In Munich he is a welcome but not very frequent guest. Belgian-Flemish conductor Philippe Herreweghe belongs to the important figures of the original sound movement. With his Collegium Vocale Gent, founded in 1970, he attracted the attention of older colleagues Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt; especially with Bach cantatas and Renaissance music. With the Chapelle Royale, founded in 1977, he dedicated himself to French baroque music. In the meantime, however, he has expanded his repertoire to include Haydn, Mozart, Bruckner and Mahler. Their works cannot always be realized with original sound ensembles. Herreweghe is quite flexible in this regard. The only thing he wouldn’t play with a modern orchestra was Bach, he says in the preliminary talk for his Munich concert, at which he performed Wolfgang Amadé Mozart’s “Prague Symphony” and his “Requiem” with the Munich Philharmonic and its choir in the Isarphilharmonie.
Last year he made an exception: at the memorial concert for the destruction of Dresden on February 12, 2021, he conducted the Staatskapelle Dresden with a sinfonia, choirs and solos from various Bach cantatas. He didn’t transform the Staatskapelle into an original sound ensemble, but he encouraged the instrumentalists and even more so the choir and the soloists to at least begin to sound authentic phrasing and sound design. The oboe sounded a little less sharp, the violins less bombastic, the bass less flat, rhythmically profiled. Nevertheless, it is of course an audibly modern, large-scale symphony orchestra with a sound pattern similar to that which was now offered in the Munich Isar Philharmonic. However, it already became clear in the opening Prague symphony that Herreweghe had something completely different in mind than the superficial effect, the intoxicating grand sound.
That would be in the Isar Philharmonic Hall also problematic. The choir, especially the male voices, often sound distorted in the forte. This hall cannot handle a lot of volume. But Herreweghe is also not a man of loud tones, rather an artist of loving accuracy, of persistent and unobtrusive precision, which in the end kindles something like an inner ember with little firelight, but all the more profound effect. It’s a smoldering fire that works beneath the surface, and you could feel it again and again that evening.
Herreweghe believes in the work and less in the magic power of the conductor to make a masterpiece out of anything
But for Herreweghe, the word is the starting point. And the movement. These are the cornerstones of his musical practice. Unlike other early music conductors, it is not about particularly accentuated word interpretation and drastic illustration, as is the case with John Eliot Gardiner, but rather about text comprehensibility, sheer phonetics and phonology. The basis is the understanding of the content. But there are singers, he says, who don’t understand Latin. And the difference between understanding what you’re singing and just learning how to pronounce the words. Herreweghe is also meticulous in the concert to ensure that not a word is mumbled, not a syllable is omitted.
Sometimes this comes at the expense of a faster pace, which is more dramatic and can create a tight overall cohesion. Herreweghe takes the more difficult path, leaves room for language in the musical environment, and creates the overall tension solely through the rhythmic foundation. He speaks specifically of dance, which is more than just fixed figures of movement. It is often about a basic impulse that you perceive almost unconsciously. Except, which unfortunately happened every now and then that evening, the choir and orchestra get a little out of step. However, Herreweghe proves to be an experienced practitioner who puts the whole thing back on track without much ado. This also applies to orchestral outliers, such as when the brass become very dominant at the beginning of the Prague Symphony. Otherwise it sounds enormously plastic, in a naturally correct tempo, often telling in an operatic way how Mozart liked to think of music.
One can imagine all of this as an alternative to Teodor Currentzis’ tonal expressionism. But where Currentzis relies on effects and subordinates details, Herreweghe concentrates on a flawless sound, an extremely well-prepared choir and a highly disciplined orchestra. He also refrains from connecting the individual numbers with Attacca connections, as is usual. He believes in the work and less in the magic power of the conductor to make a masterpiece out of anything. Some brilliant composers fall through the cracks with him. Georg Friedrich Handel, for example, is “too one-dimensional” for him.
He likes it when a piece radiates in all directions and can be viewed from all angles, i.e. when it brings with it a certain basic complexity. Of course he is better off with Bach. And apparently also with Mozart’s “Requiem”, which he has already recorded three times on CD and which is so much stronger live.