Even when taking into account the departures of some incredibly high profile names from the creative world this week – Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall in particular – classical music is still having a rough time of it. Claudio Abbado, Peter Sculthorpe and Lorin Maazel are just three of highly respected artists who have recently departed, and to that list can sadly be added the name of Frans Brüggen, whose death at the age of 79 was revealed yesterday.
We can be grateful this quartet lived long and extremely fruitful lives, but I wanted to focus on Brüggen this time as I absolutely love his recordings. In fact I hold him pretty much responsible for helping my initial aversion to what we awkwardly term 'period instrument' recordings, and I think he brought so much character to his interpretations he made me realise it was possible to use instruments of the time, with the sound to which we were unaccustomed, and still build cultured and individual interpretations.
The first disc of his I remember hearing was Rameau – a sparkling and colourful account of the suite Les Indes Galantes. Yet the one that made even more impact was a Philips disc bringing together middle period Mozart symphonies – the celebrated Symphony no.29 in A major, K201 and the much less known – but equally inspired – Symphony no.33 in B flat major, K319. Brüggen and his charges, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, bring a freshness to this piece, but importantly for me the orchestra still pack enough heft in the bigger chords, together with a string sound that is positively luxurious for a period band.
This is only the tip of the iceberg where Brüggen is concerned, however. With his orchestra he completed a very fine cycle of Beethoven symphonies, which Universal are helpfully making available again this month, as well as an extremely enjoyable Schubert canon, featuring among other things a Symphony no.5 in B flat major that preserves the composer's fresh inspiration.
This is before we even get to his Haydn – for it's this area of Brüggen's output that appeals to me most. To me he understands Haydn's wit and good humour, but also his craft, and there is always an elegance to Brüggen's interpretations that makes the next note in each phrase so inevitable. In Haydn that helps an awful lot – and yet the surprise element of some of the symphonies is also retained. Brüggen’s music making in the London and Paris symphonies in particular has given hours of pleasure, and I would urge you to listen if you haven't before.
And how could I almost have forgotten his Rameau? Two discs leap out at me that Brüggen recorded for Philips – the highly characterful live recording of the suite for Les indes galantes, and an equally invigorating version of a suite from the opera Dardanus.
Even before his successes as a conductor Brüggen had shown unusual ability as a flautist and recorder player. In the 1960s he recorded a sizeable amount of Baroque music for Teldec's Das Alte Werk imprint, producing some ground breaking discs of Telemann, J.S. Bach and Handel – as well as exploring some of the lesser known corners of Baroque chamber repertoire.
Even in the last years of his life, when he clearly wasn't as sprightly as he used to be, Brüggen continued to conduct from a seating position – which was the case on the only occasion I encountered him in concert, where he and his guest charges, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, gave a typically inspiring performance of Mozart's Paris symphony.
Despite his less than ideal health, Brüggen continued to record to great effect, with recent releases bringing Mendelssohn's Italian and Scottish symphonies to life, not to mention another visit to Mozart's last three works in the form. There is quite literally never a dull note in Brüggen's recorded work – and it deserves to live on long after the sad passing of its creator.
A Frans Brüggen miscellany be found on Spotify by clicking here , including Les Indes Galantes, Beethoven's Eroica symphony, a fantasia by Telemann and symphonies by Schubert (no.5), Haydn (no.102) and Mozart (no.39).
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