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Andrew Manze: Crazy for Baroque
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18282 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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1 / 1999 |
2,567 Words |
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
On the face of it, chamber and orchestral music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would not seem to have much to do with jazz and the likes of Charlie Parker. But British violinist-conductor Andrew Manze--who at 33 has become one of the most highly respected performer-specialists of so-called early music--begs to differ.
Manze's impassioned recordings and performances have excited critics and audiences around the world in a way almost unthinkable a generation ago. Then "early music" was the dusty province of musicologists, audiences were small and specialized, and the general view was that if you couldn't play classical music well you switched to early music, where nobody could tell the difference. Performances tended to be dry, adhering strictly to what was considered authentic performance practice. Today, Manze's phenomenal success is a measure of how the early music movement has matured.
His fascination with American jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker gives a clue to Manze's compelling approach to Baroque music. Performers of popular music are notable for their independence from written music; some cannot even read music notation. Improvisations by jazz musicians follow no written score--in fact, it is only with great difficulty that a traditionally trained musician can transcribe, from sound recordings, the myriad inflections and subtleties of a jazz player's spontaneous creation. Yet we know that "classical" musicians of times past had a similar fast-and-loose relationship to notated music. Most composers were performers--and were improvisers first and foremost. Bach and Beethoven, for example, earned international reputations more for the music they improvised on the spot than for the
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