Richard Egarr called 'eighth wonder' after Boston debut
This November, Richard Egarr made a highly successful debut at the Handel & Haydn Society in Boston. Conducting a mixed Mozart and Beethoven programme, Richard was baptised the 'Eighth wonder' and the Boston Globe called his appearance 'a highly impressive debut'.
The Boston Globe - David Weininger
A high-spirited debut from Egarr
November 8, 2008
The British keyboardist and conductor Richard Egarr is one of the leading figures in the period-instrument community today. He is an ebullient and energetic musician, part of a generation that sees historically informed performance not as a matter of faithfulness to the past but as a way of infusing music of earlier centuries with vigor and intensity. Those qualities were front and center last night when he made a highly impressive debut with the Handel and Haydn Society, in a program of works by Mozart and Beethoven.
He began at the beginning: Mozart's First Symphony, written when the composer was only 8. In a sense, we're too easily given to see Mozart's earliest works for what they're not, the better to appreciate the astonishing rapidity of his development.
Yet Egarr made a convincing case that the symphony is worth hearing irrespective of
context, drawing out the music's union of innocence and confidence, as well as some subtle shifts between light and darkness in the brief slow movement.
The First Symphony shows Mozart introducing himself to a musical form; his late piano concertos show him transforming another. Egarr led the A-major concerto, K. 488, from the fortepiano in a lucid and elegant performance that featured a tight rapport with the orchestra. The slow movement, one of Mozart's great tragic utterances, was a highlight, as were the dialogues between the fortepiano's crisp articulation and the slightly unrefined sound of the winds.
The Beethoven part of the concert began with the "Creatures of Prometheus" overture, which opened with huge, attention-seizing chords. Liberated from the keyboard, Egarr conducted largely with fitful jerks of his arms. Yet if his movements were somewhat awkward, there was no gainsaying the results he achieved, especially the near-perfect balance between richness and clarity in the orchestral texture and the prominence of the cellos and basses.
Capping the evening was a lithe, quicksilver reading of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. Though the performance got off to an oddly subdued start, it caught fire in the middle of the first movement with some raucous interjections from the brass.
Throughout, Beethoven seems to do something he does in no other symphony: enjoy
himself. There are surprises around nearly every corner, and the conductor drew attention to all of them. The finale was turned loose at a mercurial tempo, and executed brilliantly.
Egarr's work was well appreciated, not only by the audience but by the orchestra. Someone should ensure that he returns again soon.
The early music movement is by now a scene of such ferment that it should be no surprise, I suppose, that the Handel and Haydn Society should be able to debut an exciting and challenging musician at seemingly each and every concert - yet still, each one still registers as a faint, if pleasant, surprise. Indeed, Richard Egarr (left), Music Director of the Academy of Ancient Music, who led last weekend's "Mozart and Beethoven" evening at Symphony Hall, perhaps even registered as something of a shock. For here was a musician who not only conducted (and played) a freshly conceived and deeply moving Mozart concerto on fortepiano, but then turned right around and made Beethoven's Eight Symphony sound alarmingly new - and I mean alarmingly new. It will be hard for me to listen to that particular warhorse in quite the same way ever again.
But first, back to Mozart. The evening's program, in truth, hardly cohered, but was instead yet another Mozart-and-Beethoven grab-bag, the kind of mish-mash a friend of mine calls "Mostly Mozthoven." It opened with a curiosity - Mozart's Symphony No. 1, written when the boy wonder was all of eight, which Egarr demonstrated was more than just a charming bagatelle, but clearly demonstrated the composer's lyric gifts in its simple but pleasing themes (one of which included a charming run and up down the scale) - as well as his confident grasp, even at that early age, of symphonic form. The next offering on the program, however, the A- Major Piano Concerto, seemed a world away from the serene innocence of that first symphony; its second movement, in fact, is one of the most poignant passages in all music, one of those haunting, nakedly emotional moments that can never be "resolved" back into sonata form. Egarr conducted as well as played a fortepiano which sounded a little tinkly to me (and was pretty much swallowed by the orchestra in the symphony), and so I fretted that ghosts of Schroeder and "Für Elise" might haunt the performance. But I shouldn't have worried: during his solo, Egarr seemed to be drawing tragedy directly from a clear deep, well, and I found myself nearly fighting tears. Strangely, however, the maestro then leapt into the piece's merry third movement with almost inordinate alacrity, and I began to sense something a bit mercurial about Mr. Egarr - or at least, something that reveled in contrast, even for its own sake.
The Beethoven only underlined this impression. The opening piece of the program's second half - the Overture to The Creations of Prometheus - has a dichotomy all but built into its structure; it opens with huge, primal, chords that announce the Beginning of Everything, followed by more humble motifs that one takes as the signature of the frail, fire-less human race. Free of the fortepiano, Egarr brought more clarity to the orchestra's playing, and the performance proved satisfying both in scope and detail. The Eighth Symphony, however, was more shocking - for here Egarr insisted on the same range of dynamic contrast in a work that is generally played as a glossily polished interregnum between the haunting Seventh and the triumphant Ninth. He had his justifications, surely - Beethoven's markings on the score clearly call for "fff" blasts (that's fortississimo); still, perhaps one shouldn't rely on the volume notations of a guy who's basically deaf. The end result of Egarr's approach was an Eighth that glittered brilliantly and yet sounded slightly manic - or even schizophrenic; one sometimes felt one was at one of those horror-movie soirées in which the charming, all-knowing host has poisoned all the aperitifs. Still, I can't deny that Egarr may be on to something about the Eighth - perhaps there i s a scream echoing behind its tightly-clenched smile; one could certainly understand if there were. And certainly the orchestra's virtuosic playing once again threw down the kind of intellectual guantlet one has come to expect from Handel and Haydn, and the early music movement in general.