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Red Priest: Going for Baroque and Winning Fans

Jeff Kaliss on October 12, 2010
Red Priest

Early music has considerable postmodern appeal for recorder virtuoso Piers Adams and his group, Red Priest. The 17th- and 18th-century audiences for whom Baroque composers wrote, as Adams describes them, were quite laid-back, and at odds with what later became conventional concert decorum.

“People clapped whenever they wanted to and did whatever they wanted to in the olden days,” Adams affirms from his family home in Lewes, in the south of England. “They drank their ale, they played poker, and they even spat from the upper levels onto the audience below. It was very unruly. What we nowadays recognize as correct etiquette comes from ... I don’t know where; maybe Victorian times or something.”

Adams doesn’t expect to fully recapture the boisterous Baroque ethos, even though Red Priest’s long-awaited local stop is set as a Halloween-flavored concert in relatively rustic Livermore, on Oct. 28. “But I’d be very happy if people clap in between pieces, and I see it as a great sign of success if the audience feels so free that they talk to you during the performance. The more you can break down those ridiculous and artificial barriers, the better.”

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Vivaldi's La notte (The nightmare concerto)

Arrayed in colorful outfits that evoke olden days, and issuing albums with tongue-in-cheek titles, like Nightmare in Venice and Pirates of the Baroque, Red Priest has effectively marketed itself as an unlikely team of English early-music all-stars. Aside from Adams, considered to be among the more knowledgeable and virtuosic performers on recorder, the regular lineup includes harpsichordist and pianist Howard Beach, cellist Angela East, and violinist Julia Bishop, who’s married to Adams. Bishop stays home to care for their 4-year-old daughter, Sylvie, when Red Priest heads across the Atlantic, so Canadian David Greenberg, an expert in the Scottish Baroque repertoire and in Cape Breton folk fiddling, will stand in for her here.

Apart from its considerable entertainment value, Red Priest’s approach to live performance is also reflective of the source era. “It was a dirty era, really,” Adams continues. “We’re not exactly trying to re-create that; we don’t murder each other onstage or kill our colleagues over an incorrect trill. But the idea is to try to inspire reactions and emotions.”

His directive of “spontaneity and improvisation” was inspired by Adams’ encounter two decades ago with gypsy groups in Bruges, Belgium. “Each has its own completely different arrangement of traditional songs. They really turn it into their own, and that’s very freeing and liberating,” he points out about the gypsy musicians. “Even with a group of three or four players, they manage to create an orchestral set of colors by incredibly creative use of the instruments, particularly the violin. They may be inauthentic from a strictly historical perspective, but it has such a life to it that it feels even more authentic.” And there’s no compromise of virtuosity, he says. “The best gypsy groups now have, as far as I can see, as much skill and technique in a ‘classical’ sense as any top classical performers. And yet they use it in a completely different way, and I find that very exciting.”

Continued familiarity with the gypsy genre, Adams continues, “freed my mind as to how one might arrange pieces or reinterpret them,” but he also finds this freedom in historical quotes about how Baroque music was created and performed, which he posts on the Red Priest Web site. “There’s one [quote] which says that the speed can vary to half or double of where you started, or words to that effect. Tempo should not be a fixed thing. And that’s what ‘rhetoric’ in Baroque music is all about: matching it to the rhythm of speech, which, in order to hold the attention of your audience, must be incredibly varied. Otherwise, it sounds monotonous.”

There’s no monotony in Red Priest’s idiosyncratic performance of The Four Seasons, by Vivaldi, whose nickname, referring to his hair color and ordination, was adopted by the group. On their 2003 Dorian recording and in performance of this and other Baroque works, Red Priest not only changes up their tempos but also deploys slides and other ornamentations and sound effects not in favor with many more-formal and more-formulaic groups. Critics who have proven less than insightful about Baroque reality have been tempted to fashion Red Priest as would-be rock stars, a comparison that Adams is quite ready to work with.

“I think rock ’n’ roll is closer to what Baroque [he pronounces it “ba-ROCK”] music was about than is ‘authentic’ music performance, as it’s perceived today,” Adams declares. “There was much less of a distinction in the old days between what was ‘rock’ and what was ‘classical.’ A lot of the musicians were boozers and would-be drug-takers (there were drugs around at the time), and a lot of them were criminals. ... I think musicians have always lived on the edge. Look at how Vivaldi lived his life: He was always scraping together funds to put this or that opera on, constantly getting sacked from and then reinstated at La Pieta [the Venetian orphanage and music school], and he was constantly getting into arguments about something. ... He was a real person, with struggles, like you and I. And I think what history tends to do is slightly deify people, sanding off the rough edges and presenting these rather ethereal characters, which [Vivaldi] definitely wasn’t.”

Playing mostly from memory, as Red Priest does, helps infuse live performances with rock-band–like give-and-take. “It means that if David [Greenberg] and I are doing the top lines, we can jam together in a faintly Rolling Stones style. We play with a lot of energy, and that colors it differently from a lot of classical performances.”

The latest release on Red Priest Recordings, called Johann, I’m Only Dancing, bears a nod to rock in its title, as well as a clue to its content. “You have to know your Bowie to get that one,” chuckles Adams, referring to English rocker David Bowie’s 1972 single John, I’m Only Dancing. “It’s an all-Bach CD. What happens when most people play Bach is, however wacky they may be, they suddenly get very serious and reverent. Of course, he’s a genius composer, but we wanted to bring a lot of our own individual approach to him, so we decided that we weren’t going to get too reverent at all.”

The Livermore program on Oct. 28 bears the title of the group’s 2002 release — Nightmare in Venice — and will proceed in family-friendly harmony with the imminence of Halloween. It will start out with Vivaldi’s lesser-known concerto La notte (The Night), “which I first heard when I was 13 or 14 and couldn’t believe it was old music, it sounded so completely contemporary,” Adams remarks. “It sounds like a House of Horror movie score: very angular, these jagged chords. It’s one side of the Baroque, and shows very clearly the bizarre nature of that time.

“We’re gonna close the concert with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which has long been associated with Dracula. In between, we’ll have the Devil’s Trill Sonata by Tartini — a very famous late-Baroque violin showpiece — and we have some witches’ dances from 17th-century England: They’re masque dances. We’ll be playing a Halloween piece from our Pirates of the Baroque album, as well. And Dance of the Blessed Spirits, by Gluck, and Demon Airs, by Leclair. It will be fun, definitely.”

In a sense, Red Priest’s performance, like everything these lively artists do, will be an exercise in warding off the demons that threaten the repertoire they celebrate. “Classical music will die a death,” Adams warns, “if it’s not allowed to become more natural.”