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Entrevista: Rinaldo Alessandrini

12/4/2003 |

 

One of the leading lights of Italian Baroque music talks about conducting Handel opera, the difference between sacred and secular music and his sometimes surprising tempo choices.




Rinaldo Alessandrini is a mere youngster as maestros go (he was born in 1960 in Rome), but he has been active on the early music scene for some two decades. He began his career as an almost self-taught harpsichordist (and is still an admired soloist on the instrument), going on to become both a musicologist and a conductor of various ensembles, vocal and instrumental. He found real fame with Concerto Italiano, the vocal/instrumental ensemble he founded in 1995, first with a series of riveting recordings of Monteverdi's madrigals and then with exciting (and sometimes startling) renditions of Vivaldi, Pergolesi and the Scarlattis. He is fond of reviving long-dormant works: in November 2002 he gave the modern-day premiere of Alessandro Scarlatti's oratorio San Filippo Neri, and he is doing the same with Alessandro Melani's Il fratricidio di Cain at the Festival of Sacred Music in Cuenca, Spain in April 2003. In every case, he and his singers and players aim for a particularly Italianate ideal of Baroque sound, which he describes as "cantabile plus a flexibility of expressiveness."

It was almost obligatory that such ventures should lead Alessandrini to opera. His performances of Monteverdi, Vivaldi and Jommelli were soon followed by Handel and Mozart: so far, he has conducted Semele at the 1996 Spoleto Festival, Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Le nozze di Figaro at Welsh National Opera and Alcina at the Liceu in Barcelona. The 2002–03 season sees perhaps his highest-profile operatic job yet: Handel's Giulio Cesare, a co-production of the Teatro Real de Madrid and the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. andante contributor Carlo Vitali recently talked with Alessandrini between rehearsals at the Comunale.

Carlo Vitali: You're known for often preparing your own performing editions of the works you conduct. Is this your version of Cesare ?

Rinaldo Alessandrini: It's mainly based on the new Händel Hallische Ausgabe, with a few retouches to the scoring in order to adjust it for a modern-instrument orchestra such as the one at the Teatro Comunale.

CV: What policy, if any, did you follow as to cuts?

RA: A modern audience can hardly tolerate the four or five hours of a Baroque opera without the various diversions which were usual during Handel's or Vivaldi's times. Luca Ronconi [the stage director] and I "cleared a path" through the score by emphasizing dramatic action at the expense of mere virtuoso showing-off. Giulio Cesare is an extremely luxuriant score. One has the impression that Handel and his librettist wanted to put into it everything that opera can offer. Our cuts are evenly distributed and don't punish any character in particular.

CV: You work regularly with modern instruments. Do you experience that as a shortcoming in Baroque opera?

RA: Not really; it's not a serious problem. You shouldn't — in fact, you couldn't — make a modern orchestra sound like a period-instrument ensemble. This is a standard opera house orchestra, and quite a good one, actually. All I have to do is empower them to make use of techniques which are already at hand. For the strings that means playing staccato, balzato [bounced bow strokes], spiccato [detached strokes]. Dynamics should have a direct relationship with speed; articulation should be lightened. It has to do with music and the musicians' minds rather than with their instruments.

CV: You're known for sometimes extreme tempos — e.g. the super-fast launch of your Vivaldi Gloria and the very slow opening of your Pergolesi and Domenico Scarlatti Stabat Maters. How do you settle on these tempos — and how do you make them work?

RA: I just follow the metric signature of the written scores. Vivaldi writes the opening of his Gloria in four, rather than in eight as was usual. On the other hand, I have come to the conclusion that in the 18th century, slow tempos were extremely slow. Generally speaking, I think there was a definite taste for extremes.

CV: Yes — "depths of pain and heights of passion," as John Dryden wrote (and Handel set to music) in the Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day. This is true, perhaps even more so, for the madrigal repertory in which you first became famous. Do you still return to that repertory?

RA: Yes, although there is not much market demand for it any longer, especially for recordings. That said, for the Petrarch septacentennial in 2004 we will tour to Antwerp, Utrecht, London, Paris and Rome, with madrigals on Petrarch texts by such composers as Lasso, Monteverdi, Marenzio and Willaert, and in the 2003–04 season, I will conduct lots of sacred and secular music by Philippe de Monte [composer at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague].

CV: Do you find any differences in approaching sacred versus secular Baroque music?

RA: Not the slightest difference, when it comes to Italian music. We may have inherited from the 19th century a certain confusion about sacred music — between the mystical, disembodied attitude people generally expect nowadays and the depiction and contemplation of very concrete metaphors which was at the core of Baroque church music in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

CV: As when, for example, in Handel's Dixit Dominus (Psalm 110), the text is about "wounding heads" ...

RA: Yes, "conquassabit capita" — you can hear skulls being broken. When it's about "drinking of the brook in the way" ["de torrente in via bibet"], you have those wave-like patterns. Italian sacred music strikes the imagination, not unlike the way opera does. Churches and theaters were one and the same, in that respect.

CV: So would you ever try Bach's sacred music?

RA: I have: it was in 1996, in Florence's Basilica di Santa Croce for the Maggio Musicale. Yet Bach is different — the main issue there is the clear management of the polyphonic discourse, although the same concrete metaphors may be present.

CV: After Mozart and Handel, what comes next? Some say you may be ready for approaching Rossini, or perhaps Schubert.

RA: No, I don't think I am. Trying to force situations is wrong. Some day, who knows?

Carlo Vitali
Andante