Baroque soul
Both the music profession and the public rank her as one of today’s greatest Baroque violinists. Many of her recordings have won prizes, and her students rave about her; but if there exist artists who are not tempted by professorial and star allure, then Rachel Podger is certainly one of them. She gives her first concert in Budapest at the end of November. “I’m not a purist,” she stated in an interview with the BBC. “I like the Baroque orchestral set-up and it’s great if a person has a fine Italian violin, but the choice of instrument is a personal decision. The player should be happy with the instrument. That is most important!”
Happiness. This is arguably the essence of the art of Rachael Podger. The happiness that playing music gives to her and, through her instrument, she transmits to her audience in a quite magical manner. She truly is no purist, because although she plays exclusively music written prior to 1800, and she has no modern violin at home, the musicological ‘armour’ never suppresses her musical instincts. Her mother is German – she spent part of her childhood in Germany – while her father was a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and took part in numerous projects by John Eliot Gardiner. In other words, during the 1980s Rachael Podger experienced a musical awakening with the results of historically informed performance practice in her ears. She was always attracted to the Baroque violin throughout her student years, disproving that once-held belief that only people who are technically not fully mature become Baroque instrumentalists.
In her student days she co-founded The Palladian Ensemble, known for its energy-packed concerts and recordings. The ensemble went on to attract the attention of many early music ‘big guns’; for instance, Trevor Pinnock, who in 1997 invited Rachel Podger to be concertmaster of The English Concert. Her fi rst disc features Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin – few are brave enough to undertake this at such an early stage in their career. Since then she has appeared on many recordings as a member of The English Concert. She has held the directorship of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment since 2004. She has taught at the London Royal Academy, the Royal Danish Academy of Music, and she is currently professor at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. When her schedule permits she spends time at home in Brecon, South Wales, where she lives with her two children and her partner and fellow musician Tim Cronin.
Rachel Podger (Photo: Jonas Sacks)
This is where she founded the Brecon Baroque ensemble and the Baroque music festival, which is far more than a pure music programme: it is a real community event. The fact is Rachel Podger considers the human aspect of music far more important. “While preparing, one has to extract everything possible from the score and oneself,” she says of the preparatory phase, “but when we play together with other people, then that is not a pure replication of what is on paper. One can never know what will happen.” She looks on Bach, Telemann and Pisendel not as old gentlemen in wigs who gaze out stony faced from dusty secondary school singing books, but people of fl esh and blood, full of thoughts that can be mediated through their music. This is why she considers it essential to have knowledge of the period context, since in a broader sense music is a part of culture: if you want to understand the music, you have to understand the medium in which it grew. Rachel Podger is not a simple Baroque violinist, rather she is a time traveller who has visited the 17th and 18th centuries on numerous occasions and allowed the period to imbue her soul.
Gergely Fazekas