In this new article series, together with Ambronay’s Sustainable EEEMERGING and its partners, we explore Early music across Europe – and the challenges faced by young artists in various countries across the continent. What is the condition of Early music today?
This article was supported by Festival Concentus Moraviae, Czech Republic.
For any visitor to the Royal Antwerp Museum of Fine Art, a striking moment is coming across Hans Memling’s altarpiece, Christ Surrounded by Music-making Angels. Here are a slew of instruments of the late Middle Ages, almost life-size: a psaltery, lute, trumpets and shawm, organetto and harp, and an early string instrument, ancestor to the violin, known as a vielle.
In Antwerp for a festival of medieval music, I saw almost all of these instruments played, often in copies inspired by the exact renditions in Memling’s painting. The vielle was no exception: I caught young Czech violinist Vojtěch Jakl performing on a vielle with the ensemble La Morra.
“We have a few surviving instruments from that time, from 1400s to the 1500s – but there’s not many,” Jakl tells me, when we catch up by video call a few weeks later. “Some of them were found in a shipwreck; some of them were found in a latrine, an old toilet in the middle of Poland! They’re very bizarre, and super old, discarded because they were no longer needed.” Some of these surviving instruments were themselves made quite approximately (“rather folk-ish”).
“The instruments we play now, basically all of them, the string instruments and organetti, are based on iconographic sources,” Jakl says. “The Memling altarpiece is one of the most valuable. The vielle I played is loosely based on the Memling painting, with some adjustments to make it meet today’s standards – because we have no idea how that instrument sounded. (It’s always a question of ‘was there a thumb post?’ and so on.)”
It is not an easy instrument to play at the best of times, and Jakl isn’t helped by an oddly asymmetrical string tuning, known to be common for instruments of the era. “For a violin player, when I encountered it for the first time it was super difficult: you have a fourth, second, fifth and fourth. Your brain is on fire basically!”
As a young violinist, Vojtěch Jakl fell in love with period violin performance in his youth at Prague Conservatory, almost by chance. His violin teacher in Prague, in being interested in Baroque violin, was “kind of the black sheep of the department: it was not considered a thing, around 2014–15. Back then, it was still a bit bizarre to see someone playing Bach or Telemann with a Baroque bow, at least at that school.” I’m a little taken aback: those years do not seem so long ago. “The school system was – and still unfortunately is – kind of a bit stuck. I was lucky enough to have a teacher who was encouraging me to do things differently.”
Soon enough, Jakl headed to the well-regarded International Summer School of Early Music in Valtice, in the far south of Moravia. “There I had my first lesson on Baroque violin with gut strings. I got completely sucked in!” By the time of his Bachelor’s degree, Jakl was already seconded to perform with established Prague-based period ensembles Collegium 1704 and Collegium Marianum. “I started touring with them even before properly studying Baroque violin. They adopted me and I blended in well.”
I ask about the challenges of doing all this at an early age. “The biggest barrier was the transition period between modern and Baroque violin,” Jakl says. “The last two years of my Bachelor’s studies became almost schizophrenic. I had to do all the Romantic and High repertoire, super virtuosic violin stuff – and at the same time playing with Collegium 1704, a completely different world.”
Reflecting on the situation for young musicians in Czechia, Jakl says, “it’s pretty conservative here, when it comes to Early music”. He still encounters an unreconstructed attitude from students: “‘you play Baroque violin and Early music because you cannot play the violin very well’… I don’t think that those people ever held a Baroque violin and tried to play it, because they would realise how difficult it actually is – to play it well of course!” Among schools, Jakl says, “there is one exception: Brno. The school there, the faculty, they have a good Early music department.”
Barbara Maria Willi, rector of Brno’s Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, concurs. “Vojtěch is right in saying that the Janáček Academy is the leading institute in the country and in Central Europe. Since 2014, I have been involved in founding and leading the first Department of Early Music within a Czech academic institution.” The deparment features courses in “harpsichord and historical keyboard instruments, historical violin, violoncello, singing, lute instruments, traverso flute, and oboe,” Willi says. “The team of teachers is young and dynamic, often constitued by members of Collegium 1704”, as well as graduates from across Europe.
Willi has overseen a new Master’s programme, launched between the Janáček Academy and Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Future-proofing is a key aspect too: masterclasses are broadcast via “ultra-low latency technologies”, Willi says, and alumni are involved in computer-aided transcription of historical sources. And alongside a rich collection of historical strings, and wind instruments, the Academy’s collection of 25 historical keyboard instruments encompasses everything from the 15th-century Dulce melos – an extremely early ancestor of the piano – to a copy of Janáček’s own instrument.
Jakl studied at Brno with violinist Lenka Torgersen, a graduate of Basel’s Schola Cantorum and a leading violinist of Collegium 1704. Jakl would head to Basel too, a pilgrimage made by many young Early music performers – if they can get a place. (His teacher there was Amandine Beyer: “the perfect teacher, she changed my life and many things.”)
At Basel, Jakl found friends and comrades to form a new group, Ensemble Rýnský, becoming drawn to the virtuosic and flamboyant style of the early Baroque known as Stylus fantasticus. “Generally, it’s a very free and unrestrained mode of composing: even Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia Universalis said that it’s ‘bound to nothing’.” Composers of this style include Heinrich Biber and Ignazio Albertini, whose 12 sonatas Rýnský are in the middle of recording. “What we liked to do was to meet in the evening and play through the whole book. We would go through plenty of stuff just sight-reading and trying things out. It became an obsession.”
It’s not just the violin part that is replete with virtuosic ornamentation – Rýnský’s other members, on theorbo and harpsichord, create a rich continuo texture to accompany the solo violin. “They are really into all the counterpoint, crazy ideas and imitations. We really try to bring the fantasticus aspect of the violin repertoire into the basso continuo as well.”
As we speak, Ensemble Rýnský are in Czechia about to perform at a festival near Plzeň, and recently was at the Concentus Moraviae festival, where the group presented this repetoire as part of their programme Bound to Nothing. Other significant Early music festivals in Czechia include the Summer Festivities of Early Music in Prague, held since 2000, and the Český Krumlov Baroque Arts Festival, devoted to Baroque opera.
Jakl says he likes “to freshen up the festivals – because otherwise it would be the same groups playing over and over again! We’re trying to blend in, but also to show new aspects, new research.” Indeed, Czech archives contain a treasure trove of undiscovered music, Jakl tells me. “I was recently in Kroměříž, in the archive there: one of the biggest and most valuable archives of music of the 17th century. I found so many pieces that no one has recorded… some pieces that are really beautiful.”
The Sustainable EEEMERGING residency scheme enabled Jakl’s visit to Kroměříž, with support from Concentus Moraviae. It has proven valuable for the young ensemble, particularly in developing those aspects crucial behind the scenes – including the tricky business of finance for cross-border organisations. “And of course, programming: how to build a programme, how to approach concert organisers, venues and festivals, how to pitch programmes,” Jakl says. New techniques of concert staging, including advanced lighting methods, also entered into the discussion. In Rýnský’s programme at FEL!X Festival in Köln, the ensemble utilised a light design “that changes with the composers, or the affetti of the pieces. There we finally could try it out: not every organiser would be kind enough to give you 20 lights of different colours.”
Whether these new techniques will find favour in conservative Czechia remains a bit of an open question. The situation has more immediate challenges. “I would say that it’s quite difficult now, given the global political situation. The war in Ukraine is quite close from here,” Jakl says. “People are helping as they can, but people are scared… People are struggling a bit, given that, and culture is always the first thing that is cut.”
Nevertheless, in Czechia, “the Early music community is growing bigger with my generation coming in, and younger people studying abroad coming back home after their studies. Right now, we’re in the phase of a generational overlap and blending of those two worlds.” In engaging with colleagues, “I consider myself lucky that my remarks are accepted most of the time,” Jakl says. “We can find a way between generations.” In the meantime, Jakl is restless for new repertoire, making editions, and in the early stages of establishing a small publishing house. “Research goes on, it’s a never-ending story, we still have new things to discover, new findings…”
See upcoming events in the Czech Republic.
Sustainable EEEMERGING is funded by the European Union.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
This article was sponsored by Centre culturel de rencontre d’Ambronay.
