Stalking Veracini

I have been utterly obsessed with Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768) for nearly a decade. Since I first encountered his music in 2007, I haven't been able to stop thinking about him, playing his sonatas, and even -- at least for a brief period in 2012 -- trying to be him. (At the RAM, they encourage students to give themed concerts as final projects, and for mine I attempted to reconstruct his violinistic battle against Johann Georg Pisendel, another 18th-century fiddler whose name will be familiar to readers of this blog.) I've always been attracted to his fearlessly virtuosic writing: the formal ingenuity, the wild chromaticism, the painfully long upbow slurs, and, most of all, the really deep, dark emotions that his sonatas explore.

At the height of my obsession, Veracini played a huge part in my musical life: his sonatas featured in most of the recitals I gave between 2007 and 2010; the first sonata I performed at the RAM in 2010 was by Veracini, as was the last, in my 2012 final project. I commissioned and now play on a reconstruction-copy of one of his bows. When I moved to Boston, I got to know the cellists and harpsichordists in town by reading through Veracini with them, and seeing who could make the continuo wild and crazy enough.

I thought my relationship with Veracini couldn't get any deeper, but life has given me the opportunity to change that. I'm spending much of this autumn in Florence, which means I can now follow Veracini around in his own hometown. I've visited the church where he was (probably) baptised in 1690, as well as the two churches where he served as music director after his musical bridge-burning stints in Dresden and London. (Having discovered that Florence is really quite a small town, I now understand how it is that he could hold down two church jobs simultaneously: it only takes about 5 minutes to walk from one building to the other. Even allowing for his lifelong limp [he injured himself jumping out of an upper-story window in Dresden], it wouldn't have been hard for him to finish one service and then head around the corner to the next!)

Walking the roads that he walked, and standing in the buildings where he played, has prompted me to face a question I usually manage to avoid: is seeing his neighbourhood supposed to change the way I play his music? For most of my life, I've been an avowed follower of New Criticism, which holds that the work of art is autonomous, and the artist's biography basically irrelevant. If the music is good, we don't need to import biographical details to understand it better -- and if we do need to supplement a work of art with such 'external' details, the art probably isn't worth our time in the first place. This has never been a problem for me: first, because my favourite composers (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) are all first-rate crafstmen, and, second, because I happen to be fascinated with structures, forms, meaning, and analysis, and other considerations 'inside' the art.

Veracini may be the one composer I really love for whom this kind of thinking falls short. Elisabeth LeGuin, in Boccherini's Body, makes an excellent case that some composers' music simply can't be separated from the physical act of performing, and this is surely true of Veracini: there's something about his music that demands a physical, and thus highly personal, interpretation. There are moments, for example, when he writes incredibly long slurs, always on upbows, and it seems clear that he must have had some very unique physical trick he did to turn those bowstrokes into a performance feature of their own. Elsewhere, he begins one of his early sonatas with the violin alone (without accompaniment) playing a single long note, marked 'molto cantabile'. It's normal to think of a melody as being played cantabile, but a single note? In both cases, I feel compelled to imagine him as a physical entity -- the way he moved while he played, or the extraordinary finesse of his bow technique -- and challenge myself to play the way I think he did.

(Eyewitness accounts, by the way, do suggest that his bow technique, and the resulting sound, was something special. Tartini claimed that seeing Veracini perform prompted him to move to the countryside and spend a few years reworking his bow arm from scratch; later on, in London, Charles Burney commented that when Veracini was playing in an orchestra, his clear and uniquely penetrating tone would be audible no matter how large the violin section. No wonder he was unpopular with his colleagues...)

Virginia Woolf (cf. her discussion of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters in A Room of One's Own) would probably point out that these glimpses into Veracini 'himself' are structural and technical flaws in his music. After all, the very definition of good technique -- the ability to recognise and serve the 'needs' of the composition's inner-workings -- implicitly excludes all things personal. I agree wholeheartedly. Still, it may be those very moments of 'weakness', where I seem to catch a glimpse of Veracini within a sonata, that keep me coming back to his music.

I'll be doing a series of recitals featuring Veracini's music (and works of his contemporaries and teachers) this season, so some videos will follow. For now, though, here are some photos from the Florentine churches he was associated with.

San Salvatore di Ognissanti: if Veracini was baptised, it probably happened here in 1690:

San Gaetano: Veracini held a post as music director here when he returned to Florence after living in Dresden and London:

And, the baroque interior of San Gaetano. I assume that he would have performed from the organ loft:

And, finally, San Pancrazio. This church was deconsecrated and turned into a museum of modern sculpture. A tiny chapel remains, but I can't imagine that any music went on there.
The sculptures, and what (presumably) used to be the main church:

The chapel, with a sepulchre designed by L. B. Alberti (!)

Diary of a Recording: Telemann Violin Sonatas

Although my previous post here is clearly marked 23 July 2015, I still have a hard time believing that 13 months have passed since I last added to this journal. Now -- with September and a new season in view -- seems a good time to begin again.

To ease in, I'll start by posting a few photos and thoughts from my Telemann recording in mid June. My colleague Paul Cienniwa and I spent two days at WGBH in Boston recording seven early Telemann violin sonatas -- six from his brilliant Frankfurt collection, and one from the Dresden archives that will be a premiere recording. (Who knew there was still unrecorded Telemann out there?)

Although I've participated in other recording projects as part of orchestras and small ensembles, I've never done a solo project like this, so I've never had quite this level of artistic control. Needless to say, I'm still feeling my way through the process. There are so many trade-offs -- for instance, when the perfect takes feel a bit lifeless, but the exciting ones are all ragged. The number of possibilities, too, is numbingly vast. (I left the studio with 300+ takes of a mere 28 movements, and spent about two weeks weeding through them.)  I surely knew, intellectually, at least, how artificial the recording process is, but none of my anti-recording philosophising prepared me for the experience of conjuring, take by take, a completely 'fake' interpretation: one in which I know I played every note, but which never, ever, sounded quite that way before, either in reality or in my imagination. And, with so much material, so much of it useable, I could have decided on any number of different final products. For some movements, I constructed four or five take-maps, all viable, and each with its own strengths. At best, it destabilizes the whole notion of the recording as document of an interpretation, and replaces it with that of recording as unconscious inventor of an interpretation.

There's an interesting contrast here with what various philosophers, most ably Taruskin in Text and Act, have said about live performances, recordings, and interpretations. Taruskin looks at a composer-performer like Stravinsky, whose many repeated recordings of his own works are so bewilderingly different, and so often diverge from performance instructions in the score, to argue that there is no such thing as a single 'Interpretation' of a piece of music, even (I say: especially?) by the work's composer. He begins from the 'evidence' of divergent recordings, and extrapolates to include live-performed interpretations on his list of nonexistent things. My experience suggests the opposite trajectory: for me as a performing musician/human, there is never a single interpretation of these works -- but in doing the recording and putting all the 'good' takes together and discarding the 'bad' I've had the rather disconcerting experience of watching an interpretation come to life, seemingly on its own, simply by piggy-backing on the good takes. On 17 June, there was no 'Interpretation'; now there is.

Ironically, and despite having watched the interpretation take shape, I still don't know quite what it will sound like, since I haven't yet heard what magic the engineer will work with my take-maps, but I should find out any day. And, in the meantime, I'm still savouring the memory of these sonatas as live performances. I have a long-abiding love-hate relationship with adrenaline -- but, listening through my 300 takes, meditating on the vicissitudes of excitement, technical 'perfection' and musical sterility, I've never missed the concert stage more.

***

Although Paul and I were too distracted to make a video in the studio, we did get some photos.

Setting up beforehand:

Action shot (look closely!):

Taking a break, touching up the tuning:

And, as we played our last note, my E string snapped:

Birth of an 'interpretation':

Relics from a recital a week before the recording sessions. Having done these pieces in the studio, I almost don't remember what it was like to play them on stage.

Sonata II in D major:

Sonata V in A minor (don't miss the last movement!):