ESCAPING THE MUSEUM.(Andrew Manze)(Pomerium vocal ensemble)(Concert Review)

Musicians who specialize in performing works of the deep past, from the Baroque, the Renaissance, or before, eventually have to face up to the impossibility of their task. The philosopher Lydia Goehr, in her book "The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works," shows that the concept of a "work"--an infallible score to be scrupulously realized in performance--did not exist until the Romantic period. Before then, scores were less like papal writs than like cooking recipes, leaving crucial details up to the taste of the performers. Singers would adorn their lines according to their abilities and whims. Instrumentalists would fill out their parts with ornaments and other sonic curlicues. Composers often doubled as virtuosos, throwing out ideas in off-the-cuff improvisations. In this repertory, the modern ideal of the note-perfect performance, so prized in conservatories, automatically produces an inauthentic result. Play only the right notes, and you play them wrong.

If you really wanted to re-create the musical culture of Bach's time, you would have to stop playing Bach altogether and concentrate on contemporary composers. Before 1800, there was no great reverence toward the musical past, and even a living giant such as Bach had approximately the glamour of a TV weatherman. The historian Tanya Kevorkian suggests that Bach's cantatas were received with something less than universal devotion; while some members of the congregation followed closely, others chatted, milled about, or went out for a smoke. "Mein Gott, here goes Bach with his tortured counterpoint," the typical burgher might have said. Centuries on, a work such as "Ich habe genug" causes audiences to fall silent with awe. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's new recording of the cantata, on Nonesuch, is beautiful enough to stop a war, if anyone thought to try. Were Baroque listeners uncultured idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music's place in society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.

The most authentic performance is the most alive performance. I can't favor John Eliot Gardiner's meticulous reconstructions of the "St. Matthew Passion" over Otto Klemperer's Brucknerian renovation; the latter has too much august beauty to be dismissed. It's not what Bach had in mind, but you can imagine him saying, as Stravinsky said when he heard Bernstein's over-the-top "Rite of Spring": "Wow!" Still, there is much to be gained by studying the past and recovering its habits. The music has a better chance of staying alive if the performer uses an appropriate instrument and knows some of the oral tradition that went along with the score. We are luckiest when we get a performer at once learned and fervid; and it was a very lucky crowd that came to the Frick Collection earlier this month to hear the violinist Andrew Manze.

Manze is a balding, bespectacled Englishman of deceptively professorial appearance. He made his name with a series of recordings for the Harmonia Mundi label. The latest is a delightful all-Mozart disk, in which he manages to give some backbone and bite to the dinner-party anthem "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." Manze is much in demand as a conductor, but at the Frick he showed up with only his 1783 Joseph Gagliano violin, playing solo works of Bach, Tartini, and Telemann. He commands an astonishing variety of colors, from eerie whisperings to guttural fortissimos, from pure-toned lyricism to a gritty attack one or two steps removed from bluegrass fiddling. A kind of live-action musicologist, he is able to marshal these sounds into a cogent narrative. His playing is at once spontaneously inventive and magisterially controlled.

First came Manze's own arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. In some comments beforehand--the violinist likes to preface his performances with wry, donnish lectures, which makes his flair for the demonic all the more arresting--he alluded to musicological speculation that this most famous of organ works might have been originally composed for violin (perhaps by Bach, perhaps by someone else). Even if it wasn't, Manze would have been within his rights, as a headstrong Baroque virtuoso, to make the appropriation. In this version, the ...