Authentic baroque performance is energising young performers

AT A recent BBC Proms concert, a French choir and orchestra named Pygmalion performed Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, a baroque masterpiece. The audience can be forgiven for not being well-acquainted with the performers: Pygmalion was founded only 10 years ago. 

“We were kids!” said Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion’s founder and conductor, in the Proms programme notes, referring to the group’s early days. Indeed. Mr Pichon is still only 32 years old. Even more remarkably, Pygmalion is only one of many new groups specialising in baroque performance. This year’s Proms alone featured 10 ensembles dedicated to baroque music.

That’s a remarkable change from just a generation ago. For most of the 20th century, symphony orchestras had a near-monopoly on baroque music, which they performed in a rather bombastic style that bore little resemblance to the way Monteverdi, Johann Sebastian Bach and other baroque masters performed their own music in the 17th and 18th centuries. But in a classical-music version of the...Continue reading