The woman in the black suit stands there calmly, only making the most necessary gestures, listening closely to her musicians, driving, leaving room to breathe: This is how Michi Gaigg conducts the L’Orfeo Barockorchester, founded 25 years ago by her and oboist Carin van Heerden, who sits on stage with 24 other musicians and the eighteen master singers of the Salzburg Collegium Vocale. Understatement, craftsperson pride, modesty and agility are Michi Gaigg’s strengths. The audience in the large auditorium of Salzburg University cheered the first three cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio”, which Gaigg clearly presented as a three-act concert opera.
Michi Gaigg comes from the Attersee not far from Salzburg, that is unmistakable on the phone a few days before the concert: a mild woman who speaks to a deep, warm Alto. If she treats her musicians in such an anti-authoritarian manner, then one understands why her free orchestra has stuck together for 25 years: because then making music turns into love. Just like the arias sung by the young alto Alois Mühlbacher in the “Christmas Oratorio” are love poems, addressed to Jesus, but composed with the fervor and eroticism of a lover. The Christian mystics, above all Juan de la Cruz and Teresa von Ávila, practiced it like Bach.
Michi Gaigg conducts as the narrator
Conducting had never been her goal. She learned the violin and attended courses with the radical music innovator Nikolaus Harnoncourt, at a time when he was still making music with a few students: “That was great!” Would it have been easier for her if Harnoncourt had been a woman? At least he, according to the answer, would have had it “a little more difficult” to assert himself with his ideas in the conservative classical music business run by men. Michi Gaigg developed Harnoncourt’s ideas further, so she conducts as a narrator and relies a little more on the ensemble than the master does. Musicians used to be ranks of the maestros, that’s over. At first she conducted with the violin in hand. When she was in her mid-forties, however, she noticed that she was no longer able to cope with the violin or conducting, it was too exhausting, too exhausting. In this way she became a conductor who, due to the lack of many role models, is often more difficult for women than for men, has found a great naturalness and informality in body language and gestures.
Gaigg has just fulfilled a great wish and recorded Franz Schubert’s eight symphonies including the fragments. For them, Schubert is “incredibly visionary”. The album is the climax of the more than 40 recordings of the Orfeo troupe’s discography, which almost exclusively contains secular music. There was often not enough money for the clergy. Orfeo: The name is an adoration of the ancient lyre player and singer, the troupe, like Orpheus, tries to deliver “an infinite number of shades and colors”. Gaigg and her colleagues, who are probably not accidentally sitting in this orchestra founded by two women, have a striking number of women, and have played through the history of music successively from 1600 to the early 19th century. Perhaps that is why with every record you can hear astonishment about what has been made possible by a new composer.
She understands Schubert’s symphonies as “untextured songs”
There is only a year between Schubert’s first and second, while for Gaigg it is aesthetically felt 20 years. The first six symphonies are “untextured songs”. Gaigg has a weakness for songs, for their poetry and linguistic ties. The Viennese, the folk dance, the Austrian folk soul with Schubert are familiar to her. But also the unfinished and the huge C major symphony sound like song, folk dance, Vienna. Again and again, however, something catastrophic knocks the world out of its hinges, Gaigg lets it flash spontaneously, effortlessly.
“We”, says Gaigg, “would like to just play Bach.” That is the “creed of the musicians”. When rehearsing his B minor overture without the solo flute, Gaigg was surprised that this music also works without the upper part; the parallel to Schubert’s untextured symphonic songs is obvious. For Gaigg, the chorales are central to the Christmas Oratorio, they go straight to the heart. Because of the ingeniously placed middle voices: “No one else can do that.” The audience hears that too and cheers. Virgil Hartinger, he sings the evangelists and, unlike the other soloists, does all the choir passages in harmony with Bach, thanks the audience for coming, it was the best Christmas present.