Compare the roster of musicians who performed on a 1995 English Concert album with the line-up traveling to Denver with the London-based chamber orchestra this week, and you will discover only three names are the same.
In little more than a decade, the world-renowned period ensemble has undergone an almost complete personnel transformation. But Andrew Manze, an acclaimed baroque violinist who has been the group’s artistic director since July 2003, said audiences needn’t worry.
“What amazed me is that the actual people onstage are different, with the exception of three of them, but the sound has stayed basically the same,” Manze said from his home in Stockholm. “Somehow, the new players who come in, they inherit the sound and approach.
“It’s almost as if the English Concert has a spell to it, which makes the players inside it, whoever they are, play in a certain way.”
Manze and the orchestra are undertaking a 13-city tour, which began Friday in Tucson and takes the ensemble across the United States. It appears Wednesday evening in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House under the auspices of Friends of Chamber Music.
In April 2003, Manze, 41, joined the Academy of Ancient Music, another major period ensemble, for a concert at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Later that year he made a solo appearance at the Lakewood Cultural Center.
It’s likely the next time Colorado audiences see him, he will be in yet another guise. He is stepping down as leader of the English Concert in September 2007, and it was announced Tuesday that freelance English harpsichordist and conductor Harry Bicket will replace him.
Bicket, who has made a speciality of the baroque repertoire, was a guest conductor with the Colorado Symphony in March 2004; he led a rare production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1649 opera, “Giasone,” at the 2005 Aspen Music Festival.
Manze’s departure comes in part because of a recent move from his native England to Sweden with his wife, a Swedish violinist, and children, ages 1 and 3. He serves as artist-in-residence with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and as chief conductor of Sweden’s Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra.
From the start, Manze said he never intended to remain with the English Concert as long as Trevor Pinnock. The famed harpsichordist and conductor founded the chamber orchestra in 1973 and remained its artistic director for three decades.
“I set myself certain goals,” Manze said. “Some of them we’ve achieved, and some of them we haven’t. As I got to know orchestra better, I realized that some of the thoughts I’d had of things we could do didn’t suit the orchestra very well.”
He had hoped to expand the orchestra’s repertoire into the early 19th century, perhaps including works by Ludwig van Beethoven. Instead, he found it made more sense for the orchestra to stick to what it does well – baroque repertoire and compositions from the late 18th-century by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and others.
Save for the Symphony No. 1 in D major by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, a pivotal figure in the 18th-century transition from the baroque to classical styles, the ensemble’s Denver program will be entirely devoted to works by Mozart.
“We’ve done a lot of Mozart, which the orchestra has been doing for many years,” Manze said. “And it really feels, when you pick up a new piece of Mozart that it (the ensemble) hasn’t played, that it’s got its language of how to play Mozart.”
Manze is well known for his improvisation in baroque music – ornamentations and other in-the-moment enhancements typical of performers of that time. But he believes that approach also makes sense for works from the classical period.
(Although the term “classical” is broadly applied for a continuum of concert music extending from the Renaissance to Philip Glass, it specifically applies to a period in Austro- Germanic music stretching from the late 18th through early 19th centuries.)
“There should be a spirit of improvisation in classical music as well,” Manze said. “I’m going to be playing a concerto of Mozart, which he himself played. Now, I’m sure every time he did that things came out a bit different, whether he chose a different character for a phrase or literally different notes. He was the composer and player, and he just did what he felt like.”
Will the violinist actually change some of Mozart’s notes, an action long frowned upon by many in the field who believe the notes on the page are sacrosanct?
“I’m fighting that question right now,” Manze said. “Generally, I haven’t changed the notes of Mozart except in tiny ways that hardly anyone would notice.”
But he said he will likely take things further on this tour, where he and the orchestra must perform a nearly identical program day after day.
“I’m really passionate about avoiding playing one concert 12 times,” he said, “and one way to achieve that is to play different notes. And I’ve been practicing that, improvising passages or ornamentations, always trying to stay within Mozart’s language.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
English Concert
PERIOD ORCHESTRAL MUSIC | Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets; 7:30 p.m. Wednesday | $30 | 303-388-9839 or friendsofchambermusic.com.
CD review
Ensemble shows glory of Bach Jr.
For the past 50 years and probably much longer, composer Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) has been overshadowed by his celebrated father, Johann Sebastian Bach, and relegated largely to the backwaters of classical-music history.
A sparkling new Harmonia Mundi recording by Conductor Andrew Manze and the English Concert should go far in changing such unfair perceptions. It features the younger Bach’s Cello Concerto in A major along with a set of four symphonies he wrote in 1775 at age 61.
In an accompanying essay, Manze makes a case for Bach as a pivotal transition figure between the baroque era and later composers such as Mozart and even Beethoven. The surprisingly fresh, vital works strongly back his thesis.
Manze seems incapable of making an album that isn’t of exceptional quality, and this one is no exception. The playing on every track is infused with clarity, buoyancy and translucence.
– Kyle MacMillan
