Refiner's Fire

2

THE PIPER AND THE LYREBIRD

The original Academy of Ancient Music was born at the Crown and Anchor on the Strand. Its reincarnation was conceived one night in 1972 in another pub, and it's one of the quirks of memory that we now no longer know which one. The new group had two parents: both are now dead. But what Christopher Hogwood did say is that he'd met the Decca record producer Peter Wadland, more or less by chance, at a concert at Carlton House given by the clarinettist Alan Hacker. It rings true: Hacker (1938-2012) was leading the revival of the basset clarinet, and a programme of late-classical or early-romantic chamber music - such as Hacker promoted with his ensemble The Music Party - is exactly the sort of thing that would have piqued the interest of both men. They exchanged names and met again soon afterwards at a recording session conducted by Neville Marriner with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF).1

Again, the exact date and details are uncertain. Hogwood, a man who valued precise scholarship, was self-effacingly vague about the birth of his own orchestra. Possibly it was one of the sessions for Vivaldi's L'estro armonico, between 26 July and 26 October 1972, on which Hogwood played both organ and harpsichord continuo. Marriner's virtuoso chamber orchestra was in high demand, recording almost monthly for EMI and Philips, as well as for Decca and its subsidiary Argo. But it's Decca that concerns us here, and the Vivaldi sessions took place in St John's Smith Square. '[Wadland] came to that, and after, we went for a drink,' Hogwood told the musicologist Nick Wilson in 2003.2 There were various pubs in the grid of streets that makes up that particular corner of Westminster. The Marquis of Granby has been suggested. But what is certain - at least, as Hogwood recalled it - is that Wadland made the proposal.

He said, since you play with that group [the Academy of St Martin in the Fields], would it be possible to conceive of a period group of about the same size playing to anything like that standard? Rather foolishly, I said, 'Yes!' Not so much because I knew the English players could, but I could see that the Dutch and the Viennese had - I could see no reason why we couldn't.3

Christopher Hogwood was given to understatement. Wadland, at twenty-six, was already a shrewd judge of artists and individuals, and in taking Hogwood out for a drink it's unlikely that he expected the answer to be no. He'd perceived that Hogwood, who turned thirty-one during the course of those Vivaldi sessions, was uniquely placed to give him an informed and honest answer. Hogwood's family heritage was scientific; his father had been a physicist, and when Christopher went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read Classics in Michaelmas Term 1960, his ultimate ambition was to be an archaeologist.4 Within weeks, he was on a very different path. He'd learned the piano at home in Nottingham - the harpsichord had been a subject of curiosity but little more. But as early as Cambridge University Music Club's freshers' concert, on 29 October 1960, he'd appeared in public as a harpsichordist, playing with fellow students in a Telemann trio sonata. Three weeks later, in another CUMC concert, he was providing harpsichord continuo again - this time in what he described as the 'first modern performance' of a Handel sonata for two flutes.5

Already, his love of discovery - and his flair for translating that excitement into performance - was taking a recognisable shape. Christopher's first two years at Cambridge saw him playing Stravinsky's Sonata for Two Pianos, singing madrigals on the River Cam, directing a student wind band in Richard Strauss and Gabrieli, and conducting a production of Sullivan's Cox and Box. And, of course, taking every possible opportunity to perform on the harpsichord, whether solo or as a continuo player. 'Surely the Music Faculty's harpsichord had never been so busy,' comments the musicologist Elizabeth Roche, whose husband Jerome was a Cambridge contemporary (and, as a fellow student, a frequent musical collaborator). That Christopher was not a Music undergraduate was immaterial: at Cambridge, as at Oxford, a vigorous undergraduate musical life has always thrived entirely independently of academic supervision. That autonomy can even be an advantage. As Roche puts it, the undergraduate Hogwood was

an immensely stimulating presence, both musically and intellectually - a fine practical musician who, not being preoccupied with preparing for stiff exams in harmony and counterpoint, or producing a comprehensive folio of compositions, was able to take a broader, and often thought-provoking, approach to all sorts of musical matters. In particular his enquiring and adventurous - and where earlier music was concerned, notably forward-looking - spirit often enabled him to widen horizons by introducing his friends and acquaintances to then unusual repertory both old and new, and developing ideas spanning a wide range of interests not by any means limited to music.6

'Anyone who did not know him to be officially a Classicist could easily have taken it for granted that he was one of the Music Faculty's most talented - and versatile - students,' she observes.

It was also his fortune to be an undergraduate at a time when the tone of the Music Faculty was set by Robert ('Bob') Thurston Dart (1921-1971), the virtuoso harpsichordist and musicologist who would become Professor of Music at the University in 1962. Hogwood took lessons with Dart, and came to see him as a mentor - James Bowman thought that Dart was a decisive influence in his decision to become a professional musician.7 The outwardly gruff Dart could be intensely supportive and inspiring to those who shared his enthusiasms, and his personal collection of historic instruments was itself a source of inspiration to those of a similar mindset. Hogwood's friend and fellow Pembroke undergraduate David Munrow was already a superb recorder player (although, like Hogwood, he wasn't a Music undergraduate - he was reading English). The sight of a crumhorn hanging on the wall of Dart's study prompted him to take his next step into what was then called early music.8

But that was (and is) one of the special qualities of a collegiate university: its ability to connect the lay enthusiast and the academic expert; to jolt the curious out of their academic ruts and to provide a constant, fertilising milieu of unexpected personal relationships. Another important presence at Cambridge at that time was Raymond Leppard, the conductor, composer and harpsichordist. He lectured at Trinity College from 1958 to 1968, and was in the process of leading the post-war rediscovery of Monteverdi with a lavish and controversial new edition of L'incoronazione di Poppea, presented at Glyndebourne in 1962.

And then there was the harpsichordist Mary Potts (1905-1982), in whose capacious, welcoming home Hogwood lodged for several years. He was not alone. Munrow had digs there, the harpsichord-builder Trevor Beckerleg started out in Potts's basement, and contemporaries recall a constant traffic of musical young people through her house at 54 Bateman Street - eager to play her historic instruments, and to absorb the experience and expertise of a woman who had learned her art in the 1920s from Arnold Dolmetsch, one of the founding figures of the early-music revival.9

Hogwood, too, was forming musical relationships that would shape his future career, and his future orchestra. Konrad Schiemann sang in the choir at Pembroke College. He recollects,

after some rather bibulous choir supper, retiring to the Dean's room with Christopher. He wasn't in the choir, but he was there because he came to musical events, and so he'd been invited to the supper, and afterwards we made music. I remember singing the part of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni; it was all rather jolly. But years later, Christopher said, 'Well, the person who introduced me to Mozart opera was Konrad, who sang this part.' And so I feel this is part of my limited contribution to the musical life of the country.

(It's something of an understatement; Schiemann would become a long-serving director and supporter of the Academy of Ancient Music.)

In June 1963, meanwhile, Hogwood conducted a CUMC performance of Walton's Façade. The ensemble included the future conductors Christopher Seaman and David Atherton, and the concert was presided over by a choral scholar from King's College, Simon Standage, who was already making a name as a violinist.10 That relationship, too, would have long-term consequences. 'I played with him a lot - well, with his orchestra at Pembroke College, anyway,' recalls Standage. 'And then I went abroad for about six years, and when I came back he was playing with David Munrow in the Early Music Consort.' Another King's chorister, the bass David Thomas, recalls singing in a performance at Pembroke of Handel's Acis and Galatea, with Hogwood on harpsichord and Munrow on sopranino recorder, 'which was very funny'.

Pembroke contacts would prove useful in 1964 when, after finishing his undergraduate degree, Hogwood won a British...