It is hard to believe that something as serious as a period instrument orchestra arose from the ethyl spin of a New Year’s Eve. But on December 31, 1985, a group of students from Friburg University of Music devised a set of period instruments, without director and completely democratic, in the midst of euphoria caused by the champagne bubbles. “It was difficult to open up to everyone’s opinion and it took us a long time to start,” recalls Petra Müllejans (Düsseldorf, 66 years old) while taking a snack before the concert of the Baroque Orchestra of Freiburg last Monday, April 7 at the Philharmonie in Berlin. The German violinist, artistic director and founder of this prestigious historicist team, attends El País coinciding with her last project before retirement. But also, when the commemoration of the 40 years of that madness of New Year’s Eve is approaching, to which he has dedicated most of his life, after thousands of concerts and more than a hundred recordings.
The Baroque Orchestra of Friburg re -joins the Vox Luminis choir for an extensive international tour dedicated to Bach, which will pass through Spain this Thursday 10, on Friday 11 and Sunday 13. Three interpretations of the Passion according to San Juanas two years ago with the Passion according to San Mateoin Madrid, Barcelona and Seville, preceded by performances in Berlin and Stuttgart, and followed by others in Brussels, Bruges and Freiburg. “We had already worked with several choirs, but with Vox Luminis we found a very special chemistry, because its responsible, Lionel Meunier, directs the choir singing from within, just like I do when I play in the orchestra,” Müllejans continues. That tune could also be seen in the conversations during the bus trip that moved both teams from the hotel to the Berlin Sala, as well as in the Philharmonie cantina while sharing card games before the concert.
The sound test in the Philharmonie camera room was another sample of the natural tune between the German orchestra and the Belgian vocal team. They started at the end, with the beautiful choir Ruhl well, her holy bones (Rest, sacred remains), to find an ideal assembly between voices and instruments and achieve the crib song air that closes the work, with that Lutheran association of death with sleep. Müllejans and Meunier dispersed throughout the room to check the filling and making corrections, with a result superior to that of the Passion according to San Mateo two years ago. Then, the work imposed a duplicate choir and orchestra, forced to have forty instrumentalists and almost thirty voices, in addition to a choir of children. Now everything is reduced to twenty -two members of the orchestra with seventeen singers. “I remember perfectly the challenge that the Passion according to San Mateo with such a large group; Now, with the Passion according to San Juaneverything is easier to balance, ”Müllejans acknowledges.
In fact, “great” is an adjective associated with the Passion according to San Mateo already in the surroundings of Bach. And the “small” appellation is usually linked to the one based on the Gospel of St. John, since that of St. Mark has not been preserved as such. However, the Passion according to San Juanreleased on Good Friday of 1724 in Leipzig, was its first large -scale composition. A work of almost two hours that combined the biblical story in recitative, choral stanzas and lyrical meditations in the form of arias or choirs, and that would mark the guideline for other coming. It is highlighted by Christoph Wolff in his magnificent monograph In Bach’s musical universethat the cliff editorial has just translated. This Bachiana authority also underlines the two central moments of the work: the scene before Pilate and the death of Jesus, where Bach inserts spectacular choirs that symbolize the crowd or the soldiers, along with Arias interpreted with unusual instruments like two violas d’amorea purple leg or the combination of a ravsera flute and an oboe hunting.
After ensuring the ideal filling between the choir and the orchestra, these two moments acquired a fundamental prominence in the sound test. The fluid succession of the evangelist recitative and the characters of the biblical story connected admirably with choral interventions. And in the meditative moments of the Arias with unusual instrumentations highlighted the solo voices of bass Sebastian Myrus, the contractor Alexander Chance and the soprano Viola Blache. They left the overwhelming chorus that opens the work for the end of the test, Lord, our ruler (Lord, our owner), which Bach suppressed in 1725, among the multiple variants he introduced in his second version of the work, which will interpret on this tour only in Brussels and witches. However, in Spain we will hear the most common version, which combines the original 1724 score with some details of the final version of 1749. In its moving introduction, the Petra Müllejans violinist led from the lectern of concertin semicorcheas swirls in violins and violas next to the sharp dissonances of oboes and flutes that symbolize, together, the crown of thorns.
The baroque orchestra of Friburg has always had a close relationship with Bach, as evidenced by its two recordings of the Brandeburg concertsof 2000 and 2014. “I would not know how to say the best of the two, because this is like with the recordings of the Goldberg variations by Glenn Gould. In the second, we opted for a fingerboard at 392 Hz and that produced a more relaxed and precious sound, ”says Müllejans. The violinist remembers the importance she had for the Rainer Kussmann orchestra,” a teacher who left you a lot and encouraged you with a curious distinction of clothing of different colors for girls.
Müllejans keeps a pleasant memory of the first recordings they made for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, between 1990 and 1995, with symphonies and concerts of CPE Bach and Johann Georg Polendel: “I think we were able to express that fantastic orchestral culture before Haydn very well.” And he does not forget the influence of René Jacobs from 2001, which led them to move towards Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber in many Harmonia Mundi recordings: “He is one of my heroes and I still remember when, at first, he asked us Mozart symphonies, ”he admits.
The list could continue with the Fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout and his concert projects by Mozart and Beethoven, and with Pablo Heras-Casado, who have directed the team to Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. Even Müllejans does not rule out that the orchestra progresses towards Brahms and Bruckner; “The limit is always the budget,” he says. In fact, he recalls a 2007 project that the Baroque Orchestra of Freiburg commissioned works to composers under forty years, such as Rebecca Saunders and Benjamin Schweitzer: “There are current composers, such as Brice Pauset, who know how to use the timbric possibilities of period instruments in their own music,” he says. It is clear that historicist interpretation is something fully contemporary.