Frans Brüggen (1934-2014)

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Amsterdam, Amsterdam Conservatory, audition, August Brüggen, Beethoven, Berkeley, Brahms, brass, Chicago Symphony Orchestr, Chopin, conservatory, Dutch, flute, Frans Brüggen, Gustav Leonhardt, Harvard University, Johanna Verkley, keyboard, Louis Andriessen, Luciano Berio, Machtelt Israëls, megaphone, Mendelssohn, New York, Notenkrakers, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, performance practice, recorder, Rolling Stones, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Royal Conservatory of The Hague, Schubert, Sieuwert Verster, Sour Cream, Symphony no. 3 in E flat Major, tempo, The New York Times, University of Amsterdam, University of California, vibrato, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Vivien Schweitzer

Frans Brüggen in 1978

Frans Brüggen, a Dutch pioneer of the early music movement, a co-founder and conductor of the influential Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, and a virtuoso recorder player who in his youth became (literally) a poster boy for the instrument, died on 13 August 2104 13 in Amsterdam. He was seventy-nine.

His death was confirmed by Sieuwert A. Verster, who founded the ensemble with Mr. Brüggen in 1981.

Their period instrument orchestra was one of the first ensembles to adopt a historically informed method of performance, in which the lush sound, vibrato-heavy string playing and sometimes ponderous tempos that were then standard were abandoned for a buoyant, leaner sound with less vibrato.

Unlike other period ensembles, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century has not strayed too far from its original focus; it has ventured into Mendelssohn, Schubert and Chopin, but not later romantics like Brahms.

Mr. Brüggen had a particular affinity for conducting Beethoven, releasing two recordings of the complete symphonies and leading the “Eroica” Symphony more than one hundred times.

Reviewing a 2007 performance of two Schubert symphonies and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 during one of the orchestra’s infrequent appearances in New York, Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that “by keeping the brass choirs in the foreground sounding punchy in the Ninth, he tapped a vein of both novelty and visceral excitement that gave these familiar works a welcome freshness.”

The orchestra (a part-time group that tours several times a year and regularly releases recordings) was founded with an unusually egalitarian pay plan. After expenses, profits are divided equally among musicians and conductor.

The orchestra recruits its members through word of mouth and never holds auditions. “We are a bit like the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Verster said in a phone interview, “always the same people.” The orchestra intends to continue to perform with guest conductors, he added.

As a guest conductor himself, Mr. Brüggen worked with both Baroque and modern ensembles, including the London-based Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Amsterdam-based Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – bringing a period practice aesthetic to his interpretations.

Mr. Brüggen had a rebellious streak and appreciated counterculture movements, both in and out of musical circles. In 1969 he supported what became known as the “Notenkrakers” (“Nutcrackers”) action, in which conservatory students and composers, unhappy with the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s conservative programming and what they saw as its elitism, disrupted a performance in Amsterdam with noisemakers and a megaphone.

Mr. Brüggen, who in 1972 founded an avant-garde recorder trio called Sour Cream, began his career as a recorder soloist and chamber musician. He elevated the instrument to star status with his brilliant, idiosyncratic approach. Some early albums came along with a poster of him, a tousle-haired young virtuoso.

His performances were physically and aesthetically distinctive: He played while sitting cross-legged and infused his interpretations with a flexible rubato that rendered the music sensually expressive.

Early video recordings highlight his beautiful tone, remarkable technique and soulful artistry, often heard in collaboration with eminent musicians like the Dutch keyboard player and conductor Gustav Leonhardt.

Mr. Brüggen, who also played the flute professionally, played a wide range of repertoire and became a champion of contemporary composers; Luciano Berio and Louis Andriessen were among those who dedicated works to him. He performed as recorder soloist with his orchestra in its early days but stopped after his fiftieth birthday.

Franciscus Jozef Brüggen was born in Amsterdam on 30 October 1934, the youngest of nine children of August Brüggen, who owned a textile factory, and the former Johanna Verkley, an amateur singer. He studied recorder and flute at the Amsterdam Conservatory and musicology at the University of Amsterdam. At twenty-one he became a professor of Baroque music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Brüggen is survived by his wife, Machtelt Israëls, and two daughters from that marriage, Zephyr and Eos, as well as two daughters from a previous marriage, Alicia and Laura, and a grandson.

Mr. Brüggen, who had appeared frail for many years and sat on a stool to conduct, last led an orchestra in May. But despite failing health he had no plans to abandon his career. In 2008 he told The Times that he planned to conduct “until I fall dead, like all conductors.”

Vivien Schweitzer – The New York Times

Music and Color

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Berkeley, brain, color, emotions, facial expression, Stephen Palmer, University of California, University of Newcastle

When you listen to a lively Mozart piece in a major key, what colors do you see? If bright yellows and oranges swirled in your mind, it wouldn’t surprise a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Their new study found that people associate upbeat, major-key music with lighter, more vibrant yellow-toned colors, while slower music in minor keys actually gives people the blues.

These results were the same for participants in both California and Mexico, suggesting humans may have a surprisingly universal emotional color palette. “The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors,” study researcher Stephen Palmer, a UC Berkeley vision scientist, said in a statement. “Surprisingly, we can predict with ninety-five percent accuracy how happy or sad the colors people pick will be based on how happy or sad the music is that they are listening to,” Palmer added.

Palmer and his colleagues studied nearly one hundred men and women, half in the San Francisco Bay Area and half in Guadalajara, Mexico. The participants listened to eighteen varied pieces of classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johannes Brahms. They also were given a 37-color palette and told to choose five colors that best matched each song.

Overall, most people chose an array of warm colors to accompany the upbeat songs and darker, grayer, bluer colors to go with the more somber ones. The researchers saw the same pattern when they tweaked the experiment to use facial expressions instead of colors – happy faces were matched with upbeat music in major keys, while sad faces were paired with gloomier tunes. The results suggest emotions are responsible for music-color associations.

The scientists hope to expand their research to study other musical norms and cultures. Next, they plan to recruit participants in Turkey, where traditional music often uses scales beyond major and minor keys. “We know that in Mexico and the U. S. the responses are very similar,” Palmer said. “But we don’t yet know about China or Turkey.”

The study seems consistent with previous research on color associations. One such study published in the journal BMC Medical Research Methodology in 2010 found that people with depression or anxiety were more likely to associate their mood with the color gray, while happier people preferred yellow.

The new research was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be presented at the International Colour Association conference at the United Kingdom’s University of Newcastle in July.

– Live Science

The Powers of Bach

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Amsterdam, Bach Collegium Japan, Berkeley, BIS, cantata, Choir and Organ, Dutch, English, German, Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord, Japanese, Juilliard Baroque Orchestra, Kobe University, Leipzig, Masaaki Suzuki, Messiah, Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Choir, Nicolaus Harnoncourt, organ, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, piano, Piet Kee, polyphony, San Francisco, Schola Cantorum, Ton Koopman, Yale School of Music

Last June, the German city of Leipzig awarded Japanese conductor Masaaki Suzuki the prestigious Bach Medal 2012. Suzuki, an internationally renowned Bach specialist and founder of the Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ), received the medal for “significant contributions” to “the dissemination of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach in his homeland Japan through his work as organist, harpsichordist and conductor.” The jury stated that: “concerning the repertoire of Bach, which has always been much-appreciated in Japan,” Suzuki has “created an awareness for a scientifically and historically oriented performance practice in Japan and the entire Asian region.”

The inclusion of Suzuki in an impressive group of honorees (among them: Gustav Leonhardt, Nicolaus Harnoncourt, and Ton Koopman) came as a surprise to no one, yet things were different in 1995, when Suzuki released the first volume of BCJ’s complete Bach cantatas. The Swedish independent label BIS made a disc, reportedly from a single recording session. That new arrival on the international early-music scene was met with skepticism and even some latent hostility: How, listeners wondered, could someone from an ancient Eastern culture adequately comprehend Bach, the epitome of Western classical music? And the question “how dare he?!” hovered right below the surface.

“We were very surprised that they thought that Japan and Bach don’t go together,” says Suzuki. “And it is actually a complete misunderstanding. Bach’s music is a universal language that can easily overcome any kind of cultural border. He is one of the most famous European composers in Japan. Every child who starts playing the piano plays Bach at some point, and everybody who goes to a conservatory has to study Bach. Nobody is a stranger to Bach’s music.”

In an interview with Choir and Organ in 2005, Suzuki explained how the Japanese quickly developed an enormous appetite for all aspects of Western culture, especially music, once the country opened up to the West. From the early seventeenth century until late in the nineteenth, Japan was officially closed to the West, and only the Netherlands had limited access to it. After World War II, the interest in Western art music merely increased.

Niels Swinkels spoke with Masaaki Suzuki on his arrival in the Bay Area from Amsterdam, where he conducted a number of concerts with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and the Netherlands Radio Choir.

Niels Swinkels (NS) In a recent YouTube interview for the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, you responded in perfect Dutch. Then I remembered that, after you graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts, you went to Amsterdam to study harpsichord with Ton Koopman and organ with Piet Kee. No wonder you speak the language so well!

Masaaki Suzuki (MS) I studied in Amsterdam between 1979 and 1983, but during this last visit I realized that my Dutch is not really sufficient anymore [switches to excellent Dutch]. My Dutch is good enough for everyday use, but not good enough for an interview about music [laughs].

NS You are in San Francisco for a series of concerts with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a Bach Christmas program, and two performances of Messiah. Is this your first time with Philharmonia Baroque?

MS Yes, this is the very first time. I have been in Berkeley twice, with my own ensemble. The first time was in 2003 with the whole group – choir and orchestra – and the second time was 2006 or 2007, with a kind of chamber ensemble. I haven’t been here since, so that is quite a long time.

NS You probably already know some of the musicians in Philharmonia Baroque?

MS Well, actually, yes, I have worked with several of them already. And all the vocal soloists are alumni from the Schola Cantorum at Yale. I picked them myself.

NS At Yale University, you are visiting professor of choral conducting and conductor of the Schola Cantorum. How long have you held that position?

MS I was there in October and this was my third year. I go there every spring and autumn for a few weeks. We do at least one big project, in addition to smaller things like chamber music and so on. Every year, we do a program together with the Juilliard Baroque Orchestra, and every other year we do an international tour. We were in Italy last year, and next year we go to Japan and Singapore. I am very thrilled about that.

NS Your parents were both amateur musicians, and Christians. How has your Christian background influenced your perception of Western music in general and Bach’s music in particular?

MS Without this background I probably wouldn’t have come to this field at all. When I was in middle school, I started playing the organ every Sunday during worship. I enjoyed it very much, and tried to play all of Bach’s organ works, but the organ was actually only a small, pedal-pumped harmonium; it was impossible to play Bach on that. So I decided that I had to play a real organ, and took lessons in high school. My first teacher was a Belgian Catholic priest who was also a musicologist, specializing in fifteenth and sixteenth-century polyphonic music. I wouldn’t have started this without my religious background. I have always felt a familiarity with Christian music and culture, and not only the worship. I can’t say that I am very religious, but I believe in God.

I believe in the power of music, and especially in Bach’s sacred works.

NS I have heard you talk about the consoling, nourishing power of music.

MS In Japan, so many people have been hurt by disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes. They were really consoled by the music and the text translations of the Bach cantatas. Quite ironically, right before we started recording in 1995, we had a big earthquake in Kobe. Following the disaster, the chapel in which we were recording [at Kobe University] was one of the few concert venues in which you could still perform. All the other concert halls in Kobe city were either damaged or used for storage of dead bodies. We postponed the project, of course, but in the meantime we had a couple of charity concerts for the victims of the earthquake. Many people told us how the music spoke to them. I believe in the power of music, and especially in Bach’s sacred works. This kind of suffering hasn’t changed since Bach’s time. In the eighteenth century death was probably closer to everyday life; Bach had twenty children but only a few made it to adulthood. Death was much more normal in those days, but people’s feelings about the death of a family member or a friend haven’t changed.

NS Can you explain Bach’s universal appeal?

MS When you perform German cantatas in German, it is not easy for any kind of foreign audience. In Asian countries like Japan, even English doesn’t work so well. European languages are very difficult for our audience, but we can provide a Japanese translation to the audience members and then we get a chance to talk and think about the context of the text. Bach’s music helps a lot. Sometimes you can understand the context of a cantata without knowing the text itself, because the music is so powerful.

NS What is your part in the appreciation of Bach in Japan?

MS We have given Japanese audiences the opportunity to hear live Bach performances. There are many people in Japan who have listened to LPs and CDs for a long time. I have had many reactions and letters from older people who are really fond of Bach’s music – people who have been listening to this or that recording for fifty years but still didn’t have the opportunity to experience a live, professional performance of a Bach cantata. There used to be only amateur choirs and ensembles playing this repertoire. We were the first professional ensemble to really concentrate on Bach.

NS How far along are you with your cantata project?

MS Volume 52 has just been released, and we actually have only one more project recording. Volume 54 has already been recorded, and volume 55 will be the last one of the church cantatas, which makes me a little sad. We will just keep going with the secular cantatas for a couple of years, and in between we will also do Lutheran masses. We will, of course, continue with live performances.

NS Can you compare your own Bach cantata project with others, such as Gustav Leonhardt and Nicolaus Harnoncourt, who in 1971 started recording the first complete cycle of Bach cantatas on period instruments?

MS The Harnoncourt and Leonhardt recordings were sort of my starting point. They were very important to me. For them, it was much more difficult to do the cantatas than for us; they didn’t have new Bach editions or new research and so on. They actually developed and discovered a lot of things during their projects. It actually took us the same number of years to record the cantatas – about eighteen years. Of course, once you are finished, you always want to start again, but then you would need another eighteen years.

Niels Swinkels – San Francisco Classical Voice