South China Morning Post interview

September 1, 2010

Leading up to Christopher's South East Asia tour, the South China Morning Post interviews him on the upcoming program of early music, "rarely performed in Hong Kong", and his rich experiences as a student that fueled his passion for 20th century composers like Martinů, Stravinsky and Webern, who stand alongside Handel in the forthcoming concert. Read Victoria Finlay's article in full below:

The Hong Kong Sinfonietta's concert of early music next month has a perfectly ordered programme. According to its British conductor, Christopher Hogwood - a leading proponent of a genre that is rarely performed in this city - "you could go to the concert and just hear a medley of good music". Or, he adds, you could concentrate a little harder and take part in an extraordinary lesson about how music is made.

One of the hallmarks of baroque music - written in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries - is its reverence for structure. It was created at a time when God was being redefined as a "divine watchmaker" whose presence was to be discerned through symmetry, and this programme at least is sublimely ordered.

The concert begins and ends with anthems written by George Frideric Handel - a German who lived in England from 1710 until he died in 1759 - in honour of two of Europe's most powerful and wealthy men of the time: the king of an expanding empire and (what would today be) a multibillionaire businessman.

Music for the Royal Fireworks was written for King George II and the court apparently welcomed this very popular music as propaganda for a rather unpopular monarch, while the Chandos Anthems were commissioned by the Duke of Chandos, a dodgy self-made entrepreneur who lived in the biggest house in England, in the hope that they would have a similar effect of impressing his public.

"He made his money from financing the army and defrauding," says Hogwood, and so it was perhaps not so unfair that a couple of years after Handel's anthem was written, almost all the money disappeared in the South Sea Bubble financial collapse. (The composer, cannily, had pulled out his cash just in time.)

The third and fifth pieces are orchestrations of J.S. Bach's music by two 19th- and 20th-century composers, Joseph Joachim Raff and Anton Webern, while the second and fourth pieces are by two Eastern Europeans who both found themselves experimenting with neo-baroque music while living as emigres in the United States in the mid-20th century.

"[Bohuslav] Martinu left Prague and first went to live in France in the late 1920s, and of course that was the time when jazz and swing had taken over the Paris scene and he absorbed quite a lot of that," Hogwood says. "He emigrated to America because of the second world war and he only returned to Europe at the end of his life."

He heard some music on the radio when he was a young man and it haunted him for many years. Although he was sure he had heard it announced as Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante, in those pre-Google days nobody he mentioned it to had ever heard of it. "They all said he was thinking of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante but he said no," Hogwood says.

Some years later, when Martinu got to Princeton, he found in the library that there was a Haydn Sinfonia Concertante after all, so he wrote his own in homage to the one that had so fascinated him.

"He uses the same four soloists as Haydn - a violin, oboe, cello and bassoon, with a chamber orchestra - but he adds a piano and a couple of horns," Hogwood says. The style is different but the scoring is the same, and it's a lyrical, jazzy, neo version of baroque music that the audience in Hong Kong will hear in this piece.

"I proposed the Haydn as well, but it's quite a strain on the available soloists to play the two together" Hogwood says.

Instead, his urge for order was satisfied by the Concerto in D for strings by Igor Stravinsky - who (in another neat twist in the programme) moved in his later years from being inspired by classicism to being inspired by Webern.

He might love order in his music (what he calls "architectural schemes"), but Hogwood's own home in Cambridge, Britain, is the opposite of ordered. "All academic houses are chaotic," he says. "And mine is no different. There are heaps of books all around me and nothing is in place."

Hogwood's early musical training was almost as chaotic as his piles of books. He did not, for example, start playing any instrument seriously until he was a teenager - an almost unknown situation in a classical musical world where nearly every soloist started their hours of practise aged around five or six.

Like many children, he and his four siblings did play something when they were that young, he recalls: "We were all made to do piano for two to three years. But perhaps we weren't well taught and I didn't enjoy it."

He returned to the piano at 15. "I don't know what sparked it," he admits, "but of my own volition I wanted to go back." The conductor still plays keyboards for recordings, in particular, but more rarely in performance. "When I get back from Asia I'm doing a recording of piano duets by [Carl Maria von] Weber on a Weber piano."

The piano is one that Weber owned when he was living in Prague around 1814, Hogwood says. "It's the genuine article so I thought that you can't get more authentic than that, playing his music."

Hogwood bought it in Prague on one of his many visits. His links with the city are long and loyal; in 1964, he went to Prague as a student for a year on a British Council exchange scholarship - it was an extraordinary time to be there.

"It was my first glimpse of what life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain, which was very hard to find out without doing this." He learned quickly that there were many deprivations and hardships and "not everyone was ravingly communist; a great number were not communist."

He made a lot of friends, particularly among the students, "including people who loved jazz and drinking in jazz clubs at night and so on... which happened to include the future president."

He met Vaclav Havel - absurdist playwright and future Czech president - in one of his earlier incarnations as a journalist. One of his close assistants was a friend of Hogwood's, an art historian, and she went on to be his right hand when he became president, so they met again. In the early 1990s, just after the velvet revolution when the communist regime fell, Hogwood gave a concert for Havel in the Prague Castle "in support for him being the best president in the world at that moment".

At that time - as through most of his life - Hogwood had a schedule that had him on the road for nine or even 10 months of the year. Now - approaching his 70th birthday next year - Hogwood has cut down to what, to most of us, would still be punishing.

"I now spend half of my time - six months a year - as a performing monkey and half in academic pursuits," he says.

What delights him is the different responses and skills these two parts of his life require. Hogwood says: "Performance is of the moment; it's showbiz. Once it is done it's done. Academia is so different: you can undo today what you have done yesterday."

October 8, 8pm. City Hall Concert Hall. Tickets: HK$120, HK$220, HK$320. Urbtix. Inquiries: 2836 3336