Galant in the epicentre

Interview with the leader of Arte dei Suonatori, Aureliusz Goliński, conducted by Sebastian Gabryel for the Kultura u Podstaw portal.

Sebastian Gabryel: You have been associated with early music for many years. At first glance, this term may seem understandable, but when we talk about early music, we are specifically referring to…?

Aureliusz Goliński: There was a time when there was fierce debate about where the boundaries of so-called early music lie. Today, I think no one doubts that it includes those works that were created in times of a different musical aesthetic than today’s. This aesthetic, however, changes much faster than our intuition suggests…

SG: So what is the biggest difference between contemporary music from the last and current century and that of previous eras?

AG: This is not an easy question. Certainly, each musician could find different characteristics. For me, the late Baroque and so-called Classicism, or the Age of Enlightenment, is a time of extraordinary integration of poetry and music. Perhaps never before and never after was this relationship so strong. This factor provokes me to read music differently, but also to see poetry differently, where the semantic layer takes a back seat.

SG: Fryderyk Chopin wrote that “There is nothing worse than music without hidden meaning.” You constantly search for these hidden meanings in old sound languages. What discoveries and excitements accompany this?

AG: You have touched on the part of a musician’s workshop that drives me the most. Quite recently, I was struck by the reflection that without this factor of searching for meanings and constantly deepening these searches in the works of composers of past eras, I probably wouldn’t even be a musician today.

SG: You have been recognized by the Marshal of the Wielkopolska Region more than once. This year, you received a scholarship to record and release an album featuring compositions in the galant style. In my understanding, this is music between the Baroque and Classicism. Who were its greatest virtuosos? And what distinguished this style the most?

AG: The galant style essentially fills the entire Age of Enlightenment. Usually, when listening to Mozart or Haydn, we think of the classical era in music history. However, we rarely associate their works with the composing style called galant, yet it is its patterns that fill all these brilliant classical music works. They became the bridge between the Baroque and Classicism in this field of art. Moreover, the principles of this style are largely responsible for the strong rapprochement of music to poetry.

SG: The project is closely related to the research work you are doing. What do you focus on, and how does the process of translating this theory into practice, the results of which we will find on the album, look like?

AG: Well, let’s delve deeper into the principles of the galant style. The basic point of its manifesto is simplicity – a departure from heavy, complicated polyphonic texture. In its initial phase, the Baroque also sought textural simplifications to bring out the rhetorical sound expression.

In this context, we cannot exclude that the galant style is an emanation of the same need to highlight human emotions.

This “new approach” proposes, however, a greater delamination of texture. In 18th-century scores, we increasingly notice not only clear melodic fragments and accompanying bass but also a layer creating texture. This layer is largely responsible for giving color and character to the fragment of the narrative conducted in the melodic voice or voices. Experimenting within this function gives the composer a chance to use the idiom of individual instruments. The bass layer changes significantly through its rhythmicization, which strongly emphasizes its metric function – correct accentuation, periodicity. This procedure is special because it gives greater freedom of interpretation to the melodic and narrative layers. This aspect is perhaps the most difficult for today’s musicians to assimilate and, at the same time, the most attractive. It is also the subject of deep interest for the musicians of Arte dei Suonatori and sets the next stages of the process of discovering the works of this fascinating era in music history.

SG: Speaking of Arte dei Suonatori – you and your wife founded your orchestra in 1993, over thirty years ago. Has the initial idea that accompanied you during its creation evolved over time, or has it remained unchanged?

AG: It has evolved significantly. Thirty years ago, we were delighted with the freedom of approach to the works of past eras. An important value was also the different sound we created compared to traditional performances.

Today, we focus much more on the aesthetics of the compositions themselves. It determines the playing techniques and the way of interpreting the score. We try to understand the content of the score well first, and only then do we proceed to interpret the text discovered in it.

Thanks to this change of perspective, we see even greater qualitative potential in works with a strong performance tradition, not to mention unjustly forgotten music, the discovery of which is an integral part of this process.

SG: Arte dei Suonatori is behind many early music festivals – not only in Poland but also abroad. Which projects from the last three decades…

AG: There have been several milestones in the history of the ensemble, but now I will focus only on the purely musical, artistic ones. I will start with the fruit of the meeting with violinist Rachel Podger. Recording the full cycle of violin concertos titled “La Stravaganza” by Antonio Vivaldi ended for us the era of a rock approach to Baroque music. Collaboration with Martin Gester, a French organist, harpsichordist, and conductor, shaped our philosophy of approach to music. I am convinced that without this extraordinary relationship, there would be no Arte as it is today. And the love for the galant style begins with intensive cooperation with the Polish, absolutely brilliant harpsichordist Marcin Świątkiewicz, who is now the artistic director of most of our ensemble’s projects. Two years of joint preparations to record the complete outstanding harpsichord concertos by Johann Gottfried Muthel opened our eyes to an understanding of music that we had not experienced before. Consequently, the galant style remains the aesthetic idiom of Arte dei Suonatori to this day.

However, the experience of what musical poetics is, we owe to the meeting with Katarzyna Drogosz, a pianist who made the piano the most perfect instrument for expressing what is most noble in us. We cannot forget that none of these milestones would have appeared in our experience without the involvement of each musician forming this unique ensemble. I cannot express the enormity of my gratitude for their dedication to the goal, which is music.

SG: What remains unfulfilled, and what can happen within the orchestra’s activities in the coming years?

AG: As for closer and further plans and dreams, I have the impression that there are now more of them than ever, and all are closely related to the artists I mentioned earlier, as well as other instrumentalists and singers who open new repertoire areas. Galant is at the epicenter of our musical world. This is followed by further stages of recognizing its language. One of the milestones on this path may be a deep immersion in melodrama – a musical-dramatic form that was very popular for a short time in the second half of the 18th century. But please allow me not to develop this thread further – I think that soon the time will come for an extensive description of this stage of our activities.