Interview, Ophélie Gaillard on A Night in London

With virtuoso cello concertos by two Italians abroad (Giovanni Battista Cirri and Nicola Porpora) sitting cheek-by-jowl with excerpts from Handel's operas and oratorios plus rumbustious Scots tune collected by cellist-composer James Oswald, French cellist Ophélie Gaillard's latest album on Aparté offers a vivid and varied portrait of musical life in mid-eighteenth-century London, moving seamlessly between private parties, the opera-house and the tavern along the way.

Over video-call last weekend, we spoke about why the English capital was so attractive to composers from mainland Europe, the frictions (and occasionally physical fights!) which ensued amongst their respective supporters, why she finds directing 'from the ground up' so rewarding, and her own most memorable musical experiences in London and across the UK...

What attracted you to the idea of exploring the musical life of eighteenth-century London, and what new discoveries did you make along the way?

I was always intrigued by the way that so many famous composers, mostly Italian, found success in London between around 1720 and 1770, and when I started to investigate further I found that there were many cellists among them - clearly the cello had a special place in eighteenth-century London. One of the figures I discovered was the Scottish cellist James Oswald, who collected hundreds of tunes and songs from Scotland and was really one of the first ethnomusicologists of the British Isles – it’s quite similar to the sort of work that Bartók was doing in Hungary in the 1920s. Oswald isn’t so well known nowadays, but he was really admired by his contemporaries: I came across a letter by Francesco Geminiani which describes him as the greatest composer of that time, and Geminiani was trying to do the same work rearranging those tunes for strings and basso continuo while he was writing his treatise on The Art of Playing the Violin.

I had two main focuses on the CD. One was the cello concerto by Porpora, which is probably the greatest one of the eighteenth century – it’s so cantabile in the slow movement and very virtuosic in the outer ones, and the dimensions of the piece are unusually wide. It hasn’t been recorded very often, I think partly because hardly anyone is aware that Porpora was a cellist: they know him as a famous opera composer, who was very well known for feuding with Handel in London!

The third cellist-composer who features on the album is Giovanni Battista Cirri, who was quite famous as a continuo-player and soloist and was always being asked to write concertos for the subscription-concerts which were very popular at the time. He became something of a specialist at playing and writing for these very long evenings where opera arias were mixed in with concertos, and he’d move happily between accompanying singers and taking centre-stage as a virtuoso soloist.

In a way it’s similar to my role with my Pulcinella orchestra: I lead from continuo, and of course also like to play virtuoso solo music. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to invite Sandrine Piau, Lucile Richardot and Raquel Camarinha to join us and replicate the sort of concerts Cirri used to play for – there was so much repertoire that we could easily have done two evenings or even a week’s worth of concerts!

Do you think there’s potential for a similar project centring on other European cities, or is London a special case?

That’s something I might think about – a programme centring on Vienna could work quite well. But there is something really special about London and its tradition of hosting genius composers, and maybe it hasn’t changed a lot: in those days the London gentry were all supposed to like music and to know music, and it would’ve been considered very bad taste not to be involved in those kind of evenings . But gender and social borders were much more fluid in London than in Paris or Vienna at that time: they’d begin the evening with a select private dinner, but then they’d go off to the opera and eventually end the night in the pub with all kinds of people.

Did you uncover any evidence of friction between British composers and those who migrated from mainland Europe, or do they appear to have co-existed quite happily?

There were frictions for sure, but mostly between the Italian composers! There were major feuds between Porpora and Handel and also between Geminiani and Handel, and it was a big issue to know whose side you were on: each composer was supported by different factions in London society, and lots of advertising funds were given to their opera-houses to fight against each other. Handel, who essentially became an English composer, eventually won the competition - but it was a close-run thing and got pretty dramatic, with actual physical fights breaking out at times!

What I also find fascinating is that all these composers were also renowned as outstanding performers: Handel on the keyboard, Porpora on the cello, and Geminiani who was famous as a violinist but also played the cello. And Cirri was a real champion of the cello: he was so renowned that when the ten-year-old Mozart came to London Cirri was there and played with him. So they were not only composers but also instrumental virtuosos who were constantly expanding the possibilities of their instruments: it was like a technical revolution every day! And there were plenty of fine violin-makers and cello-makers in England too during this period – perhaps not quite to the same extent as in Italy, but a little later on there were quite a few European luthiers who based their entire careers in England.

You mentioned your work with Pulcinella and the parallels between your approach and eighteenth-century performance-practice – could you tell me a little more about how that evolved?

Our first concert was in 2005. For many years I’d wanted to focus on the virtuoso cello repertoire because that’s still relatively unexplored, and I was also very interested in directing from the continuo: it’s a fascinating role, because as well as being responsible for all the harmony (alongside the keyboardist) you can also give a lot of impulse rhythmically from the bass line. So it’s a great way to lead an orchestra, but it’s still not so common – you see a lot of groups led by violinists or harpsichordists, but from the cello side not so much.

I’m really passionate about encouraging that approach to directing an ensemble, and this summer I’m leading an emerging artists programme in Ambronay followed by a European tour, focusing on conducting from the cello as it was done historically: conducting from the front with a baton as we see today didn’t really become the norm until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We’ll be exploring the possibilities of all that with some really talented young players, including a lot of musicians from England.

How much arranging did you do for the repertoire on the album?

In the case of Geminiani, he’d basically done the arrangements for us already: he writes for a five-player string orchestra, essentially a quintet, but the vocal line is so well integrated that you can choose to do them with just voice and basso continuo without losing the harmonic texture. The only piece where we used a bit more artistic licence was the Geminiani Folia, where the inspiration is so Spanish that I like to play it with guitar and percussion.

With James Oswald you have various possibilities – of course the text is the most important thing in the songs, then the leading voice and basso continuo, but you can add in harp, percussion, cello, violin etc as you see fit. I went with the violin, because it was used a lot in pubs and in popular music of the period, and I wanted to give this flavour of improvisation and freedom in the playing.

What have been your most memorable musical experiences in London as performer or audience-member?

In my early years as a young professional I played in London almost every year with Ensemble Amaryllis after we won the York Early Music Competition. We also toured a lot in Scotland, Ireland and the North of England, so as well as getting to know the London public I also met lots of different audiences in the music societies out in the countryside: I just love the musical scene in England, because the people are really enthusiastic about baroque music, and indeed about music in the broadest sense. And there’s such a special relationship with the singing voice in the British Isles, too.

I had the chance to play at Wigmore Hall a few times, which was wonderful because you really feel that everybody’s coming for the music – in some cases maybe it’s for the player, but mostly it’s for the music itself, and that’s my ethos too. I don’t do this work just to be shiny as a player, but to really champion the music and to be at the service to the pieces and composers.

The first album I made for Aparté was the Dreams recording, which we did with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, and my memory of that is very special. I had my sound-engineer Nicolas Bartholomée with me, but the sound-engineer from Abbey Road came along and said ‘These are the mics that Jacqueline du Pré used for her recording with Daniel Barenboim’, and I instantly knew that I wanted to record with them. That’s the amazing thing about Abbey Road – they have all this functioning kit from pretty much every period of recording history, and they can just give you whatever you want. I was so moved to record in that studio with those mics.

Aside from the Ambronay project, what’s coming up next for you in terms of live performances?

I’m just off to a rehearsal for a new project for the Cello Biennale in Amsterdam, which is a show for cello, piano and tap-dancer! I’ve done something similar with my group The Swiss Cellists and the world champion Daniel Leveillé: he’s the most wonderful dancer, and now we’re doing a Bernstein programme together which I’m very excited about!