If English violinist Rachel
Podger turned heads in 1999 with her debut solo recording of the Bach
Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, she induced whiplash
with her exhilarating 2004 Channel Classics recording of Vivaldi's
La Stravaganza. Critics seemed stunned by Podger's ability
to make the music sound so fresh, vital, and new.
But this wasn't much of
a surprise to people who have been following Podger's career since
the early 1990s. That's when, fresh out of England's Guildhall School
of Music and Drama, Podger began recording and touring as a member
of the Palladian Ensemble, a somewhat folky-sounding early-music group.
Before long, harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock heard her in concert.
"I thought, wow,
this is pretty good stuff," Pinnock recalls. He invited Podger
to read through some music with him, and after a few sessions was
sufficiently impressed to bring her into the English Concert, where
she was concertmaster from 1997 to 2002.
"I didn't have any
orchestral training in Baroque violin," Podger admits. "I
just learned doing it, spending many years playing second violin to
Pavlo Beznosiuk. I was very green."
"She's a stunning
musician," counters Pinnock. "She has a wonderful fluency
in the way that she plays the instrument. It's a very natural approach,
which is so lovely because her being and her music seem so well connected.
But this natural approach is underpinned by a tremendous sense of
the structure and architecture of the music. I think it's that sense
of structure which gives her the amount of freedom that she has."
She's no musical anarchist,
then, just someone who finds liberty within the natural laws of her
universe.
In school, though, Podger
had to enter that universe surreptitiously. She'd come up, like everyone
else, on the modern violin, playing the standard mix of classical
pieces. But she'd developed an interest in Baroque music as a child.
Her family played Baroque music at home, and from age eight to 19
she studied in Kassel, Germany (her mother is from Hamburg), and had
ready access to Germany's 18th-century musical heritage. She sang
Bach cantatas in a church choir, and she remembers clearly that in
1978 her mother brought home a John Eliot Gardiner recording of a
Bach cantata that gave young Rachel a start. "I said, ‘Why
do they sound so different, so bare?'" she recalls. She was instantly
fascinated by the sound of period instruments.
She played the usual range
of violin music as a teenager, but by the time she turned 16 she was
already interested in making a special study of Baroque music. She
couldn't find a teacher, though. Then, at 19, she enrolled at the
Guildhall School to study with Pauline Scott and David Takeno. "I
was dying to get my hands on a Baroque violin, but they wouldn't let
me," she says. "It was treated as a secondary instrument.
The first year they wanted you to get your technique under your belt
on the modern instrument. I didn't agree with that at all. I very,
very slyly had a few lessons on the side with Michaela Comberti.
"But there was a
stigma attached to the Baroque violin then—this was around 1988.
You only picked it up if you weren't so good on the modern violin.
I was so embarrassed, I carried one case for each violin and I would
hide one behind my back because I was self-conscious about playing
Baroque violin."
The embarrassment ended
when she won a school competition as the only violinist playing Bach
on a Baroque instrument. In 1990 she and three school friends formed
the Palladian Ensemble; before long they won an international prize
and got a recording contract with the Linn label.
"Around 1992 or 1993,
I was getting busier and busier playing repertoire on the Baroque
instrument," she says. "I was still very much into the modern
instrument, but that fizzled out because I was doing so much with
the Baroque violin. I've always kept the door open for later repertoire,
but at the moment I don't even have a modern instrument."
Actually, Podger is relieved
not to have to switch back and forth between instruments. "It's
difficult to be good at both, because the muscle memory is so different,"
she says. "You have to use different muscles, and I get very
fatigued playing a modern instrument. Sustaining through-phrases I
always found difficult on a modern instrument.
"I am where I belong."
Podger's first solo recording,
of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas, was a rather cheeky project
for a young, not especially well-known violinist. "But it wasn't
my idea initially," Podger protests. Ted Diehl of Channel Classics
suggested it, she says. "I said to him, ‘You must be joking!'
I was scared, because the Polish teacher I had in my teens wouldn't
let me play Bach. I was dying to play one of the concertos, but he
said, ‘You can't do it until you're 40. You must be very mature.
There's no way you can approach it earlier.'"
Obviously, Podger overcame
that trauma and in 1999 made an especially successful recording of
the Bach solo works. Later she teamed with Pinnock to record Bach's
sonatas with harpsichord, as well as Rameau's Pièces de
clavecin en concerts.
"She's a wonderful
musical partner, strong-willed but flexible," says Pinnock. "She
prepares everything meticulously, but that doesn't mean she's written
down in immovable type exactly what has to be done. She's always responsive
to the music, so her music making is a constant, ongoing dialog between
her and the music and her partners. That gives her the freedom to
introduce improvisatory elements."
Says Podger, who is now
guest director of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, "I'm
quite an instinctive player. If I suddenly have an idea that rings
true, something that seems right in the context of what we're creating,
then I'll go with it, but I also must be open to the possibility that
it might not work. You must have that modesty; not every idea can
be great. You find what you can in the score and in yourself in preparation,
but when you make music with live people, it's not just a reproduction
of what's on the page. You never know what's going to happen. In the
rehearsal, it could go any number of ways. We rehearse, we comment
on what we're doing, and we throw ideas about.
"No matter how I
plan it, in the end it's completely different."
Podger also is a professor
of Baroque violin at her alma mater, the Guildhall School. Rather
than angrily vowing not to make her students feel as embarrassed about
their instrument as she did, Podger is focusing on her more positive
experiences at Guildhall. Her lessons with David Takeno particularly
inspired her teaching technique.
"He would ask me
questions rather than tell me what to do," she says. "That
made me think and, guiding me into a certain way of thinking, provoked
a different attitude. That was so impressive.
"And Michaela Comberti,
who has passed away, showed me what Baroque bow technique is. She
taught me the importance of flexibility of the fingers and how to
produce a good sound."
Now Podger is passing
that information along to undergraduates as well as graduate students.
Even so, she's developed some sympathy for the professors who insisted
that she wait before taking up the Baroque violin.
"You must have a
solid technique first," she insists. "Everyone comes first
from the modern violin and has played Baroque music with that technique,
so there's some undoing to be done. But that's much easier if the
technique is solid. If not, you've got much more groundwork to do.
Of course, in Geminiani's time they didn't play Tchaikovsky first,
so I don't think there should be a fixed point at which you may be
allowed to start. It has to do with aptitude.
"If they have a big
ability with the music, you can't hold them back. That's cruel."
Podger's schedule looks
rather cruel during the first half of 2005. Not only is she maintaining
her teaching schedule, but she is performing all over Europe and in
select American venues. In January, her schedule called for a British
tour playing double concertos by Vivaldi and Bach with the Academy
of Ancient Music, and a visit to Santa Fe to play Bach sonatas with
fortepianist Gary Cooper.
In March she will direct
and solo with the group Musica Angelica in Los Angeles. Then some
solo Bach, and in April she records a batch of concertos (Leclair,
Handel, Pisendel, Vivaldi) with the Polish ensemble Arte dei Suonatori.
Somewhere along the line,
she and Cooper will continue recording the sonatas of Mozart; the
first volume in that series was released at the end of 2004.
"Mozart is a completely
different style from Bach," she says. "The writing is fairly
simple in terms of decoration and expression, but it needs a completely
different way of thinking. It's more linear, in a way. Bach's violin
line needs to be very integrated into what is happening with the harmony.
Mozart is more melody-based, and needs so much character to come off.
"I'm still learning
that."
Podger feels lucky to
have grown up listening to historically informed performances of Baroque
music on gut strings. While she admires the pioneering efforts of
string players in the 1960s and '70s, she notes that they were often
contending with inadequate instruments and unreliable bows and strings.
They were also still grappling with unfamiliar elements of Baroque
style.
"Those older recordings
can be beautiful, but they can also sound dry and overdone in their
phrasing, and the tempi and everything is extreme," she says.
"People were taking everything literally and were taking some
ideas out of context, not seeing the whole picture. Today, I'm seeing
undergraduate string players who already know much more about this
form of performance practice, and it doesn't seem like such a big
deal anymore."
Says Pinnock, "What
makes her so modern, in a right sense, is she's assimilated the music
so strongly that the historical approach has become an absolutely
natural part of her music making. She breathes the music.
"I find it difficult
not to talk about Rachel in a string of superlatives," he adds.
"That's quite intentional. I think her music says more about
her than I ever could."
What Podger Plays
Rachel Podger plays a
Pesarini violin made in Genoa in 1739. "That's not a well-known
maker, but it's a great violin," says Podger. "People tell
me, ‘Gosh, it sounds like a Guarneri or an Amati or a Strad.'
When I found it, it was in modern condition—the neck and the
bridge had been changed, so I had to have it re-Baroqued. It was a
bit of a gamble, because you don't know how it's going to sound after
the operation. It needed a bit of time to sound right. Now it's quite
full and rich, but it has an antique elegance of sound, as well. Bach
was the first thing I recorded on it, and I'm using it for Mozart
with Gary Cooper, although I'd prefer something more silvery-sounding
for Mozart."
She uses a copy of an
old Italian bow, made by "a fantastic French bow maker named
René-William Groppe. When you pick up a bow you can tell whether
it's live or not; there's something in the wood and the way it's matured.
When I picked up one of his bows, that struck me immediately. It's
very light. At first I thought it was far too light, and that I wouldn't
be able to make a sound with it. He said, ‘It's a very good bow.
It will teach you how to play in a few weeks.' He was absolutely right;
it's a good stick. You get a lot of tension and intensity with this
bow; it can go really fast and stop just before it crunches."
