King's Music

Musical Nostalga

I was interested by a recent account in the Sunday Times colour supplement of a journey up California Route 1, which goes spectacularly along the Pacific coast from LA to San Francisco, one of the world's great drives. I must confess that I did not think of pop culture of the 1960s when we traversed it, but that brilliant and infuriating TV and food reviewer A. A. Gill was making a nostalgic trip, and at Santa Barbara was moved to tears by an encounter with Roger McGuinn (from The Best of Byrds [no: I haven't omitted an apostrophe and Consort Songs]) singing a song of the period. The article chimed with the first draft of this editorial, in which I wondered if other listeners also find that performances of music they have loved from their youth are overshadowed by images of those distant performances - not by clear recollections that can be checked by replaying a disc, but rather by impressions of the effect of the music, which overpower any possibility of remembering what the performance itself was actually like and which provide an unassailable comparison for subsequent hearings.

Apart from our church choir, my first experience of small-choir singing was in a school madrigal group started by the assistant music master (I haven't seen him since 1961, but if anyone knows Alan Morgan, thank him for me.) The piece that has stuck in my mind is Dowland's Sleep you no more, sad fountains. The way the melody floats over the polyphony of the closing section and the inconclusive fading into sleep at the end moved me deeply. There are recordings of it on two discs which I have reviewed in Issue 55 of EMR (p. 27 & 32), and it begins John Potter's ECM Dowland fantasy (left aside till issue 56); but none of these match my imagined version.

A decade later, I used to play over and over again an off-air tape I made of Handel's Saul as conducted by Charles Mackerras. I still have the tapes; but I won't play them again. My concept of how to sing and play Handel's oratorios has changed enormously since than, as no doubt has Sir Charles's. * In 1999, I listen very differently from the way I did in 1969, and differently from the way anyone listened in 1739. Gill's experience was undermined by the singer inviting the audience to his web-site: the spell was broken. I hope that my nostalgia will be broken more positively: by performances so superlative that they impose a new nostalgia to last into my old age.

Clifford Bartlett

* I didn't hear his recent broadcast of Saul but I look forward to his Alcina, from our edition, at the London Coliseum next month.

Back to 'Early Music Review'