(see the first part of this blog here )
Some time ago, I wrote about how in eighteenth-century melodrama the actor pantomimes every single motive of the music and how this realization changed the way I perform and relate to the orchestra. This came about during the rehearsals for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Devin du Village in 2019. Since the music illustrates the feelings of the character, no note of the orchestra should sound before the actor’s body shows a sign of an affect or action. In practical terms, this means that the actor gives the entrances to the orchestra.
The conductor Mark Tatlow took on the challenge. We had worked together on Pygmalion and he knew how advantageous for the drama this method was. If done properly, the music would no longer sound like a soundtrack from the past but would instead appear as the inevitable outcome of the drama.
There were some funny moments in rehearsal: whenever Mark sensed I was waiting for the initial chord of a recitative, or any other entrance, he would not play. “I saw no thought or movement in the character, he would say, and so, I couldn’t play.”
This humility on his part, always making the effort to limit his initiative, was mirrored on my side by the demands usually placed on a conductor. I had to gesture clearly enough to compel Mark and the orchestra to come in but that wasn’t all: the tempo of my gesture should be identical to that of the music. And so, the music became an integral part of my pantomimic score and of the way I imagined the character.
There is a far-reaching consequence of this method: some musical genres, even orchestral ones, are destroyed by the presence of a conductor. This is certainly so in vocal music, but also occasionally in symphonies, as in those performed by the orchestra of Mannheim in the 1770s (more about this in another blog). The political implications are obvious. A genre such as opera, dominated institutionally by conductors, and where singers, for the most part, exert very little authority, withers. And one can see it.
But there is hope in the horizon. If singers behave more like conductors, and conductors more like section leaders, an alternative taste can emerge. Recently, I had the pleasure to work with the baroque orchestra Eik en Linde under the direction of Jörn Boysen. Click the link bellow for a snippet of this concert, where we made some steps in that direction.