| Musica september 2005 |
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"Ottavio Dantone, philologist to just the right degree" I was permanent harpsichordist at the Angelicum which, at that time was one of the few places where baroque music was practised. (...) It was a place and time of great discovery which provided me with the opportunity to play a lot of basso continuo. You see, what most characterises my formation and distinguishes me from my fellow musicians is basically the fact that I never went abroad, because Italy gave me what I was looking for. The years I studied with Emilia Fadini, for example, were immensely gratifying for me, for this reason I didn’t feel the need to go abroad. Afterwards, too, when I went on to perfect my studies under important maestros, I never really found the same meticulousness, the same preciseness in the teaching, or level of theory as I did with Fadini. She was the one who opened my eyes, for example, to the relation between music and rhetoric. At the beginning of the interview you said you never felt the need to go abroad to study. Does that mean then that there is a particularly Italian line of interpretation and that Accademia Bizantina today is to some extent represents it ? I do think there is an Italian school of thought as far as Italian baroque composers are concerned. There does exist a concept of performance based on the idea of “letting the music speak” through the relationship between music and rhetoric , theory of affections … and this for Italian music represents a style. The way of articulating and emphasising some musical situations are aspects that an Italian grasps from the dialectic within the music. Every time you ask yourself about the meaning of a particular figure of speech , what the composer intended or what image he had in mind when writing his music …and you try to respond to the questions with an Italian sensitivity, and, therefore, in Italian terms , this undoubtedly puts a strong Italian slant on your reading and your approach to the score. (...) There is, therefore, an Italian code of interpretation, and you need to know what it consists of. In my view it may be defined as a contextualized emotionality which is not a figment of the imagination or of modern folly but refers to the era of the musical piece. Only when you are in the right expressive and emotional context, can “contemporary life” be brought into play. The aim of my interpretation is to arouse emotions through the resources of baroque music itself, because I’m sure that these resources are not only the most effective but are also still valid nowadays. The success of today’s ensembles using period instruments is due to the fact that only with these instruments, these strings, these bows, does the music’s emotive potentiality really become comprehensible ….also to today’s audiences. What is your approach to the diminutions and embellishments? Do you improvise or work them out before-hand? I think there are three different levels of improvisation. The first are the little improvisations which I leave to the inventiveness of the first or basso continuo parts or whoever may have something to add, as long as the music requires it. Then there are the great improvised embellishments, which are real passages composed of such intrinsic nature. The third level is that of the great written improvisations. These three levels were all equally foreseen by the music of those days, and so they should all be used in accordance with the composer, at times concommittently, and at others, as in certain extremely simple Adagios by Corelli or Vivaldi, I see nothing wrong in writing all the improvisations. (...) I have to say that I have the great fortune to work with musicians like Montanari who willingly accept my diminutions, to such an extent that in Opus V by Corelli I wrote them all: I thoroughly enjoyed creating twenty-four Adagios, all different from one another, experimenting all kinds of technical variations. I presume that musicians like Montanari provide many suggestions to this regard. Of course I’m not a violinist, and he is, so many suggestions (on position, bow, etc) come directly from him. He is so talented that he never refuses the challenge of playing passages that are not strictly for the violin. Of course when I realise this, I ask him to adapt them to his instrument in such a way that I have something to learn too. When I write diminutions, however, my principle goal is a question of taste, obviously not my own but that of the period, drawing from my experience as a player and conductor, as well as from my knowledge of vocal techniques. I undoubtedly put in something of myself, just as players or singers did in the seventeenth and eighteen the centuries when they improvised; today, however, we must be very careful that the personality of the conductor doesn’t make the story appear anachronistic or decontextualized. What is your relation with the philology of music? I don’t feel I am a philologist in the strict sense. In my opinion philology does not mean using, per force, that particular instrument, formation , diapason just because they were used in that period. What is important to me is to recreate the elements necessary to enjoy the music: which does not exclude modern contribution as long as it does not misrepresent the essence of the music. What I mean is that what really counts is to understand the sense of the music itself, that is to grasp the function of the figures of speech within the music and its structure and so on, after which period instruments are not really a must …they are rather a better way to express such a universe of meaning. Fabio Sartorelli |