100, depending on what project Christie is doing, the group is a true United Nations of early music performance: Its members hail not only from France, England and America, but also from Belgium, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Canada and Australia. Despite the group`s popularity in concert and on recordings, Les Arts Florissants has gone through perilous times and nearly folded a couple of times, Christie says. He estimates the group now earns 60 to 70 percent of its budget by itself, with 30 percent coming from state and private support.
Touring and making recordings take up most of the Arts Florissants year:
Although Christie and his group give nearly 100 concerts a year, no more than 10 of them occur in Paris. The rest are given in Europe and the U.S., which the ensemble visits twice a year. Harmonia Mundi is so delighted with their CD sales that it has given Christie virtually carte blanche to record the repertoire he desires. Their next project for the label will be the French baroque composer Michel de Monteclair`s 1732 opera ”Jephte.”
Say what you will about Les Florissants and its honored place among today`s international early music elite. But don`t call them safe,
conservative or mainstream.
”I think there is something noble about being on the outskirts of the establishment,” says Christie, chuckling with satisfaction. ”You are there to make sure things are done properly. To use a hackneyed term, there is an intellectual honesty to this group that I want to maintain.”
