"There are no rules, the fantastic style -- where the fantasy is in control," violinst Andrew Manze explained during his performance in Rollins Chapel Friday night.
Manze, along with harpsichordist Richard Egarr, played a collection of Italian baroque sonatas for a curious sold-out crowd.
The repertoire demanded spontaneous creativity and improvisation -- qualities that most classical musicians lack.
The rudimentary notation of the 17th and 18th century publishers invites the performer to embellish and improvise freely. The violin sonatas -- ideally performed with three players -- only have two lines of fixed notation: the top line for the violinist, and the bottom line for the continuo players.
"This music needs a lot of improvisation," Manze said. "They didn't bother printing very much."
Egarr's line, for example, represented five percent of the music he played. Every printed note implied a whole chord, to be executed as the player wished.
In the Pandolfi "Sonata la Castella," for instance, Egarr began the ground bass in a stately tempo, but moved from one note to the next with intricate turns and runs. Both players brought new ideas into the musical dialogue and added flourishes, sequences, quiet slurred passages, broad chords and countless stepwise elaborations. They delivered a large dose of fantasy with the sparse notation.
Baroque performances rely heavily on historical accuracy. Manze played without a chin rest or shoulder rest, comforts designed for modern string players.
He explained the physiology of his instrument and bow in great detail -- his bow is a copy of an original baroque one and is very good for short, pithy strokes. It allowed him to play with extreme agility and a lighter sound than most listeners are accustomed to hearing from the violin.
Manze's left hand technique, however, puzzled me. During the Corelli "Sonata 'da camera,'" he remained exclusively in the first position, a standard baroque practice.
But in the Uccellini, he could not keep himself from shifting around wildly, playing with a quite romantic and emotional timbre. He took longer bow strokes, played with more vibrato and included some truly gutsy double stops.
The duo challenged the general conception of baroque music over and over again. During the Pandolfi "Sonata la Cesta," creative inspiration took center stage, as wild and bizarre virtuosity dominated their performance. The improvised passages possessed an icy, foreign quality that shocked the uninitiated listener. Chromatic slips and slides penetrated the avalanche of sound and unpredictable modulation in the harpsichord occasionally intertwined with the melody. The frantic display of virtuosity included instantaneous decisions on dynamics, texture, color, line and even pitch.
"If you thought we were playing out of tune, it was on purpose," Egarr said. The tuning system they used is an adaptation of the French baroque "ordinaire" temperament. Composers of the "Stylus Phantasticus" used the tuning system to create tasteful chords, most notablythe key of F sharp minor, the "goat" key which bleats at you.
Contemporary performers no longer benefit from hierarchical key relationships. "The big black object" Egarr said, referring to the grand piano, "is tuned in a communist manner."
Today, keyboard instruments are tuned within equal temperament, making the various keys bland and homogenous.
The exploratory tone of the evening made Friday's performance more of an educational event than a concert, though it was quite acceptable to include moments of tremendous virtuosity in that context.
Manze and Egarr spread enthusiasm for baroque music by their inspirational performances rather than by lecturing.
