5 insights on historically informed performance from The Strad archives

’”How wonderful… you mean Vivaldi and… er…” A frequent response to my confessing that I play the Baroque violin’ 

The names of many of the Baroque composers I most revere do not even appear in the old 1920s edition of Grove’s Dictionary slumbering in my local library, for their music lay on dusty shelves in church and court archives or in state libraries until the Baroque revivalists lovingly gathered it up and set it free to move and inspire us once more. How much astonishing variety there is: a century and a half of rich repertoire, sacred and profane, spiritual and uplifting, from the Venice of Monteverdi to the Vienna of Mozart via the Versailles of Mondonville (‘Who?’), with styles shifting from decade to decade and from city to city – not to mention ‘world Baroque’, such as the music of the Chiquitos, who composed Baroque-style Masses deep in the Bolivian jungle until the late 1800s, without even realising that Beethoven had come and gone! 

Baroque violin professor Walter S. Reiter, who teaches Baroque Violin and Viola in the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London makes the case that historically informed performance requires no secret code. The information is out there for the taking, and modern music colleges need to get ahead of the game.