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Reminiscences of Christopher Hogwood

Reminiscences of Christopher Hogwood ‘His published writings show an elegantly articulate musical discrimination.’ Christopher Hogwood’s entry in the 1980 New Grove Dictionary was fulsome—and accurate. Still in his 30s, Chris had already authored two major books—and an avalanche of published writings was to follow, for various dictionaries and journals, notably the proceedings of biennial conferences at The International Centre for Clavichord Studies, of which Chris was co-director. As one obituary put it, essays flew off his desk—on Dowland, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Purcell and many others. Chris’s classic book on Handel from 1984 was translated into Czech, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. It is a fine illustration of elegant, articulate and discriminating prose, and above all commands a cultural agenda way beyond music. Chris had a wide-ranging perspective on the past and his active, intelligent mind was always connecting disparate subjects, as his recent and widely propagated Gresham lectures so richly illustrate. He had a particular interest in period cookery and during his time in Boston, the Handel & Haydn Society held a series of period banquets themed around a particular composer and piece. One of the most memorable was a re-creation of the Water Music banquet of 1717. A barge was put together for the head table and Chris was seated next to the mannequin representing George III. That made for good fun, with endless jokes about the royal family… His head was always full of new ideas for projects and he was an expert and reassuring communicator, a kind and generous colleague. The immersion experience weekends in Boston, whether focusing on Mozart, Handel or Vivaldi, would include cooking and flower-arranging classes, talks on architecture, fashion and, of course, music. In that context it comes as no surprise that Chris was writing a history of the picnic, something of which he was obviously proud when he came to the Royal College of Music for his Honorary Doctorate a couple of years ago. He always had some new ‘thing’ he was keen about: modern-day hand-blown Venetian glass, vintage coffee cups, and pairs of mismatched socks. Chris was a game-changing musicologist whose seminal work put him in the vanguard of the early music revolution. His 200-plus recordings with the Academy of Ancient Music proved hugely influential, way beyond the confines of the historical performance movement. His revelatory Messiah in 1980 was hailed for the scholarly thoroughness of its conception and its sheer joyous brilliance of execution. Chris memorably said at the time, ‘I think it is reasonable to say that, if there are 47 or however many Messiah s in the record catalogue, it’s a good idea if just a couple of those actually reflect what Handel wrote or how he might have expected to hear it’. By the following year he was conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where the musicians found him a little strange but where he was hailed as ‘the most stimulating force in years’. Let’s not forget that in 1983 he was the highest-placed conductor in the US Billboard charts and went on to conduct a large-scale Messiah in the Hollywood Bowl during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. View largeDownload slide © Marco Borggreve View largeDownload slide © Marco Borggreve By this time he had completed his hugely influential recordings of the Mozart symphonies, the first set on period instruments. Chris consistently defended his non-interventionist approach, suggesting that the figure of the grand maestro imposing a highly subjective interpretation on a score was itself a creation of a more recent era. Some critics remained resolutely unconvinced and famously a review in this journal preposterously suggested that the AAM Mozart symphonies were not merely ‘underinterpreted’ but uninterpreted. But in reality Chris had given us something really important to reflect upon here. It is indeed revealing that in the ‘commonplace jottings’ reproduced at the end of his 2010 Festschrift, he noted: ‘“The itch of interpretation” (Susan Sontag); try to resist’. Journalists were fond of asking Chris, ‘if Bach were alive today what would he be doing?’ He responded, ‘but of course Bach is alive today; and he is playing the grand piano; he still improvises, of course, and occasionally plays fugues, and he still trains his sons to follow in the same trade. But he’s changed his name to Brubeck.’ Thus began a great series of jazz/Baroque concerts in Boston, with greats such as Dave Brubeck, Keith Jarrett, Modern Jazz Quartet, Josh Redman, Chick Corea and Gary Burton. If anyone embodied the values of early music, it was surely Chris. His fruitful partnership with the label L’Oiseau-Lyre brought for the AAM an early Grand Prix du Disque for the J. C. Bach overtures, and a Brit award for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. As the repertory moved on to Beethoven, Chris continued to listen carefully and generously to his players’ views: ‘I’m for democracy to the point of anarchy’, he once declared. He commanded respect for his sheer virtuosity at the keyboard, demonstrated by such landmark recordings as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Byrd’s My Ladye Nevells Booke and Bach’s French Suites, as well as discs of Arne, C. P. E. Bach, Louis Couperin, Frescobaldi and Gibbons, among others. He had a particular affinity with the clavichord, the instrument historically favoured by composers for its expressive powers and held up by Chris as proof of former generations’ greater esteem for domestic and amateur music-making: these factors culminated in his ‘ Secret ’ series of clavichord recordings with volumes devoted to Bach, Handel and Mozart. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that no fewer than 11 of the 26 keyboard instruments in the 2015 sale of Chris’s instruments were clavichords. In addition to his work in Boston, Chris set the agenda of period principles on modern instruments across repertory from Corelli to Tippett with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota. With the Czech Philharmonic he established himself as a Martinů specialist, reconnecting with Prague where he had been a postgraduate student many years earlier. Besides Martinů, he developed a particular taste for the neo-classical repertory of Casella, Respighi and Stravinsky. In Basel he recorded theatre music by Bizet and Strauss, Barber and Copland, and just one year ago he gave his final concert with the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra. Then there was Covent Garden, La Scala, the Paris Opéra, the Deutsche Oper and the Sydney Opera House. Of all those strands, the Czech dimension was, from his early 20s, a vital and consistent part of his life, a source of inspiration both for him and a broad range of musicians and audiences in Prague and beyond. That postgraduate year was a magical time for Chris, involving intensive harpsichord studies, trips to libraries and the discovery of new friends. Boxes of programmes from that time suggest that he was out at concerts almost every night. As a fine continuo player, Chris found himself in considerable demand, for example in the pioneering ensemble Ars Rediviva. Back home a decade later he was recording Stamitz symphonies with the AAM in 1974 and a further decade after that, the Dvořák serenades with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Chris was a frequent and welcome visitor to Prague and maintained strong links with his friends there, as well as being stalwart in his support for Czechs abroad in difficult times. The Czech composer Leopold Koželuch is represented among Chris’s many editions of major chamber and orchestral works that altogether ranged from Purcell and Vivaldi to Mendelssohn, Brahms and Elgar. Contemporaneous chamber arrangements of Haydn and Mozart became a speciality. He somehow found time to sit on the boards of the Complete Editions of C. P. E. Bach and of Martinů and was general editor of the Geminiani Opera Omnia. The Handel Institute, the Handel House Association and the Gerald Coke Handel Foundation all benefited from his guidance and he was of course a worthy recipient of the Halle Handel Prize in 2008. As one of the Royal Philharmonic Society lectures put it a dozen years ago, ‘There is no worthwhile, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating and musically adventurous performance going on today that has not been touched by the period instrument movement’. Christopher Hogwood was at its core for several decades and his distinctive place in musical history is thus assured. In Harry Haskell’s book The early music revival you will find on page 157 a wonderful photo of the young, long-haired Chris of 40 years ago—brandishing a tambourine in the company of members of the Early Music Consort. Who then could have imagined the depth and breadth of his future achievement? Perhaps those influential Cambridge figures Thurston Dart and Charles Cudworth might have had some inkling even a decade before that photograph, as they witnessed undergraduates Chris and David Munrow turning the Pembroke College orchestra into the Pembaroque and travelling the highways in Chris’s old laundry van, giving lecture recitals. Not so long ago Christopher was asked by some close friends about the qualities he would look for in an academic leader—and his response amounted to an unintentional yet telling self-portrait. He would expect a leader to demonstrate the kind of intelligence so high that it could mask itself in the process of reaching democratic conclusions; someone who could chair a meeting effectively because all preparatory thinking and reasoning had been anticipated; with a temperament that didn’t need to be confrontational; with a previous career of varied experience both academic and in the world of business/government, with international elements; someone who could enjoy and make opportunity without pressing status… This then was a life well lived. Many of us here today will cherish that characteristic sign-off of letters and emails—‘sempre Chris’. Yes, Chris, we will always remember you—with affection, admiration and delight. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Early Music Oxford University Press

Reminiscences of Christopher Hogwood

Lawson, Colin
Early Music , Volume 44 (1) – Feb 1, 2016
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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
ISSN
0306-1078
eISSN
1741-7260
DOI
10.1093/em/cav107
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Abstract

‘His published writings show an elegantly articulate musical discrimination.’ Christopher Hogwood’s entry in the 1980 New Grove Dictionary was fulsome—and accurate. Still in his 30s, Chris had already authored two major books—and an avalanche of published writings was to follow, for various dictionaries and journals, notably the proceedings of biennial conferences at The International Centre for Clavichord Studies, of which Chris was co-director. As one obituary put it, essays flew off his desk—on Dowland, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Purcell and many others. Chris’s classic book on Handel from 1984 was translated into Czech, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. It is a fine illustration of elegant, articulate and discriminating prose, and above all commands a cultural agenda way beyond music. Chris had a wide-ranging perspective on the past and his active, intelligent mind was always connecting disparate subjects, as his recent and widely propagated Gresham lectures so richly illustrate. He had a particular interest in period cookery and during his time in Boston, the Handel & Haydn Society held a series of period banquets themed around a particular composer and piece. One of the most memorable was a re-creation of the Water Music banquet of 1717. A barge was put together for the head table and Chris was seated next to the mannequin representing George III. That made for good fun, with endless jokes about the royal family… His head was always full of new ideas for projects and he was an expert and reassuring communicator, a kind and generous colleague. The immersion experience weekends in Boston, whether focusing on Mozart, Handel or Vivaldi, would include cooking and flower-arranging classes, talks on architecture, fashion and, of course, music. In that context it comes as no surprise that Chris was writing a history of the picnic, something of which he was obviously proud when he came to the Royal College of Music for his Honorary Doctorate a couple of years ago. He always had some new ‘thing’ he was keen about: modern-day hand-blown Venetian glass, vintage coffee cups, and pairs of mismatched socks. Chris was a game-changing musicologist whose seminal work put him in the vanguard of the early music revolution. His 200-plus recordings with the Academy of Ancient Music proved hugely influential, way beyond the confines of the historical performance movement. His revelatory Messiah in 1980 was hailed for the scholarly thoroughness of its conception and its sheer joyous brilliance of execution. Chris memorably said at the time, ‘I think it is reasonable to say that, if there are 47 or however many Messiah s in the record catalogue, it’s a good idea if just a couple of those actually reflect what Handel wrote or how he might have expected to hear it’. By the following year he was conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where the musicians found him a little strange but where he was hailed as ‘the most stimulating force in years’. Let’s not forget that in 1983 he was the highest-placed conductor in the US Billboard charts and went on to conduct a large-scale Messiah in the Hollywood Bowl during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. View largeDownload slide © Marco Borggreve View largeDownload slide © Marco Borggreve By this time he had completed his hugely influential recordings of the Mozart symphonies, the first set on period instruments. Chris consistently defended his non-interventionist approach, suggesting that the figure of the grand maestro imposing a highly subjective interpretation on a score was itself a creation of a more recent era. Some critics remained resolutely unconvinced and famously a review in this journal preposterously suggested that the AAM Mozart symphonies were not merely ‘underinterpreted’ but uninterpreted. But in reality Chris had given us something really important to reflect upon here. It is indeed revealing that in the ‘commonplace jottings’ reproduced at the end of his 2010 Festschrift, he noted: ‘“The itch of interpretation” (Susan Sontag); try to resist’. Journalists were fond of asking Chris, ‘if Bach were alive today what would he be doing?’ He responded, ‘but of course Bach is alive today; and he is playing the grand piano; he still improvises, of course, and occasionally plays fugues, and he still trains his sons to follow in the same trade. But he’s changed his name to Brubeck.’ Thus began a great series of jazz/Baroque concerts in Boston, with greats such as Dave Brubeck, Keith Jarrett, Modern Jazz Quartet, Josh Redman, Chick Corea and Gary Burton. If anyone embodied the values of early music, it was surely Chris. His fruitful partnership with the label L’Oiseau-Lyre brought for the AAM an early Grand Prix du Disque for the J. C. Bach overtures, and a Brit award for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. As the repertory moved on to Beethoven, Chris continued to listen carefully and generously to his players’ views: ‘I’m for democracy to the point of anarchy’, he once declared. He commanded respect for his sheer virtuosity at the keyboard, demonstrated by such landmark recordings as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Byrd’s My Ladye Nevells Booke and Bach’s French Suites, as well as discs of Arne, C. P. E. Bach, Louis Couperin, Frescobaldi and Gibbons, among others. He had a particular affinity with the clavichord, the instrument historically favoured by composers for its expressive powers and held up by Chris as proof of former generations’ greater esteem for domestic and amateur music-making: these factors culminated in his ‘ Secret ’ series of clavichord recordings with volumes devoted to Bach, Handel and Mozart. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that no fewer than 11 of the 26 keyboard instruments in the 2015 sale of Chris’s instruments were clavichords. In addition to his work in Boston, Chris set the agenda of period principles on modern instruments across repertory from Corelli to Tippett with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota. With the Czech Philharmonic he established himself as a Martinů specialist, reconnecting with Prague where he had been a postgraduate student many years earlier. Besides Martinů, he developed a particular taste for the neo-classical repertory of Casella, Respighi and Stravinsky. In Basel he recorded theatre music by Bizet and Strauss, Barber and Copland, and just one year ago he gave his final concert with the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra. Then there was Covent Garden, La Scala, the Paris Opéra, the Deutsche Oper and the Sydney Opera House. Of all those strands, the Czech dimension was, from his early 20s, a vital and consistent part of his life, a source of inspiration both for him and a broad range of musicians and audiences in Prague and beyond. That postgraduate year was a magical time for Chris, involving intensive harpsichord studies, trips to libraries and the discovery of new friends. Boxes of programmes from that time suggest that he was out at concerts almost every night. As a fine continuo player, Chris found himself in considerable demand, for example in the pioneering ensemble Ars Rediviva. Back home a decade later he was recording Stamitz symphonies with the AAM in 1974 and a further decade after that, the Dvořák serenades with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Chris was a frequent and welcome visitor to Prague and maintained strong links with his friends there, as well as being stalwart in his support for Czechs abroad in difficult times. The Czech composer Leopold Koželuch is represented among Chris’s many editions of major chamber and orchestral works that altogether ranged from Purcell and Vivaldi to Mendelssohn, Brahms and Elgar. Contemporaneous chamber arrangements of Haydn and Mozart became a speciality. He somehow found time to sit on the boards of the Complete Editions of C. P. E. Bach and of Martinů and was general editor of the Geminiani Opera Omnia. The Handel Institute, the Handel House Association and the Gerald Coke Handel Foundation all benefited from his guidance and he was of course a worthy recipient of the Halle Handel Prize in 2008. As one of the Royal Philharmonic Society lectures put it a dozen years ago, ‘There is no worthwhile, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating and musically adventurous performance going on today that has not been touched by the period instrument movement’. Christopher Hogwood was at its core for several decades and his distinctive place in musical history is thus assured. In Harry Haskell’s book The early music revival you will find on page 157 a wonderful photo of the young, long-haired Chris of 40 years ago—brandishing a tambourine in the company of members of the Early Music Consort. Who then could have imagined the depth and breadth of his future achievement? Perhaps those influential Cambridge figures Thurston Dart and Charles Cudworth might have had some inkling even a decade before that photograph, as they witnessed undergraduates Chris and David Munrow turning the Pembroke College orchestra into the Pembaroque and travelling the highways in Chris’s old laundry van, giving lecture recitals. Not so long ago Christopher was asked by some close friends about the qualities he would look for in an academic leader—and his response amounted to an unintentional yet telling self-portrait. He would expect a leader to demonstrate the kind of intelligence so high that it could mask itself in the process of reaching democratic conclusions; someone who could chair a meeting effectively because all preparatory thinking and reasoning had been anticipated; with a temperament that didn’t need to be confrontational; with a previous career of varied experience both academic and in the world of business/government, with international elements; someone who could enjoy and make opportunity without pressing status… This then was a life well lived. Many of us here today will cherish that characteristic sign-off of letters and emails—‘sempre Chris’. Yes, Chris, we will always remember you—with affection, admiration and delight. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

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Early Music – Oxford University Press

Published: Feb 1, 2016

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