A player for all seasons

String playing was stagnant in the 1960s, but now musicians are allowed to 'have their own character', veteran early music violinist Monica Huggett tells Michael Dervan.

Monica Huggett was one of the players at the very heart of the period performance boom of the 1970s, when the very mention of "original instruments" was treated as an automatic boost to sales of concert tickets and recordings.

"I went to the Royal Academy of Music when I was 16 and when I was 19 Chris Hogwood started his Academy of Ancient Music, and he was casting around for players," she says. "An old friend of mine, I think a Northern Irish woman, name of Eleanor Sloane (who I'd met in a string quartet playing in pizza restaurants) said, 'Oh, you should play the baroque violin.' She'd studied with Eduard Melkus in Vienna, and she said, 'Your style would suit.'

"She lent me this funny old fiddle we used to call the black box. I liked the sound immediately. I liked the mellowness," she stretches the word out as she speaks, "and the sweetness. I had a good technique. I was a very efficient modern fiddle player. So I started to play. I did one or two sessions on the very first record Chris Hogwood made. I sort of just went straight into it, without any training.

"Then, as the years progressed, I realised I was getting a reputation as a specialist, and I thought I should study a bit. So I did courses with Sigiswald Kuijken, and read some books. You know, it was very much like a constant seminar in those days.

"Between 1972 and 1982, I suppose, every time we got together for Chris Hogwood or whoever, people would come along and say 'Have you tried these strings?', or 'Have you seen this music?', or 'I've got this table of Tartini's ornaments.' It was fascinating and very stimulating."

She had rejected what she calls the "anonymity" of playing in a symphony orchestra explaining: "Most of the time if I played in any symphony orchestra, I couldn't hear myself. I didn't make a very big sound on the modern violin. I didn't like to hit it very hard. I used to play in a group that did things like Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time.I did quite a lot of contemporary music when I was young - and when we played with a nine-foot grand, it just felt ridiculous. I just felt like 'How can I possibly compete?' I didn't like having to play so heavy and what I felt was rough."

She recalls a televised master class with Yehudi Menuhin which she got a chance to view again recently. "You can see that I'm a kind of baroque violinist in waiting, really. There's a bit more vibrato, but everything about the articulation and the phrasing and the architecture of it was much more baroque than modern. And Menuhin hated it, absolutely hated it, wanted me to be much more sustained and so on. I should never have been on that programme. It was chalk and cheese.

"I like lots of articulation. I like a lighter sound. I don't know why. It's just one of those things. So when I started playing baroque music, I was drawn to the instrument more than the music. I wouldn't say that I was particularly a baroque fanatic at that time. I loved classical music, I loved Mozart, that was my favourite when I was an undergraduate. Of course, you get into baroque music and you play more and more of it. And in fact, late baroque music pushes into early classical, and there's quite a lot of crossover.

"It is that lovely, simple melodic sense - the first Mozart concerto, the one in B flat, is very rococo, and not so different from what Vivaldi was writing. Then, later on, I discovered all this lovely 17th century stuff, playing Biber and Marini. It's just wonderful, it's very immediate, and the audiences love it."

The man she calls "the most influential musician in my life" was not actually any of her formal teachers, but the conductor and keyboard player Ton Koopman, whose Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra she led from 1980 to 1987. "I think I was like a sponge. I can't remember him saying 'you should do this or you should do that' but I heard what he did on the harpsichord, I heard what he did with very flexible phrasing and tons of dynamics.

"The Hogwood approach was 'let's clean off the old varnish and let the bright colours come out.' But Hogwood is not a hugely passionate musician.

"Ton really wanted to grab the audience by the collar and get that music off the stage. I just loved that. Because when I was a kid I liked rock music. I believe in the visceral aspects of music and I'd never come across somebody in classical music who had that before I worked with him." She explains Koopman's approach as "the next step" after the early music movement's chapter-and-verse concern for correctness had run its course.

"He grew up with that language, which was Gustav Leonhardt's language. He studied with Leonhardt and they didn't get on at all.

"But I think because he grew up with that language he could feel free to express himself within that language. The earlier generation had to spend a lot of time and energy not imposing the modern language. It was very difficult for them to throw out the modern language, clean it all up, and then put back natural expression. I think he felt completely at home in baroque music. He didn't feel as if he had to inhibit anything."

There was a feeling in the 1970s and 1980s that period performance would stage a kind of takeover by elimination, that Beethoven's piano sonatas, for instance, would be parted from the modern concert grand, and that the music of Mozart and Haydn would be left to historical specialists.

It hasn't worked out that way. The specialists have retained their cachet, but what's happened within the mainstream has been a kind of modification by absorption rather than a takeover. Key specialists - most notably the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt - have brought period-performance concerns into the very heart of the musical establishment, by performing and recording with the world's leading orchestras.

Period-performance concerns have filtered freely into the world of chamber music too.

Period concerns still don't play much part in most performers' early musical training. In that sense, things have not changed radically since Monica Huggett first played for Christopher Hogwood. But nowadays there are courses in the music colleges, and many performers take period performance as a second study.

"It may not have been what I dreamed of when I was 25," says Huggett, "but, actually, it's been a good thing. It's been a bit like a renaissance of string playing for me. When I was a kid, everyone who came out of Juilliard sounded the same. I remember hearing a recording of Heifetz playing Mozart when he was a young man and when he was an old man, and it hadn't changed in any respect whatsoever. Every single bowing, every single shift was exactly the same. For the performer, it's so boring."

In the 1960s, she feels: "String playing had got very stagnant, whereas at the beginning of the 20th century you could listen to a violinist and say that's Heifetz, or that's Mischa Elman, or Kreisler. In the 1960s you could listen to violinists and not tell the difference.

"Now, violinists are again allowed to have their own character, and make their own sounds."

She sees the period-instruments training, even as a second study, as being "very good for them. Even if they carry on as a modern musician it's very good to have a little training, because it makes them stylistically so much more aware. For a lot of people it wouldn't be possible, and it won't be possible for a long time, to only play baroque instrument."

She instances the Irish violinist and IBO member Sarah Moffatt. "She's really committed to baroque, but she does pick up a modern fiddle to earn some money."

She expresses a more widespread concern about the ratio of performers emerging from music colleges to the amount of work that's actually available. "I have such huge problems with the concept of all these colleges cramming as many students as they possibly can, and then these students leaving after four years and there's no work."

She suggests a solution: "The model of the Leipzig town musicians at the time of Bach is the model for the future. In Dublin you would have a core of musicians who you could call on - all of them - to play a big symphony, Mahler or Bruckner, or whatever. But then the double bass players would play jazz, the fiddle players would play bluegrass, they'd play Irish music, they'd play klezmer, they'd play opera, they'd play musicals. I think that's the only future. I think symphony orchestras drain so much money from the system it's unfair." There's probably more of that crossover going on than she realises, but more the outcome of personal initiative than official policy.

There's a long, long pause, when I ask for her thoughts on music education in Ireland. She has familiarity with life on both sides of the border. She's given some classes at the DIT Conservatory as well as playing with the IBO, and her brother Stephen - yes, an Englishman - is a Sinn Féin councillor on Fermanagh District Council.

"The problem which hits me face on is trying to keep Irish musicians in Ireland. I think a lot of them would love to be in Ireland, the ones who live in London. What's needed is some kind of framework whereby they could have more regular income, and if they had more regular income they could be training people as well. I suppose the other thing would be to attract some big name teachers. It's difficult. There's lots of talent here. There's no doubt about it. There's bags of talent. It's the trickle of constant performance opportunities which is needed, and to build up audiences."

She gives no sign of ever having had any regrets about her own career choices. "I got to play music from the end of the 16th century, all the lovely 17th century stuff, the whole of the 18th century, and I've done quite a lot of 19th century. I've done a lot of Mendelssohn, dabbled in Brahms, I've done Schubert. That's actually broader than what people in a symphony orchestra do. I think I've got a little bit of a historian in me, not very well developed, but you know, when you dip back into the 16th century you can't even begin to play that music without some awareness of the structure of society and things like that. I think it's very interesting, because it's almost like it's a story all the time.

"You have to have a feel for the instrument to be able to play on gut strings, because the bowing is so important, so much more important in a way than the left hand, with all the speaking tones, and the articulation, and the little swells, that kind of stuff. I think, for me, it was a very wise option, because I got to play lots of different music and I'm easily bored."

Monica Huggett plays Vivaldi's Four Seasons in an all-Vivaldi programme with the Irish Baroque Orchestra at the National Concert Hall on Wednesday 8th at 8pm. Details and booking: 01-4170000