This is Nicholas McGegan's third visit with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Picture / Randi Lynn Beach
This is Nicholas McGegan's third visit with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Picture / Randi Lynn Beach
Tonight, Nicholas McGegan is conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in Haydn's The Creation, and the affable Englishman is surprised when I talk of buying his albums back in the late 1970s.
"It was such fun back then, nearly 40 years ago," he says, recalling the thrill of performing baroqueand classical music in the authentic style of the times.
"London wasn't quite as cutting edge as Amsterdam or Vienna, but playing flute in the first presentation of The Creation on period instruments felt like a premiere. There was a real frisson. I can still remember going to concerts in the 60s and 70s in which all music, from Corelli to Tchaikovsky, was essentially played in the same way."
McGegan is a major force in early music circles, with an extensive CD catalogue. He has recorded 23 of Handel's 40 operas.
This New Zealand tour is McGegan's third visit with the NZSO. "I know so many of the players now," he laughs. "You get to eat with them, have a post-concert drink and then sit at the airport for hours. It's not a shotgun wedding by any means."
On both previous tours, McGegan played Mozart, with his own unique blend of scholarship and imagination. Tonight's Haydn promises more of the same and he will be using a score based on various sets of orchestral parts which Haydn used when he conducted the work 45 times.
"There's extra orchestration - the contrabassoon has a lot more to do. There's also ornamentation marked for the singers and even some metronome marks where the musicians back then noted Haydn's instructions."
The oratorio will be sung in English, and rightly so, McGegan feels. "It should always be done in the language of the audience."
The Creation is one of the great oratorios. Baron van Swieten, who gathered together its text from various sources, including Milton, admired Haydn for his inexhaustible genius. McGegan agrees, pointing out how the cosmopolitan composer incorporated various European styles into his music.
"You can hear how impressed Haydn was with Handel's English oratorios in the sheer weight of the choruses, something the Viennese just didn't have. Yet even though there's a real debt to the spirit of Handel, these choruses are totally Haydn as well, which I love," he says.
The characters of Adam and Eve, sung by Irish tenor Robin Tritschler and our own Madeleine Pierard, go "all Viennese" when they sing their love duet. "It sounds as if she would be wearing a girdle and he would have lederhosen, made of fig leaves, of course," McGegan laughs. "They even do little polkas every so often."
This man has a more than slightly wicked sense of humour - a quality he also admires in Haydn. Describing the composer's treatment of the animals in this Creation story, he singles out the cows which "fart big time". "Haydn writes a big methane note played by the trombone at the bottom of its range," McGegan laughs - which may stir Aucklanders' memories of the "methane emissions" tax proposed here a decade ago.
