|
 |
|
© 2005 David M. Allen |
Nic's Profile
Quick Nic Facts
Articles by Nic
Nicholas McGegan is loved by audiences and orchestras
for performances that match authority with enthusiasm, scholarship
with joy, and curatorial responsibility with evangelical exuberance.
The London Independent calls him “one of the finest baroque
conductors of his generation” and The New Yorker lauds him as “an
expert in 18th-century style.”
Through nearly twenty-five years its music director,
McGegan has established the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque
Orchestra as the leading period performance band in America - and at
the forefront of the 'historical' movement worldwide thanks to
notable appearances at Carnegie Hall, the London Proms, the
Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the International Handel Festival,
Gottingen where he has been artistic director since 1991.
In Gottingen and with the Philharmonia Baroque he has
defined an approach to period style that sets the current standard:
probing, serious but undogmatic, recognising that the music of the
past doesn't belong in a museum or in academia but in vigorous
engagement with an audience, for pleasure and delight on both sides
of the platform edge.
'If Nicholas McGegan is conducting', wrote the Los
Angeles Times, 'closing your eyes means missing something vital.
Other conductors may interpret baroque scores as plains of sewing
machine rhythms and textures; McGegan finds in them rivulets,
courses, hairpin turns and breezes gusting through valleys and up
and around mountains... At every move, his musicians respond
instantly, fluidly, and the music springs into life and stays
alive'.
Active in opera as well as the concert hall, he was
principal conductor of Sweden's perfectly preserved 18th-century
theatre Drottingholm 1993-6, running the annual festival there. And
he has been a pioneer in the process of exporting historically
informed practice beyond the small world of period instruments to
the wider one of conventional symphonic forces, guest-conducting
orchestras like the Concertgebouw, Suisse Romande, Halle, Chicago,
Cleveland and Philadelphia, St. Louis, Toronto, and Sydney
Symphonies, and the New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong
Philharmonics, as well as opera companies like Covent Garden, San
Francisco, Santa Fe and Washington.
His discography of over 100 releases includes the
world premiere recording of Handel's Susanna, which attracted
both a Gramophone Award and Grammy nomination, and recent issues of
the same composer's Solomon, Samson, and Acis and
Galatea (a rarity in that it unearths the little-known version
adapted by Felix Mendelssohn). He is also credited with the first
performance in
modern times of Handel's masterly but mislaid
Gloria. And he has broken new ground in experimental
dance-collaborations with Mark Morris, notably at festivals like
Edinburgh, Ravinia and the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York.
Mr. McGegan is committed to the next generation of
musicians, frequently conducting and coaching students in
residencies as part of the music programs at Yale and Juilliard.
Born in England, Nicholas McGegan was educated at
Cambridge and Oxford and taught at the Royal College of Music,
London. In 2010 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE)
“for services to music overseas.” His awards also include the Halle
Handel Prize, an honorary professorship at Georg-August University,
Gottingen, and an official Nicholas McGegan Day, declared by the
Mayor of San Francisco in recognition of two decades' distinguished
work with the Philharmonia Baroque.
The citation on that curious day talked loftily of
his achievement in presenting 'great music that enriches lives,
inspires passion for period instrument performance, connects
audiences to history, preserves tradition, and celebrates creative
genius'.
But as McGegan himself said when a journalist talked
admiringly of his work with an orchestra: 'I'm not working with
them. I'm having fun with them'. It makes a difference.
Visit Nicholas McGegan on the web
at
www.nicholasmcgegan.com.
Last updated June 2010
|
