Casual classical music listeners might think of it as a genre designed around string quartets and pianos. But the hardcore devotees among us know that the piano didn’t even exist when many of the best-known composers like Bach roamed the earth.
New England’s own Martin Pearlman has been a major force in bringing that historical truth to listeners’ attention, bringing historically rooted performances from curiosities to essential parts of the field over the last half century. When Pearlman founded Boston Baroque in 1973, it was the only group in all of North America playing the music of Baroque composers on “period instruments.”
Pearlman is stepping down from Boston Baroque as this season comes to an end. He joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath in-studio to share more about this journey. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: Maestro, welcome!
Martin Pearlman: Thank you! It’s good to be here.
Rath: Before we talk about founding Boston Baroque, for people who might not be so deep into the details of music, I want to talk about using period instruments. I grew up accustomed to hearing Bach keyboard music played on a piano, and the piano didn’t exist when Bach was composing. Could you talk about your journey learning the instrument Bach wrote for, the harpsichord?
Pearlman: I came into being a harpsichordist more or less by accident. I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I was mainly in composition. And I played the violin and the piano. I was going to stop violin, and I didn’t want to take piano lessons at the school because I had a good teacher outside. And so I asked them if I could simply not take lessons. And they said, “No, you have to take some lessons.”
So I found a little harpsichord off in the corner of some room, and I convinced the university organist to teach me lessons on it. And then I got a Fulbright grant, when I finished at Cornell, to go to the Netherlands to study with Gustav Leonhardt, who was the seminal figure in early music, and that got me going on harpsichord.
Rath: Wow. And if you can, like, tell us, compress the journey from there to founding Boston Baroque to feeling like this was… You needed to broaden people’s experience of music this way.
Pearlman: Well, there was very little, even in Europe, of playing on period instruments. There was one group, Concentus Musicus Wien, that was great — but that was pretty much it.
And I was asked to turn pages for my teacher in Holland when he was recording all the harpsichord concertos of Bach. He was using period instruments, just five of them, and I was fascinated. When I got back to the United States — to Yale, and then eventually to Boston — I was curious: What would happen if we put period instruments on this music?
I asked all the people I knew who could play decently on them, which was about eight people, and we started playing concerts.
Rath: People were used to hearing things like the Bach Mass in B Minor in what they might think of as a big way, right? With big ensembles, perhaps louder with modern instruments. Was it a hard sell to people?
Pearlman: No, it was the opposite. People were very curious. We were sold out from the beginning. It was just a small church, but still, we had lots of interest. And it just grew from there. People were very interested in it.
Rath: I’d mentioned Mass in B Minor. That was the first, I’m sure, North American performance of that on period instruments?
Pearlman: Yeah, that was probably not until we had been playing for about eight years or so.
Rath: Something to work up to.
Pearlman: Right. Well, I remember The Boston Globe writing in advance about it and saying, “Can these instruments play this music?” And I was thinking, “Well, it was written for these instruments.”
It was a big event for us, and it was a huge success, and it made the ensemble and the subscription base grow tremendously.
Rath: Moving up to playing the B Minor Mass — did you start off with smaller works? Talk about the development.
Pearlman: We started with just concertos, one-on-a-part concertos. I played a lot of harpsichord concertos. We played some Brandenburg Concertos, and then eventually I added a chorus because I wanted to be able to do a larger part of the repertoire.
So by the time we did the Mass, of course, I had a chorus that had developed, and I had wind players by then, which I didn’t in the beginning.
And eventually, some years after that, we started doing some opera. I just wanted to expand to the point where we could do the entire repertoire of the Baroque — and then of the Classical period too. You know, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn.
Rath: Your background, at least your academic background wasn’t in choral music, and then you’re starting off doing these historically informed performances. How was that for you?
Pearlman: Well, it was a bit of an adventure. But I felt that I knew what I wanted to hear, and it became gradually more comfortable as I was doing it.
Rath: And as the ensemble grew, you’ve worked with so many musicians, and pretty hands-on. You’re also a music teacher as well. Talk about the human side of the orchestra.
Pearlman: It’s been wonderful to see the generations — now a few generations of players, some of whom weren’t born when I started this — grow into something more mainstream, more normal. Something people could grow up hearing our recordings, or other people’s recordings on period instruments, which was something I couldn’t do when I first started. There were very few recordings when I was starting.
A lot of the information we had about how to play this came out of books, what people wrote back then about how to play. And, of course, by playing the instruments themselves, which teaches you a lot.
Nowadays, people learn more the way they used to learn, which is by hearing it around them, hearing, growing up with recordings, growing up with teachers who know about this kind of playing.
Rath: One of the things that stands out for me when I’m listening to your music and your recordings — and I don’t know if this means historically informed tempos — but I find myself tapping my foot a lot. I feel like this pulse, like the heartbeat, almost, going through it.
Pearlman: There’s a tremendous rhythmic energy in a lot of Baroque music. And that was something that, as you said, back in the ’70s when we got started, the traditional way of playing it was somewhat heavier. Even with symphony orchestras, which used to play quite differently on this music from what they do now.
And particularly, that’s true of Messiah. When we started doing Messiah, that was a real surprise to people, because it had a tradition. Just a lot of heaviness — a kind of reverential feel of being very slow and heavy.
Handel never performed it in a church. It wasn’t done that way. His librettist called it a “fine entertainment.” It has such energy in it, and such rhythm. And the tempo is, of course, moved along, which was a surprise to a lot of people but it was very popular.
Rath: It must be very satisfying for you: That bright, beautiful sound of the Messiah that we heard from you, that’s sort of the standard now.
Pearlman: It’s interesting how it’s developed. It used to be: You were performing something for the first time on period instruments, and that was exciting to people. Now, most things have been performed, and it’s a question of: Is it a good performance? Which is what is true of any ensemble, on any kind of music. And that, I think, is a kind of maturity that the field’s gotten and I think it’s a very good thing.
Rath: When you talk about hearing these things for the first time, I think about your recording of the Monteverdi Vespers. The first time I heard that, it was just — wow! How is it sounding so old and new at the same time? But it still has that force when I listen to it today.
Pearlman: Well, that’s an amazing piece. It’s an encyclopedia of all kinds of music from that time. And as you say, it lives today. It’s a very exciting piece.
Rath: So you worked through so much of the Baroque repertoire, but Boston Baroque has also taken on Classical repertoire as well, you know — composers like Mozart and Beethoven. When you’re applying the historically informed approach to that, what are we getting out of that music?
Pearlman: We’ve done all the Beethoven symphonies, for example, and a great deal of Mozart and Haydn, as you say.
The first thing that I think strikes people who haven’t heard it that way is that the instruments themselves have a more transparent sound. And so you can hear inner voices — you hear things you didn’t hear.
The whole style of playing comes from a different place. When a symphony orchestra goes back to play Mozart, they’re coming from later music and going back. Whereas for us, this is the “new music.” We’ve been playing earlier music, and this is the latest thing that we do. And it’s just a different feel.
Beethoven, for example: There’s a sense in Beethoven, I’ve always felt, that he’s pushing the boundaries of what can be done with music, and what these instruments can do. And that I don’t feel as much with modern instruments.
I do love modern symphony orchestras when they play Beethoven, when they’re great performances, but one thing I don’t feel in them is that sense of pushing the boundaries. So it’s a different take, in a way. And it’s very exciting for us to do this later music.
Rath: While we’ve got you here, I do want to ask you some questions about things beyond Boston Baroque. For instance, you as a performer: You perform and conduct music that’s not Baroque music. It’s some very modern music as well. And I might think there’d be a kind of cognitive dissonance going between the two, but I’ve heard you talk about it, and it’s not that way for you.
Pearlman: I mean, my background has always been as a composer. I’ve been composing since I was six years old, and my degrees in school are in composition. And it’s always been something that I’ve been involved in, although I haven’t made it as public a part of my career. And very modern music, not imitating old music.
And so I’m kind of living in the 18th century and in the 20th or 21st simultaneously. In the middle — the 19th century — is music that I love, but I somehow have never been drawn to perform it. So I have a certain affinity to this earlier music and performing, and then the later music I’m very close to.
Sometimes it’s like switching cultures, switching languages. You have to take a breather for a moment and switch gears, but I do go up and back.
Rath: Now that you’re stepping away from conducting, are you gonna put more time into composing? We just had a premiere of a string quartet, right?
Pearlman: String quintet, yeah. And I have written a piece recently for two pianos, and I am going to be doing much more composing.
I’m also going to be helping my daughter, who just started a Baroque orchestra up in Portland, Maine: North Star Baroque. So I’m not performing with them, I’m just on the board. But it’s great to see something developing up there.
