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Co-founded by Giovanni Antonini, an Italian conductor and recorder/Baroque flute soloist, Il Giardino Armonico became one of the best known of the period-instrument ensembles from the 1970s and ’80s that sought to revolutionize how Baroque and even earlier music was understood and interpreted. Using period instruments and historically informed performance techniques, these groups sought a sound that was much closer to how works from those periods would have sounded originally, and perhaps more important, one that came across as more contemporary and appealing to then 20th-century and now 21st-century ears.
While Antonini, 58, continues to be most closely associated with the Milan-based Il Giardino Armonico, to which he devotes about half his time, he also guest conducts regularly, bringing his ideas about early performance wherever he goes. And so it will be May 4-6 and 9, when he leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a program devoted entirely to the celebrated Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi.
Featured will be what Antonini calls “two great masterpieces of Vivaldi’s sacred music”: the composer’s Magnificat and Gloria. Both were written in the early 18th century when the composer served as director of music at an orphanage for girls, Ospedale della Pietà, and later adapted for a more traditional mix of male and female voices. Also on the program are the CSO’s first performances of Vivaldi’s Kyrie and the Sinfonia from La Senna festeggiante, a kind of cantata for vocal soloists and orchestra. The guest soloists will be sopranos Amanda Forsythe and Yulia Van Doren and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke.
When he leads a modern-instrument ensemble like the CSO, the conductor tries to at least temporarily instill some of his historically informed ideas about articulations and other elements of the music, but he knows the result will be a kind of mix of the two performing approaches. “It’s not what I would have in mind if I would perform with Il Giardino,” he said. “But if there is the chemistry, and if the meeting between musicians from different backgrounds is good, like I hope and think it will be, the result will be a third thing — probably no more Chicago Symphony sound as if they were to perform Mahler, and of course, not a period-instrument ensemble.”
After more than 35 years, Antonini doesn’t think Il Giardino Armonico has changed that much, though, of course, some of the personnel is different. He continues the research into historical performance practices that made the group sound quite new at the time it was founded, especially in the realm of Italian Baroque music. “Even today, when we are doing less Vivaldi but more Haydn, for example, we continue developing on the same path that we started in 1985,” he said.
Unlike the 1970s and ’80s when there was considerable friction and sometimes even resentment between the modern- and period-instrument worlds, Antonini said the latter has now been almost entirely accepted. “I have to say that I miss this feeling of discovery, of proposing things that in that time were quite new and for some people even shocking,” he said, pointing to the once-new ways that the group played Vivaldi, experimenting with dynamics and other elements. “In a sense,” he said, “I miss this ability to be outsiders.”
Indeed, so successful has the period-instrument movement been, Antonini said, audiences more and more expect that Baroque and even Classical-era composers like Mozart and Haydn will be performed on period instruments or at least in a historically informed style. “Of course, not all the ensembles are the same but, for sure, there is quite a huge difference between a modern orchestra, for example, and a baroque ensemble,” he said.
Because the approach has become so mainstream, he worries that the playing of some period-instrument ensembles (he hopes Il Giardino Armonico is an exception) has become a bit staid and routine. “I have to say that sometimes I find more interest from the modern players to discover something new than the period-instrument ensembles, which in a way are established,” he said. He praised, for example, the Oslo Philharmonic, which during a February concert enthusiastically embraced his approach to Haydn and Mozart, because for many of the musicians it was new and interesting. “So there is a kind of crossing directions,” Antonini said. “We are in a strange moment.”
One of Antonini’s most ambitious undertakings has been the Haydn2032 project, which consists of recording all 106 of Haydn’s symphonies in time for the 300th anniversary of the composer’s birth (in 2032). Collaborating with Il Giardino Armonico and Kammerorchester Basel, of which he is principal guest conductor, the conductor is more than halfway through the undertaking, with Vol. 14 next to be released on the Alpha Classics label.
Though Haydn’s name is certainly known, the conductor believes the composer remains under-appreciated. He points to the typical placement of Haydn symphonies at the beginning of a program, where they are too often treated like a “warm-up” for the later compositions by Mahler or Shostakovich, which are seen as the “real music, the true music.” “This for me is really a mistake, because musicians sometimes think Haydn is easy. And maybe it can be in terms of notes, but Haydn is very difficult.”
Antonini called Haydn2023 a great experience that has produced some “incredible discoveries.” With the exception of perhaps 20 or so of the symphonies which are regularly performed, the rest are more rarely heard. “Of course, not all the symphonies by Haydn are masterpieces, but in each one, I always find something,” he said. “The more I start to study and I start rehearsals, these pieces are transformed before my eyes and ears, because there are aspects in Haydn’s music that are quite hidden. You have to discover them. Haydn is not like Mozart where it is so appealing right from the first moment.”
