NEW YORK (AP) — William Christie, a conductor famend for Baroque performances, thought again to a 2014 telephone name from Nikolaus Lehnhoff, a yr earlier than the German director’s dying.
“‘I believe a ‘Tristan’ with Christie can be actually an important factor,’” Christie recalled Lehnhoff referencing Wagner’s opera. “I said: `That’s a bad joke.′ I said: `I’d be coming into an arena as a puny little boxer who doesn’t know sort of how to sort of box, someone who has no idea what all this is about. I’d be sliced to ribbons.′”
In a season celebrating his eightieth birthday this previous Dec. 14, Christie has no Wagner plans. He’s as busy as ever as a frontrunner of the period-instrument motion, conducting, enjoying the harpsichord, administering his Les Arts Florissants ensemble and educating at The Juilliard Faculty.
“He’s always brought his flair and say-so,” director Peter Sellars mentioned. “He was the chef de cuisine at a certain moment in history. You look at the personnel on all of his early recordings, and anybody who’s done anything came through the apprentissage in his kitchen.”
Christie’s 2024-25 season included a putting Robert Carsen staging of Rameau’s “Les Fêtes d’Hébé (The Festivities of Hebe)” at Paris’ Opéra-Comique. It moved the motion from 1739 to the up to date Élysée Palace and featured the French nationwide soccer workforce celebrating throughout a ballet, adopted by a closing scene on a Seine vacationer boat passing a glowing Eiffel Tower.
“I like mixing epochs visually and musically,” Christie mentioned. “I can remain I think true and faithful to the things that I think make my music eloquent: old instruments and being faithful I think to performance practice.”
Educating the subsequent technology
Christie has grow to be an elder statesman of the motion highlighting seventeenth and 18th century efficiency follow. Since 2007, he is supplied to Juilliard college students his data of Baroque articulation, subdued vibrato and decrease pitch.
“They eat through maybe eight to 15 different conductors a year and some of them I admire, and some of them I think are on the merry-go-round just because it’s fashionable and I wouldn’t have hired them,” he mentioned. “Some of them have, well, sort of very perverse ideas about French music, for example. And so I try to say to them, first of all, I’m here because for certain repertory I have at least better ideas than you individually, and I think I can sell them to you.”
He based Les Arts Florissants in 1979 to impart data he felt was getting ignored. He used his personal orchestra when he led Charpentier’s “Médée” on the Palais Garnier final spring.
“I worked with orchestras that have made me feel so awful and so low and so mean and miserable,” he mentioned. “Baroque orchestras are not (Sergei) Prokofiev or (Dmitri) Shostakovich orchestras. They’re not Ravel orchestras. They’re not Korngold orchestras. But then modern orchestras playing Mozart sometimes are hideous.” He provides that one “dug holes 6 feet under and buried Mozart.”
Emmanuel Resche-Caserta, Les Arts Florissants’ concertmaster since 2017, was unsure whether or not to stick with music, pursue political science or swap to artwork historical past earlier than he encountered Christie at Juilliard.
“If I can do music with this intensity that he is asking for, I can dedicate my life to it,” he mentioned. “I was very impressed by his natural charisma. He enters the concert hall or the rehearsal room. and we play differently because we want to please him.”
Christie based Le Jardin des Voix (Backyard of Voices) in 2002. Lea Desandre joined the academy in 2015 and has blossomed right into a star mezzo-soprano.
“He is a wonderful teacher because he knows so much, he reads so much,” she mentioned. “I feel like I have someone who’s going to put me in a very comfortable place, even if maybe was not a comfortable role for me.”
First encounter as youngster
Christie grew up in Williamsville, close to Buffalo, New York, after which South Wales. His mother, Ida, organized piano classes when he was 5 and performed the choir at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.
“And so when I was 7 or 8 years old, I heard Bach and I heard Handel and I heard Purcell and I heard Orlando Gibbons, and we sang 19th century hymns,” he mentioned. “It was a curious kind of childhood because I was playing sports, and summer vacations were down at the lake. But I already had this extraordinary idea of a different world.”
Christie first heard the harpsichord when he was 9 or 10 and his mother and her mom, Julia, took him to Handel’s “Messiah” on the Buffalo Philharmonic’s Kleinhans Music Corridor with conductor Josef Krips and Squire Haskin on the keyboard.
“He (Haskin) was part of this funny groupings of cultural people in cultural boondocks like rural New York, upstate New York,” Christie mentioned. “That was a great moment for me to hear this instrument that was going to be the center of my life.”
Christie took piano classes from age 12 with Laura Kelsey. His mother labored on the music retailer Denton, Cottier & Daniels, and in 1952, he grew to become fascinated by an Erato recording with French harpsichordist Laurence Boulay and soprano Nadine Sautereau of music by François Couperin.
“It sort of changed my life,” he mentioned.
Transferring to Europe
Christie acquired a Harvard undergraduate diploma in 1966 and a Yale grasp’s in 1969, then taught at Dartmouth. He moved to Europe within the fall of 1970 to keep away from the U.S. army draft, and in 1985 purchased a home within the Loire village of Thiré — the place he has created a grand backyard and launched a vocal academy. He gained French citizenship in 1995.
Christie does like music he isn’t recognized for. He calls “my secret life” enjoying Liszt’s “Transcendental Études” or Schubert. However these aren’t for public listening.
“I think myself what I would do differently,” he mirrored, “but I’m not courageous enough to say, all right, in the 2028 season William Christie is going to recycle and is going to start with Haydn and finish off with, I don’t know, how about Dvorak? How about Bruckner motets?”
