Laurence Dreyfus
Laurence Dreyfus, PhD (Columbia), Diplôme Supérieur (Brussels), Hon RAM, FBA, D.Litt (Oxon)
Laurence Dreyfus, University Lecturer and Fellow of Magdalen College, was born in Boston, Mass. (USA), and is a noted interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach, both as a scholar and performer. His other interests include English consort music of the 16th and 17th centuries and the works of Richard Wagner. As an historian and analyst, Dreyfus has published Bach's Continuo Group as well as Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Harvard University Press, 1987 and 1996), the latter of which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best book of the year. As a bass viol player, he has recorded CDs of Bach's viola da gamba sonatas of Marais' Pièces de violes and Rameau's Pièces de clavecin en concert (all with Ketil Haugsand on the Simax label).
In 1994, Dreyfus founded Phantasm, a quartet of viols, whose debut recording of Purcell's Viol Fantasies won a 1997 Gramophone Award. Seven further Phantasm CDs (on Simax, EMI, GMN, and Channel Classics) were devoted to works by Byrd, Mico, Locke, and Lawes, alongside a rendition of Bach's Art of Fugue. Phantasm's disc of Orlando Gibbons's Consorts (AVIE) won the 2004 Gramophone Award and was a finalist for Record of the Year. Their CD from 2005 is called Four Temperaments, with Elizabethan music by Byrd, Ferrabosco, Parsons and Tallis was nominated for awards by Gramophone and the BBC Music Magazine. Most recently, Phantasm issued Jenkins Consorts in Six Parts (AVIE).
Dreyfus holds a PhD in musicology from Columbia University in New York, where he studied under noted Bach scholar Christoph Wolff. He studied cello at the Juilliard School in New York with Leonard Rose, and viol at the Royal Conservatoire with Wieland Kuijken at Brussels, which awarded him its Diplome supérieur with highest distinction. Dreyfus taught at Yale, Chicago and Stanford universities moving to London where he held a Chair at the Royal Academy of Music and King's College London as the Thurston Dart Professor of Performance Studies. He was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1995 and (for his musicological work) a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. In 2004, he was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, and delivered a series of public lectures on ‘Wagner and the Erotic Impulse', which will be published in book form by Harvard University Press. In conjunction with Dreyfus's move to Oxford, Phantasm was named Consort-in-Residence in the University.
At Oxford he lectures on Bach, Wagner, and Chamber Music and offers performance classes for the MPhil in Musicology and Performance. He is interested in supervising students in a wide variety of subjects, from English consort music through to studies in late-19th-century German music.
Beyond Guilt and Shame: Historical Performance as Contemporary Experience
Laurence Dreyfus (University of Oxford)
Placing the authority for musical interpretation in the hands of a scholarly discipline – a phenomenon which has failed to take root in theatre or ballet, for example, and which has had only limited success in the case of opera – brought with it benefits that could not have been dreamt of even half a century before. Not least among them was a liberation from the very sloppiness of musical traditions and their authority. Musicians of many different stripes were spurred into an Oedipal revolt against their authoritarian fathers and used the opportunity to engage in fresh inquiry and bold experimentation. Indeed, the achievements of the historical performance movement have been so well-advertised as to have become one of the dominant ideologies of the performance of classical music by end of the twentieth century. At the same time it's fair to say that the desire to be ‘historically informed' on the part of early-music performers has incurred widespread feelings of guilt and shame to the extent that we often feel guilty for not being even more ‘true' to the past, ashamed of our compromises and sometimes for our ‘false advertising'.
Yet there are crucial differences between music historians and performing musicians. More often than not these differences are passed over in the attractive fantasy of a mutual aid society between scholars and performers that rarely stands up to close inspection. Whereas an historian needs evidence to back up historical assertions, performances are never successful on the basis of historical evidence. Historians too can never collect too much textual evidence or too much documentary detail. In musical performances, for example, there is a danger that relatively trivial musical details are elevated to a position of aesthetic significance because they happen to be susceptible to reconstructive methods.
In my own approach to performance, I've struggled since the early 1980s to work within the trajectory of ‘historically informed performance at the same time that I keep some distance from the idea that we are servants of music historians, who – wearing another hat – I honour when I come to write about – rather than play – music. In this keynote talk, I reflect on how I've come to deal with issues of ‘pastness' and the present emotional moment via an interest in the metaphor of music as ‘lived experience'. By ‘lived experience' I hope to capture what all good musicians are actually doing irrespective of their ideologies and socially mediated practices, namely, communing with music from the past in an attempt to grasp human perceptions, thoughts, and emotions in ever new forms. The independence of lines in 3-part consort music is an ideal place, I'll propose, to discover the sense behind musical gestures as well as an idealized locus of contemporary community and communication.
Matti Raekallio
Matti Raekallio has established a dual career: he is both a pianist with a large repertoire and a committed teacher, now based at the Juilliard School in New York. Mr. Raekallio was born 1954 in Helsinki, Finland. He studied in his home country as well as in London with Maria Diamond Curcio, in Vienna at the Academy of Music with Dieter Weber, and finally in Russia at the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Conservatory.
Mr. Raekallio played his American debut concert in 1981 at the Carnegie (Weill) Recital Hall. Since then, he has made regular tours of the U.S.A., including solo recitals and performances with several American symphony orchestras. He has performed complete cycles of the 32 Beethoven Sonatas, the 10 Scriabin Sonatas, and the 9 Prokofiev Sonatas, as well as altogether 62 piano concertos. These include all of Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, as well as more rarely played works like the concerti by Busoni, Szymanowski and Lutoslawski. He has made about 20 CDs, including an acclaimed set of the complete Prokofiev Sonatas for Ondine Records.
In 2007 Mr. Raekallio joined the faculty of the Juilliard School in New York. From 2012, Mr. Raekallio teaches also at the Bard College in NY. From 2005 to 2010 he shuttled between USA and Europe, where he held a full professorship since 2005 at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hannover, Germany. Before these positions, since 1998, he was full professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he had started teaching in 1978. In addition, he has held professorships at the Swedish Royal College of Music in Stockholm and at Western Michigan University, USA. Mr. Raekallio's students include several top prizewinners in international piano competitions, among them the First Prize laureates in Leeds, AXA Dublin, London, Vienna (Beethoven), Isang Yun (Korea), New York (Artists International), and Budapest (Liszt-Bartók). He has been a juror in several international competitions, including Tel Aviv (Artur Rubinstein), Geneva, Helsinki, Shanghai, Vienna (Beethoven), American Pianists' Association, The Gilmore Prize, Tokyo (PTNA) and many others. He gives regular master classes in his home country as well as in the USA, Israel, China, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Austria, Sweden, and Denmark.
Mr. Raekallio's Doctorate (Dr.Mus) at the Sibelius Academy focused of the History of Piano Fingering. Subsequently, Prof. Raekallio became a member of an international research team, investigating pianists' choice of fingering from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology. Mr. Raekallio received the Leonie Sonning Foundation Grant (Denmark) in1980, and was recipient of the 5-year Artist Grant of the state of Finland three times altogether. He served for three years, 1998-2000, as a member of the Finnish Academy's Council for Research of Culture and Society. In 2009 he was named Honorary Doctor of the Estonian Academy of Music.
Germanic Aspects on Sonata Forms
Matti Raekallio
My keynote address of today is a performance combining music and speech. The main objective is to provide a miniature case study of performing two very different sonata forms, one of the central organizing principles in Western classical music. While doing that, I also look back at, and sideways from, my work as a pianist. The viewpoint emphasizes both intro- and retrospection.
Sonatas of various kinds have always been important objects of my concert performances and also of my pedagogical work. The cycle of the entire Beethoven Sonatas was central to my DMus examination at the Sibelius Academy at a certain point in the previous millennium. My concert repertoire in the 1990's has also included the complete cycles of piano sonatas of Scriabin and Prokofiev. On the other hand: speaking, besides playing and sometimes instead of it, and remarkably often also nonsensical speaking, has been for decades an essential tool in my daily work as professor of piano. However, the juxtaposition of precisely these two works serves also as an illustration of the less typical possibilities of both the specific musical form and oral communication in general. The special cases, the aberrations, often best elucidate the norm.
The structure that is commonly but not unproblematically called ‘sonata form' has been a mainstay of the last three hundred years of large-scale compositions in Europe and later also elsewhere. It has been especially important in Germanic countries, and even the 19th century musicologists who first defined the principle, as we now know it, were German. Adolf Bernhard Marx is reputed to have premiered the fateful coinage of the two words, the term ‘Sonata Form', in 1845.
The musicians in the audience are completely familiar with the sonata concept; for the others suffice it to say that what is currently referred to as ‘sonata form' is essentially an organization that is based on conflict and its resolution. The tension may focus on harmonic or thematic contrasts, or both, or neither. The opposing elements simultaneously necessitate and complement each other, forming a dynamic entity very much like the yin and yang of Chinese philosophy. However, as the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters demonstrates, the material that is elaborated according to the tradition of the sonata form does not have to be conventionally musical to yield recognizably sonata-esque results.
Beethoven's Op.109 is an exceptional work, as are all of his late piano sonatas. The composer turns certain conventions upside down, for instance in the first movement: there the first theme provides a light and lyrical statement, opposed by the heavily rhetorical and strong second subject – which is exactly the opposite of what is "officially" supposed to happen in a first-movement of a sonata. Furthermore, the angular dualism of the first movement is repeated quasi fractally in the structure of the entire work. The organization is almost like a Russian matrjoshka doll: inside the Manichean dichotomy of the complete work, with the first two movements opposed to each other, and with the two together contradicting the third, there are further two-part structures, each of which contains smaller nested dualities, always with a tension between the two parts. As in many other late works by Beethoven, there is a maniacal heightening of the dualist principle, no matter which level of the organization one looks at. It is a remarkable paradox that despite this huge structural tension and its local eruptions, the overriding expression of the sonata is serene and, in the end, transcendentally calm.
Kurt Schwitters was a German artist, born in Hanover. He was a multitalent who is perhaps best known for his Dada-and surrealism- influenced works in various genres. His "Ursonate" took decades to reach its final from. Schwitters started working on it in 1922, and finished it at some point in the 1940's. The name means "Original Sonata" or "Primeval Sonata". It is a massive work in four movements, designed according to the sonata tradition: Introduction and First movement, Second movement (Largo), Third Movement (Scherzo-Trio-Scherzo da capo), and Finale (Presto-Cadenza-Coda). Interestingly enough, despite the obvious avant-gardism, a few of the compositional procedures that Schwitters uses in the elaboration of his material can be traced back to some of musical classicism's favorite tools ("Verkürzung", ‘Developing variation', etc.)
This performance is also, at least in part, a characteristic example of my work as a pianist. The idea of the sonata, in whatever guises it may appear and when understood above all as a conflict-driven entity, has continued to interest me since the beginnings of my musical work. The drama, the dynamism, the power, and the passion of the organizational principle what we call a sonata remains fascinating to me, no matter how many times the tensions get built and resolved, and whatever they may be about.
Laurence Dreyfus, University Lecturer and Fellow of Magdalen College, was born in Boston, Mass. (USA), and is a noted interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach, both as a scholar and performer. His other interests include English consort music of the 16th and 17th centuries and the works of Richard Wagner. As an historian and analyst, Dreyfus has published Bach's Continuo Group as well as Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Harvard University Press, 1987 and 1996), the latter of which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society for the best book of the year. As a bass viol player, he has recorded CDs of Bach's viola da gamba sonatas of Marais' Pièces de violes and Rameau's Pièces de clavecin en concert (all with Ketil Haugsand on the Simax label).
Matti Raekallio has established a dual career: he is both a pianist with a large repertoire and a committed teacher, now based at the Juilliard School in New York.