Currently Featured CD


 

© Steve Sherman

Nic's Biography
Quick Nic Facts
Articles by Nic

You don't have to meet Nicholas McGegan to know his personality is irrepressible: That quality is central to his music-making, in the rhythmic bounce, tempos that border on the reckless and the musical wit that bubbles up whenever appropriate, whether in performance or on disc. "But that doesn't mean I'm not serious," says the conductor, who has also explored the depths of tragedy with the heroes and heroines of Handel operas: "I'm serious about things that matter, but I'm not pious, if you know what I mean."

McGegan has been a remarkably durable presence amid the shifting winds of historically-informed performance in the world of baroque music, making his name with a healthy respect for—but a certain distance from—the early-music tastemakers of his native England during long-term appointments with San Francisco's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (which was named Musical America’s 2004 Ensemble of the Year), Germany's International Handel-Festival Göttingen, Sweden's Drottningholm Theatre, The Milwaukee Symphony and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Some of his most successful collaborations, however, have been with iconoclastic individualists such as choreographer Mark Morris, with whom he has collaborated regularly over the past decade on the path-breaking productions L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Platée, and Dido and Aeneas. If some of his greatest successes have been with early operas previously not thought to be stage worthy (he rediscovered and revived Philidor's Tom Jones, for one), it's because he has a bemused affection for plots others might think absurd, and has participated in their staging, drawing on his study of baroque-period gestures.

He appears on more than 100 recordings, a significant number of them with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for Harmonia Mundi USA, part of a series of pioneering Handel recordings which includes the Grammy-nominated, Gramophone Award-winning Susanna. He attributes much of this success to working with singers who share his sense of musical adventure, such as Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Lisa Saffer. He encourages his singers to improvise their own ornaments and cadenzas, though he holds no one to slavish ideas of correct performance, which he describes as "an ongoing inquiry."

He believes, in fact, that there are any number of routes to a kind of performance that's both sympathetic to the music and communicates with modern ears. And one of those routes is conventional-instrument orchestras. He's one of the few baroque specialists to regularly conduct the world’s major orchestras, including those of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, Washington, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Göteborg Symphony Orchestra, and Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Conducting modern instruments now takes up 80 percent of his time.

"I try not to come as a prophet of early music, saying, `no vibrato this week and I'm going to preach to you for a half hour because you don't know how to play this stuff and I do.' That's a great way to alienate an orchestra. And it's quite interesting in those circumstances to do Rameau, who is stranger than most baroque composers because the music was actually written for large orchestra and doesn't have a harpsichord in it. Also, every orchestra has its own personality and you have to go with it and adapt to it. For one week, you're having to live together, and it's not a one-way ticket."

There's also a practical side to these guest engagements: While an orchestra's brass and percussion are playing holiday pops concerts, McGegan enlists the string players to perform an appropriately pared-down Baroque program. In large-hall settings, he's careful to avoid Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, but finds that "certain pieces by Corelli are infinitely expandable."

In the standard repertoire, McGegan, like many musicians who arise from a specialist background, has his share of un-received wisdom. "I conducted Hansel and Gretel in San Francisco, and it's a wonderful opera though it's usually done with the lightness of Christmas pudding. I did take notice of the metronome markings; it was faster and a bit dance-y. I suppose I took it to the fat farm."

His non-baroque repertoire is also selective: "I tend to go for the clean-limbed 20th-century music, more than the high romantics. But I love Mendelssohn and the Viennese classics. I've done all the Beethoven symphonies and all the big Schuberts, a lot of the major Mozarts and a great number of Haydn symphonies. My favorite piece in the world is The Marriage of Figaro. I don't suppose anybody will ever ask me to conduct the Ring cycle, but I'd love to do Tristan und Isolde. Vaughan Williams is fun, but I don't think I'll ever conduct Liszt or Delius." Inevitably, his concerts juxtapose periods more frequently these days, with Bach suites rubbing shoulders with the Bartok Divertimento. He's conducting more ethnic-flavored music by Peter Sculthorpe and Alberto Ginastera. Gilbert & Sullivan occupy a particularly honored place in his repertoire.

Educated at Cambridge and Oxford, McGegan participated in some of the earliest authentic-performance recordings during the 1970s as a baroque flutist, including Christopher Hogwood's seminal recordings of Mozart symphonies. Early on, though, America became a strong base for McGegan in situations allowing him various opportunities for experimentation. While in residence at Washington University in St. Louis, McGegan produced baroque opera using simulated candlelight, and discovered that the repeated da capo arias so often thought to be un-theatrical could be perfectly riveting amid a flickering stage environment. (This later proved to be particularly popular in productions at Göttingen). The University of Maryland afforded him opportunities to explore little-known regions of Handel's major operas with important, U.S.-based singers. All the while, he also developed his conducting technique, which at one point entailed the use of a pencil as a baton, which came out of practicality given that he was constantly marking his scores. The received wisdom that Handel's operas are trivial and the oratorios are profound was roundly debunked by McGegan's production of Handel's early Teseo at the Pepsico Summerfare Festival, proving that young Handel wasn't less-realized Handel. "It's some of the best stuff," he says.

Since then, he has spent more than 20 years with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, founded the chamber-music group, The Arcadian Academy, and was principal guest conductor of the Scottish Opera, principal conductor of Sweden's Drottningholm Theatre, and Baroque Series Director and Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Along the way he has collected a number of honors, including an honorary degree from the Royal College of Music in London, the prestigious Handel Prize from the Halle Handel Festival in Germany, the honorary medal of the Friends of the Drottningholm Theatre, and an Honorary Professorship of Philosophy from Georg-August University in Göttingen. In 2010 Mr. McGegan was made an OBE, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, “for service to music overseas.”

Amid such galloping eminence, McGegan has graduated from conducting with a pencil. "I don't use anything now. I don't need to. Now I see that each finger can be used. If I'm doing a piece in which I have to bounce between time signatures such as 7/8 and 9/8, which means you're beating time terrifically, I'd consider using a baton. But I love to watch how Pierre Boulez does it without one."