Where would Baroque music be if it weren’t for Nicholas McGegan? Over a period of 25 years, the British-born conductor has established the San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra as one of the preeminent period performance bands in the country. At the same time, McGegan has produced one of the most extensive discographies of any of his contemporaries. He has more than 100 recordings to his credit, nearly half of which are Handel opera and oratorio. McGegan’s world premiere recording of Handel’s oratorio Susanna won a Gramophone Award and a Grammy nomination.
Somehow he also finds time to direct the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany, and guest conduct all over the world. But perhaps his most important work has been as an ambassador of historically informed practice to modern instrument ensembles. He has led the decidedly non-Baroque institutions of orchestras like Concertgebouw, Chicago, and Philadelphia; and the New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong Philharmonics; as well as opera companies like Covent Garden, San Francisco, and Santa Fe. “Other conductors may interpret Baroque scores as plains of sewing machine rhythms and textures,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “McGegan finds in them rivulets, courses, hairpin turns, and breezes gusting through valleys and up and around mountains.”
So does McGegan consider himself an early music specialist?
“Aw, now really,” he groans in reply, reached on telephone between gigs in Santa Barbara and Dresden. “Saying that you’re a specialist implies that you don’t do other things.” And certainly McGegan’s repertoire includes Beethoven and Schubert and runs as late as “clean-limbed twentieth-century music,” as he calls it. He does confess that he does not particularly enjoy conducting “tubercular operas,” though he attends happily and “with a big box of Kleenex.” But his greatest renown comes as a conductor of high Baroque opera.
What does McGegan look for in his singers? “In general,” he says, “singers need to be quick learners, flexible for Handel, and able to sing coloratura.” Perhaps due to the repetitive nature of da capo arias, singers must find inventive ways to personally connect with the words. Or, as McGegan says, “You can’t just be a brightly plumed parrot.”
Beyond these qualities, it can depend on the occasion. If an opera is to be staged, “I’m interested if the person can act,” he says. Casting decisions can come down to “how tall is the mezzo.” McGegan aims to hire a “team of equals” for each production, preferring singers with some Baroque experience, knowledge and, most importantly, an interest in the style. But he places the highest consideration on a singer’s flexibility.
“What I do not enjoy are ornaments and cadenzas that have been pre-written by a teacher and pre-learned by the singer, but do not work with a production,” he says. “I’m looking for team building.” He adopts an “I’ll try this, you try that” way of working in rehearsals that leaves room for some spontaneity. McGegan does prefer to write his own cadenzas and ornaments for singers in his productions, but he encourages them to improvise within the vocabulary.
Each Handel role, McGegan explains, “is like a Coco Chanel dress. Handel custom fit them for his singers.” In modern times, casting the right singer is a matter of finding the best fit. You can always change things slightly to adapt a role to the singer, however, such as writing higher ornaments if someone’s voice is higher than the role.
To address the question of whether a role is more appropriate for a countertenor or a mezzo, McGegan suggests looking at what Handel did. For example, Ariodante is a castrato role, intended for a man—albeit there is no authentic way to replicate this voice today. Ariodante’s nemesis Polinesso is a contralto role, intended for a woman. In some modern productions, McGegan observes, the genders are reversed.
When it comes to the right voices for Mozart operas, another important part of McGegan’s career, certain roles demand a heavier voice than Handel does. Idomeneo, for example, is a heavier part than those found in Handel operas, which were written for a young tenor. However, the singer of Idomeneo would be appropriate for Judas Maccabeus, a later Handel oratorio. In general, voices appropriate for Mozart opera are also well suited to Handel oratorio, with both styles requiring a similar weight. However, “the Countess does not have the coloratura of Alcina,” McGegan says, noting that female roles in Mozart rarely have brilliant, fast-moving lines. By contrast, Handel’s female characters are often title roles, with great variety among arias. Handel, however, does not write the jumps of Fiordiligi, and Mozart’s soprano roles tend to lie higher than Handel’s roles for women.
McGegan also points out that “a singer in a Mozart opera has to sing well enough in an ensemble, while a singer in a Handel opera has mostly solos.” Mozart has more “company divas,” he says. “You have to be someone who is comfortable in a group [to sing Mozart] and a lot less selfish as a singer.” On stage it means being concerned with balancing and blending, and not with being a diva.
When writing cadenzas, McGegan considers the purpose of the musical moment, the strengths of the singer, and the context of the production. “Recordings are the hardest [to write for],” he says, “as you don’t want something so elaborate that it becomes annoying and mannered,” especially if the recording is one of only a few available of an opera, and thus at risk of becoming the gospel standard. In addition, “cadenzas that have a function on stage might not work on a recording,” he continues. “For example, a long, kissy-kissy cadenza in a love duet won’t necessarily seem as nice when you listen to it in your living room.”
The musical choices, as with everything else in a Baroque production, serve the whole. But the team building approach to casting is different than what is found in grand opera, he says, where “you cast stars.” With an audible smirk, McGegan remarks that when he attends operas as an audience member, he can tell when singers are not on speaking terms with each other. As for how he chooses his casts and hears about individual singers, his circles are close. “I’m generally working with friends,” he says. Some soloists may come to him from colleague recommendations, but he “rarely [takes] people from an audition and certainly never from a tape.”
Among his regular collaborators are Lisa Saffer (whose roles range from Cleopatra to Gilda to Lulu) and Dominique Labelle, whom McGegan describes as a singer who “has it all: musicianship, technique, experience, and a warm heart.” He continues, “She can really make you believe the situation in the aria. While a singer like that is singing, you believe every word she says. It’s a thrilling experience.”
McGegan’s attitude to leadership—whether he’s conducting his own group or if he’s a guest conductor—is quintessentially Baroque. He lets musicians and ensembles be themselves instead of lecturing them on a narrow view of performance practice. At the same time, “modern orchestras are a great deal more flexible than they were 20 years ago,” he says. “There’s less of an us-versus-them feeling between performers of modern and early music.”
The average grand opera house has much more early opera than ever, observes McGegan. He also notes that young professionals today can find role models in seasoned singers who make their careers in Baroque music alongside grand opera and contemporary music, such as Susan Graham and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. He also speaks approvingly of conservatory programs where modern instrumentalists can try period instruments and experiment with historical styles. McGegan can be found at Juilliard this fall, coaching the Handel trio cantata Clori, Tirsi, e Fileno, which he helped bring to prominence with his 1992 recording of the work with Lieberson, Drew Minter, and Jill Feldman.
In fact, it was during appointments at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Maryland that McGegan began to experiment with different ways of dramatizing da capo arias and to bring to light lesser known Handel operas. This willingness to explore Baroque music on its own terms, and invite other musicians to do the same, is perhaps McGegan’s greatest accomplishment.
McGegan notes that “while America hasn’t led the way [in the early music revival], it has been a beneficiary of it”—likely referring to the fact that while early music in America has a devoted following, much of the revival of historical performance practice has been led by European ensembles. As McGegan’s long career in America has shown, however, stateside audiences certainly keep up their healthy appetite for historically informed and innovative music-making.
