Getting high on Baroque

Italian violinist-conductor Enrico Onofri is one of the world’s foremost performers of Baroque music.

By BARRY DAVIS
The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra’s 2016-2017 seasons starts next week (photo credit: Courtesy)
The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra’s 2016-2017 seasons starts next week
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra will open its 2016-17 season with the Baroque Decadence concert on November 13 and 14 at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv and the International YMCA in Jerusalem, respectively, both at 8 p.m.
The ensemble kicks off the season with one of the stellar interpreters of the genre, Italian conductor and violinist Enrico Onofri, in an energetic and virtuosic program featuring works by composers of High Baroque – Handel, Corelli, Geminiani, Vivaldi and Telemann.
This will be Onofri’s second synergy with the ensemble, following a successful confluence a couple of years ago.
Today, the 49-year-old Italian is one of the most feted performers of Baroque music, but as a youngster he displayed a great interest in science and even considered pursuing it professionally.
I wondered whether that youthful fascination in an ostensibly very different field may in some way inform the maestro’s current line of work.
“I don’t know, maybe,” comes the considered reply. “A historically informed player has to pay attention to details, even if he’s not interested in sciences.”
It appears to be a moot point.
Like many youngsters, Onofri’s hands-on musical endeavor started with recorder. He was also an enthusiastic singer, honing his vocal skills with various choral outfits, and he says his non-stringed musical activities left their imprint on his work today. “Both enormously influenced my violin playing and my conducting. Breath, articulation, singing while playing, acting....”
The latter is an intriguing element of Onofri’s onstage delivery, and he is one of the most visually compelling performers on the classical music scene.
Born in Ravenna, Italy, he began his career with an invitation from now-75- year-old Catalan conductor, viol player and composer Jordi Savall to serve as concertmaster of a Barcelona-based group of soloist singers, La Capella Reial.
That was followed by engagements with Austrian Baroque ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien, French chamber music group Ensemble Mosaiques and Concerto Italiano, an Italian early music ensemble lauded for its interpretations of Monteverdi and Vivaldi. Between 1987 and 2010 Onofri served as concertmaster and soloist of pioneering Italian early music ensemble Il Giardino Armonico.
Onofri first took up the baton in 2002.
“It was a natural consequence of my long job as concertmaster,” he explains.
He says his transition into the music of the Baroque era was prompted by the aesthetics of his childhood. “My father is a painter, my mother an antiquarian, so I grew up surrounded by painting, furniture and objects of the 17th and 18th centuries. That probably contributed to developing an attraction to Baroque music and more, in general, to the historical informed performances.”
Even so, Onofri says he keeps an open mind, and is not averse to dipping into other phases of musical evolution. “Actually I specialize in Baroque and classical music, but I’m very close also to previous and later repertoire performed in an historical way.”
While Onofri infuses his renditions with very here-and-now energies, he is strongly bonded with the roots of the material he performs. He cites Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who was known for his historically informed performances of music from the Classical era and earlier, and Hungarian-born chamber music violinist and conductor Végh Sandor as his initial formative sources of inspiration. He also tends to delve into the theory backdrop to his concert undertakings. “My most inspirational sources were the historical writings about violin and music in general – Baroque and classical vocal and instrumental treatises,” he states.
Onofri fell in love with Baroque and classical music at a very young age, and says that his childhood and teenage sounds of choice took in works by Bach, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart, “and Italian opera of course.” The hours he spent spinning discs by the early giants continue to color his work as a much-lauded professional. “The memories from childhood inform the approach to music of every musician, I think it’s a kind of imprinting,” he says.
The thematic phase of Baroque music of the Italian’s forthcoming concerts here is a natural fit, both on a personal and a professional level. “[High Baroque] is among my favorite repertoires,” he notes. “Moreover, a historically informed player cannot really understand how to play the late Baroque music if the Early Baroque is not deeply inside his DNA – especially the Italian Early Baroque.”
Performers and fans of classical music and, today, even jazz often debate the merits of rendering works in an accurately historical form, as opposed to bringing them a little more up to date by investing them with more contemporary sensibilities.
Despite his propensity for getting to grips with the fundaments of his craft, Onofri is very much a product of his time. He also incisively notes that, unlike other areas of art, it is simply impossible to replicate pre-recording device technology compositions as they once were. “Historical performance cannot be considered as an archeological way to perform music; it’s just an artistic hypothesis. We can restore a fresco or a Roman wall because we still have them, even if highly damaged. Finally we can affirm that the result is most probably close to the original state of the object.”
His more ephemeral profession, however, does not afford such reference points. “Music, on the contrary, doesn’t exist any longer once played. It’s just air which vibrates. We don’t really have the music of the past. We have just indications from the historical sources – sometimes with contradictions between them – and we have the scores, no more. Scores themselves don’t make any sound. Both music and sources need the mind and the soul of the performer to be converted into sounds.”
Onofri certainly has much to offer in that department.
The Italian says he is delighted to be back working with the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, and to have another opportunity to proffer some of the gems of an intriguing coalescent stage in the continuum of European musical development.
“The program is dedicated to the decadent style of Late Baroque. That means the epoch in which the different national styles started to mix up, creating an interesting pan-European melting pot,” Onofri explains. “Telemann’s Ouverture des Nations Anciennes et Modernes is dedicated to nations, especially the new rising north European states of the Baroque ages.” The work offers added entertainment value. “It’s a very funny piece, because the last ‘decadent’ movement – ‘The Old Ladies’ – is a joke about France, Italy and Spain, the old ladies of Europe.”
There is more in the way of cross-cultural offerings. “Ciaccona is one of the rare pieces by Corelli clearly influenced by French music. Handel is the composer who fused more Italian and French music.
He was German and he lived in the UK.”
Add to that Vivaldi’s “Il coro delle Muse,” which Onofri describes as “the overture of a lost cantata dedicated to the prince of Saxony during his visit to Venice, celebrating the glory of that nation,” and the inclusion of Concerto Grosso No. 1 in D major by Geminiani, an Italian composer who created French-style works and also relocated to England, and you have yourself a pretty eclectic program for next week’s concerts.
For tickets and more information: (02) 671-5888 ext. 1 and www.jbo.co.il