PERSPECTIVE — The early-music community, the classical-music world’s most dramatically evolving niche, has gone beyond semi-attainable goals of time-travel performances, instead turning into a search for more genuine launching points for interpreting long-loved masterpieces from Bizet to Wagner. Plus discovering the muffled voices of marginalized composers from less-likely epochs, 16th-century Central America for one. Skeptics might ask: Is there anything to be discovered from the historical-instrument performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle or Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, both composed only decades before modern recording technology? Or from retrieving music so ancient that any performance is a speculative act of co-composition? Oh, yes. Plenty.
In Wagner and Mahler, the less aggressive sound of gut string, in contrast to the steamroller tendencies of steel strings, allows individual phrases to have their say. That’s definitely true of the Mahler 9th recording by the Mahler Academy Orchestra conducted by Philipp von Steinaecker (ALPHA1057), which also disproves notions that period performances dictate faster, straitjacketed tempos. The 1938 live Vienna Philharmonic recording conducted by Bruno Walter is as close to Mahler’s own interpretation as you can get. Yet the Mahler Academy’s final movement is a good six minutes longer than Walter’s. The period-instrument Rheingolds are all over the map. Simon Rattle’s 2004 outing with the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment came in at 237 minutes, while his 2015 reading with the modern-instrument Bavarian Radio Orchestra was 222 minutes. Meanwhile, Kent Nagano’s 2021 Rheingold with Concerto Köln and the Dresdner Festpielorchester was 215.
Explanation: Interpretations are inevitably personal to the performers, historical authenticity being a surprisingly flexible guard rail. The OAE Rheingold gives a more pronounced radiance to the more extra-worldly moments — the sudden aging of the gods without their eternal-youth apples — creating a counterbalance with the opera’s nastier skullduggery. Such qualities are readily transferable to modern-instrument performance once the conductor knows what to look for. In Nagano’s Dresden Festival project, which has once-a-year Ring installments and continues this year with Siegfried concert performances starting April 1 in Prague, he rethinks the music right down to the hammer blows.
Such revisionism would almost have to be developed in greenhouse circumstances outside the usual concert treadmill, hopefully with musicians who have less to unlearn. Sharper, hairpin transitions and quicksilver volatility was more possible in the more precise orchestra sound heard in 2024’s radio broadcast of Die Walküre from Amsterdam. Though one associates early-music performance with deliberate, pedantic execution, Nagano conjured controlled chaos both in the storm music of the first act and the terror of the Valkyries in the third act. The less imposing orchestra sound yielded less labored vocalism plus far greater articulation of the words and their shades of meaning. Could there be any better point of reference for modern-instrument performances?
What about the staging element? The primitive machinery used to float Rhine Maidens in Wagner is best left unrevived. But a new DVD of Carmen (BruZane BZ3001) recreates original sets, costumes, and stage blocking (such documentation survives from 1875) in a production from Rouen Opera with all sorts of subtle revelations. The picturesque, postcard stage pictures create the illusion of dimension even though the scenery is basically painted flats. The score seems liberated by the lack of the visual challenges in modern regietheater: One realizes how skillfully Bizet sustained audience interest by delaying dramatic resolutions — even small ones like Micaëla accounting for her unexpected appearances in unsympathetic places. Sure, the production reveals the opera’s undisguised 19th-century claptrap, but also with reminders of how much this opera is one miracle after another. Rising star Deepa Johnny is alive to every dramatic nuance in the title role and sings as seamlessly as Régine Crespin.
The clock is turned back only selectively in a new recording of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis (ALPHA1111) by Jérémie Rhorer, who conducted several excellent Mozart opera recordings with his period-instrument group Le Cercle de l’Harmonie. The composer’s near-impossible fast tempo demands — no doubt well beyond the grasp of choruses in Beethoven’s time — are no problem for the Audi Jugendchorakademie in Rhorer’s breathtaking Gloria. Other choral groups might sound like they’re running for their lives. And the artistic rewards of such high-velocity Beethoven? Often called the greatest unperformable masterpiece, Missa solemnis becomes a spiritual event that’s superhuman in every way.
Renaissance polyphony performances, in decades past, often seemed like borderline ambient music, especially with British groups that (thanks to school training) capably sight-read the music when such scores are transcribed into modern notation. In contrast, Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Maria zart — the longest mass of its era — is a layered, detailed experience sung by the Dutch group Cappella Pratensis (Challenge Classics CC72933). Getting inside such works means doing what early 16th-century singers did: clustering around a single part book and reading the music in the original notation. A welcome wildcard involves unwritten accidentals. During performances, an appointed Cappella Pratensis member guides the group into cadences by dictating a half step up or down, with thumb raised or lowered, according to what feels right in the moment. I saw that practice in action when the group sang the Obrecht mass in 2019 at New York’s Music Before 1800 series. Autopilot, obviously, wasn’t possible.
Nor will that be possible in Piffaro’s Mexican polyphony project planned for 2026. The Philadelphia Renaissance wind band joins the larger, ongoing exploration of religious music following the Spanish conquest. Repertoire discovered in Central American cathedrals mixes music imported from Europe with that of local composers that, on Jonatan Alvarado and Ariel Abramovich’s recording The Huehuetenango Songbook: Music from 16th-Century Guatemala (Glossa GCD923542C), includes an “Ave Maria” setting for solo voice and guitar that’s basically a simply sung prayer.
Music for more public celebrations, says Piffaro artistic director Priscilla Herreid, has indigenous composers writing in the Aztec-related Nahuatl language, with music modeled after Josquin but often using their own rhythms. This was not some haphazard, make-do practice in the New World. Contemporary accounts claim the singing was on a level with the great courts of Europe. As the Belgium-born missionary Pedro de Gante wrote to Charles V in 1532: “You would have to see them actually singing in order to believe it possible.” Stay tuned for the time when musicology joins hands with anthropology and archeology.
