Paul McCreesh: Passionate about Bach

Paul McCreesh has joined the ranks of those who think the great choral works were written with single-voice choruses in mind. He tells Nick Kimberley why small is beautiful

For the period instrument movement, the journey from margins to mainstream has been short. Little more than 20 years ago, it was almost revolutionary to propose that music from the 17th and 18th centuries worked best on instruments which the composers themselves would have recognised, be they the originals or carefully crafted replicas. Now hardly anyone bats an eye at the suggestion.

One of the things that has changed in the process is that no period-instrument practitioner any longer lays claim to "authenticity", originally the movement's rallying cry.

So when I let the dread term drop into our conversation about his new Bach recording, the conductor Paul McCreesh bristles. "Can we ban that word? I don't have any interest in being authentic," he says with some asperity. "We're never going to be an 18th-century audience, so what can 'authenticity' possibly mean? It's not important to me."

McCreesh is a combative fellow, always happy to throw down the gauntlet to fellow period-instrument conductors. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to hear him acknowledge that his recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion owes a debt to the researches of two other conductors, Joshua Rifkin (best known for playing Scott Joplin's music) and Andrew Parrott.

"Unity breaks out among baroque specialists" would once have been a shock-horror headline. Not now. What unites these three is the conviction, first voiced by Rifkin, later echoed by Parrott, that Bach intended at least some of his choral pieces, including his great Passions (St Matthew and St John), to be performed with a chorus of solo voices. That is, the singers who take the solo arias would join voices for the choruses, which are more conventionally sung by separate choirs.

An arcane point? Not for McCreesh: "This is not an academic exercise. Judge it on its musical credentials. In the last 25 years, baroque orchestras have become as technically skilled as any orchestra in the world. The string players have got serious about bowing techniques, we've learnt to play the oboe da caccia fantastically well, yet we still pretend that Bach wanted a 20-voice choir, simply because that's how John Eliot Gardiner and Philippe Herreweghe have done it. Performing Bach with solo voices opens new possibilities, and I happen to think that it probably reflects Bach's own performance practice. But while the historical evidence guides you, leads you to think in certain ways, it's only a starting point. It's never going to make an interesting performance in itself."

No doubt the taste for larger-scale performances derives from the 19th-century notion that great works require great forces. Purely practical considerations convince McCreesh otherwise: "I toured the St Matthew Passion around concert halls five or six years ago, using 18 hand-picked English choristers, all expert in early music, all with beautiful light voices that blended wonderfully. But in so many of the choruses, I constantly had to ask them to sing more softly. I just couldn't get the beauty and delicacy of sound that I wanted. Once I started to work with solo voices instead of a choir, the problems of balance no longer existed, and I heard things that you never otherwise hear: things like flutes and oboes. What is fundamental about this whole conception is that there is parity between voices and instruments.

"When you hear those choruses sung with full voice, with truly committed diction, but without the inevitably more anonymous style that a chorus produces, there's a directness, a real understanding of the act of music-making that is essential to the piece. Whatever people say about this new recording, I don't think anyone would suggest that it lacks drama, or indeed passion."

While McCreesh emphasises the drama, he has little time for the kind of operatic staging that Deborah Warner gave the St John Passion at English National Opera three years ago. "What I found difficult was the coyness of the production. Nevertheless, I'm convinced it is possible to recreate baroque forms in different ways, which reflect on the original with great imagination. I'm sure you could achieve something by staging the Bach Passions, but I would only do it with a director for whom I felt complete empathy, and who understood what was going on."

McCreesh's conviction will soon be put to the test, not in one of Bach's Passions, but in Handel's hardly less substantial Jephtha; he will conduct Katie Mitchell's new production for Welsh National Opera in May. Once again, "authenticity" is not the issue: not only is Jephtha an oratorio, not an opera; but it will also be performed on modern, not period instruments. "I've made a rule that I will never perform baroque music with modern instruments. The only exception I'm prepared to make, because I have to, is in the opera house. That doesn't mean I approach Jephtha with a heavy heart: I'm thrilled to be doing it. The chance to work with great directors is too good to turn down on the single issue of period instruments."

And the matter of staging a work not written for the stage? "Jephtha isn't opera, and shouldn't be paced like an opera. Its big tableaux have their own dramatic flow, which makes the psychology of the piece so telling. Without doubt it's one of Handel's most profound philosophical statements, and my instinct is that Katie's production will be quite harrowing.

"We've talked about the pacing, and we'll go into the first rehearsal with the broad structures in place, but we've left room for everything to grow. I enjoy that teamwork, the sense of making something corporately. The opera house gives you the luxury of working together over a six-week period. I wonder what we could achieve if we had that much time in the concert hall."

Paul McCreesh's recording of Bach's 'St Matthew Passion' is on DG Archiv. Welsh National Opera's production of Handel's 'Jephtha' opens May 17 at Carfiff's New Theatre (029 2087 8889) and tours until 11 July (www.wno.org.uk for details)