Sir Charles Mackerras - classic interview

Five years ago James Jolly interviewed the conductor on his 80th birthday for Gramophone online

Sir Charles Mackerras - 1925-2010 (Photo Z Chrapek)

Sir Charles Mackerras celebrated his 80th birthday on November 17, 2005 amid a mass of celebratory concerts and CD releases. The Gramophone’s Editor-in-Chief, James Jolly, visited him during that summer to talk about this landmark birthday. And high on the list of major events was his debut, the previous year, with the Berlin Philharmonic…

CM: I enjoyed it so much. I would say it was one of the most pleasant experiences of my life to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 79 and to have hit it off with them so well.

JJ: And they’re such a young orchestra…

CM: Absolutely, and very enthusiastic. And even the older ones who were all playing for Karajan were extremely nice to me. We really got on very, very well. And I’ve already got in the diary two concerts with them. One, which is in October, is for me a perfect programme. They particularly wanted the Dvorák String Serenade and I’m doing the [Tannhäuser] Venusburg Prelude and Venusburg Music which they don’t play all that often because it’s the Paris version. I don’t think that German orchestras play it all that often so it’s going to be a great experience for us all!

Then the Enigma Variations which they apparently haven’t played for years and years and the Walk to the Paradise Garden – which is sort of Anglo-German music. I don’t think they’ve ever played it: it’s so Germanic isn’t it? When I recorded the whole of A Village Romeo and Juliet with the Austrian Radio orchestra it really sounded terribly Wagnerian. And of course the whole ending in B major is so extremely ‘Tristanian’, if that’s the word.

Returning to the Berlin Phil, it was a huge pleasure all round and of course working with Mitsuko Uchida. And then in Mozart/Shostakovich year I’ve got another concert which contains both composers.

I’m about to record La clemenza di Tito which will be a great pleasure, continuing my Scottish Chamber Orchestra series. Of course they’ve jumped around labels though they’ve mainly been for Telarc, though Idomeneo, which was a huge success, was for EMI. And now Clemenza is for DG.

JJ: And that’s a bit of a return after all those DG discs in the early 1960s.

CM: Yes it is. It’ll be a great pleasure working with them again. I’ve always had very good relations with DG, particularly when I was living and working in Hamburg and I did a lot for the Archiv label. I did a whole series of Handel oratorios for them, including, famously, the Mozart arrangement of Messiah, the first time this sort of secondary authenticity was considered viable! Authentically doing an inauthentic arrangement. The Mozart version of Messiah is so beautiful but of course it tells you more about Mozart than it does about Handel! There’s the typical instrumentation that he always uses in certain keys. ‘Ev’ry valley’ being in E major with the flutes and bassoons – just like the cemetery scene in Don Giovanni or the trio in Così fan tutte.

JJ: So was it at that period that you became interested in what we call historically informed performance?

CM: No, it was much earlier than that. I really started out when I was still in Australia thinking that the way Handel was performed at that time couldn't be right and why was it necessary to have such big orchestras and to have to re-orchestrate it all when we know that was not how it was originally done. The turning point really came when I - who knew the Hamilton Harty orchestrations of the Water Music and the Fireworks - first saw the Boosey & Hawkes miniature scores that came out at the end of the War. And then I saw how different Handel's own orchestrations were from the way Harty had rearranged them. But they were continually played: the Water Music arranged by Harty was one of the most popular concert starters in the repertoire. A lot of people were then interesting themselves in, shall we say, 'correct' approaches to performing Handel and Bach and other baroque composers.

I think I was one of the first people to move it on slightly later and interest myself in performance practice of Mozart and there was that famous, if that's the word, 1965 Figaro in which although it was done in English, because it was at Sadler's Wells, it put into practice a whole lot of things that we knew went on, particularly in relation to singing the recitatives and indeed the arias with appoggiaturas. And I think as regards the ornamentation of the arias we might have gone a bit over the top but at least it was pointing in the right direction. And I was able to modify it later. So now I think my versions of the Mozart operas are more or less right in that regard.

Of course it's amazing to me that still in so many Italian operas there's no common ground - or that many Italian singers don't seem to naturally sing appoggiaturas. I've recently seen some otherwise very good performances of Rossini in which the Italian singers don't seem to understand the use of appoggiaturas and just don't do them.