Baroque rocks into 21st century

By taking a radical approach to the staging of baroque music, the organisers of a series of performances hope to open it up to a whole new generation of audiences, writes Arminta Wallace.

'IF YOU LISTEN TO jazz, if you listen to Radiohead, if you listen to Arvo Pärt, you don't need any further introduction to this music. You're gonna put it on and you're gonna say - 'Where have you been all my life?' "

Eric Fraad is convinced that baroque music rocks, and is determined to stage it in a way which makes sense to 21st-century audiences. To this end, he and his partner, the soprano Caitríona O'Leary, have organised a series of three workshop-plus-performance packages which will see the Dublin-based early vocal music ensemble, eX, collaborate with some of the biggest names on the international baroque scene.

Thanks to funding from the Arts Council, Irish audiences can attend the resulting performances, and some master classes, free of charge. The first tranche of the programme took place last April and featured the lutenist Konrad Junghänel's take on German sacred music of the 17th and 18th centuries. The final instalment, planned for mid-October next, will see the Argentinian flautist Pedro Memelsdorff tackle the intricacies of the medieval vocal music known as the Ars Subtilior.

Meanwhile, at the end of this month, the conductor Christopher Hogwood, well known for his recordings with the Academy of Ancient Music and winner of a Diapason d'Or award for his recent CD of clavichord music, Secret Handel, will work with eX on a project called The Rape of the Lock. This original piece will combine the poetry of Alexander Pope with Handel's Italian duets - or, as Fraad prefers to put it, "smash" them together. Fraad has already "smashed" Handel with the French playwright Racine, as well as mounting a production of Messiah, which opened in a lunatic asylum, finished in a nightclub and featured costumes by the fashion designer Hussein Chalayan.

FRAAD'S RADICAL approach to the staging of baroque drama is balanced by O'Leary's interest in baroque style and vocal detail. She founded eX a couple of years ago when she came back to Ireland after living in New York. "I was very lucky there," she says. "I got to sing with great singers and musicians, and work with wonderful directors. When I came back here, I found that although people are working quite a lot on instrumental period style, there wasn't much going on in terms of early music singing." The workshops aim to develop the group's expertise, as well as broaden the audience for this kind of music in Ireland.

Besides O'Leary herself, eX is made up of singers from Poland, Italy, Scotland and Australia. "The name just came to me," says O'Leary. "In algebra, X stands for what you want it to be. It's also Latin for 'out of', so you get the idea not just of music of the past, but the idea that everything you do is a product of what you have experienced in life already." How does she define baroque singing? "The sound baroque instruments make is very different to modern instruments," she says. "So you have to make a sound that will complement that. You need to learn what kind of ornamentation to use, because it's not written out. And as with any music, you need to know the history of the text and how it relates to the culture of the time." She turns to Fraad. "Have I left anything out?" she asks.

"Fantasy," says Fraad firmly. "You have to add your imagination as well. I visited the museum at Handel's house in London a few years ago. I walked through it, and I said 'Handel could never have lived in this place'. There was no ingenuity, no spirit. It was like looking at an embalmed body in a casket. I can bet you Handel's house would have been like a rock star's residence. I was in Freddie Mercury's house many times when he was alive. He lived like a pasha - and that's how Handel was. He was a superstar."

Fraad questions the convention that oratorios should not be staged. Questioning convention is, in fact, a hallmark of his work as a producer and director. In New York, he co-founded the companies Opera at the Academy and The Baroque Opera Institute, working with such early music pioneers as the conductor William Christie and the countertenor Derek Lee Ragin.

After meeting O'Leary and coming to live in Dublin, he ran The Ark, an experience he says he thoroughly enjoyed. But he's clearly relishing the prospect of applying his vivid imagination to the various aspects of baroque music which the eX programme will explore.

"What is an oratorio, anyhow?" he asks. "What is a concert, for that matter? How far can one stretch these words? When the early music movement began in the 1960s we used to call it 'birkenstock baroque' - they all wore those sandals, you know. But today the interpretation is wilder. People are taking the music and making it their own. It's really fired up; and when you hear it performed in that way, it puts the music back into it."

O'LEARY, WHO HAS recorded both early music and traditional Irish music, is also well used to crossing musical boundaries. And few works challenge our pre-conceptions as much as the medieval avant-garde music known as the Ars Subtilior, she says. "It usually has three parts set against each other in such a contrasting way, and so syncopated, that it's almost jazz-like. It's very difficult music technically - so much so, that early 20th-century music historians decided it was probably just an intellectual exercise, never meant to be performed and enjoyed by audiences."

Irish audiences will get a chance to try it out for size in the autumn; but first, there's The Rape of the Lock. How did Fraad persuade Christopher Hogwood, who has written a much-praised biography of Handel, to take on this somewhat unusual Handel-Pope hybrid? "We proposed a few programmes for Christopher to do," he says. "He made it clear that his interest was in doing a performance with us. First we said, 'Let's start with Byrd and do the transition from the English Renaissance through to the early English baroque' - which seemed like the right thing to do because he's an expert on English music. But he said, 'I'm really not interested in doing that'.

"So then we said, 'Well, what about Handel duets? Let's do a concert'. And he said, 'I'm not interested in doing that either'. He really wanted to get down and do a performance. To take this mock-epic poem by Pope, and smash it together with these duets to create this dark underbelly - this subtext where they resonate to create something that comes together in a musical, theatrical way."

Innovative, he adds, but not as radical as some Handelians might fear. "In the 18th century there was no copyright, so there was a lot of, let's say, recycling. If somebody grabbed your melody you had to do it again and bill it as new and improved. So a lot of these Handel pieces ended up as choruses in Messiah and so on. They're emotionally seductive and so beautiful." O'Leary nods. "They're exquisite," she says.

The Rape of the Lock, based on Handel's Italian duets, with eX, conducted by Christopher Hogwood and directed by Eric Fraad, in association with the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, is at Ss Michael and John's, 15-19 West Essex Street, Temple Bar, on Friday at 8pm. Tonight there will be a masterclass in the Boydell Room in the department of music, TCD at 6.30pm