How lucky we are that Peter and Victoria Readman have made the Chamber Orchestra of Europe's fantastic and bold idea come true! The result is a wonderful musical creation that allows us to relive, with gratitude and enthusiasm, a treasure of unpublished concert recordings of the great and inspired relationship between Nikolaus and the COE. (Translation: Carolin Sommer)
This set is a testament to the remarkable collaboration between the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE), and its release this year marks the Orchestra's 40th anniversary. The partnership began to develop only a few years after the Orchestra itself and continued through the second half of the 1980s, throughout the 1990s and the first decade and a half of this century. The release also marks the triangular relationship with the Styriarte Festival in Graz, the largest city of Styria in Southern Austria. The festival was started in 1986 as a platform for Harnoncourt, who was brought up in the city, though he spent much of his time in Vienna. These recordings trace that relationship over 20 years, from 1987.
The COE became Harnoncourt's orchestra of choice for the classics played on modern instruments. He had been a pioneer of the exploration of period-appropriate style from the early 1950s on, mainly with the specialist period orchestra he formed, Concentus Musicus Wien. Later, though, he wanted to explore how modern orchestras could respond in the classics by adapting to the style without having to change the instruments they were playing. The COE was the perfect vehicle for this. It was not shackled by a long romantic and early 20th-century tradition, it was full (then) of young players, it was flexible in size and receptive to the use of baroque timpani and natural trumpets. Just as importantly, the COE is imbued with democratic equality. Its players are chosen by their peers, not a music director, and they all receive the same pay.
The idea for the Orchestra was stimulated by a group of players who had first come together in the European Community Youth Orchestra and who detested the thought that they might never play together again as their careers dragged them back to different home countries. They wanted an ensemble that could gather for a few tours and residencies each year without being tied to any particular city (and its cultural politics) or any single conductor's edict. They have continued to choose as a collective who to penform with and where.
Once Harnoncourt was in front of the Orchestra, though, there was no doubt who was in charge. He wanted to challenge the musicians at every turn, asking them to push dynamics to the extreme and sometimes beyond. He did not mind mistakes (within reason), arguing that it was better to take an interesting risk and fail than to play safe. In rehearsal, he often told the performers that great music making was always on the edge of catastrophe.
Mathis Huber worked with him from the early days of the Styriarte Festival and is now its director. He says, “Harnoncourt was fundamental to everything we did. He helped us create a festival that sticks to his tradition of always asking why we are programming the music. It keeps us fresh. He had such a deep knowledge of the scores that it was unmatched. Other conductors do not prepare like he did. He translated the music, not just prepared it."
Harnoncourt spent most of his career rebelling against the way music had evolved into a sort of cosy audio armchair in the postwar Viennese ethos. He hated that attitude when he was a cellist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and he carried the rebellion into his conducting. “If everybody was happy with one direction, he went in the other", says Huber. “In Vienna the expectation of the audience was only to have a nice evening. He felt that was not good enough. He decided he wanted to give the audience the same surprise they would have had in 1800. He felt that working with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe at the Styriarte Festival gave him the chance to get the classical orchestra back."
The earliest recording in this box set is Mozart's Symphony No. 29 K 201 from the 1989 festival, the year after the acclaimed cycle of Schubert symphonies Harnoncourt recorded with the COE (released on four CDs as ICAC 5160). It was also the first symphony performed by the fledgling COE at its launch concert in London in May 1981 and therefore has great significance for all those who remember that extraordinaiy evening 40 years ago. In 1774, when he wrote the Symphony, Mozart was still living in Salzburg, a known and acclaimed composer, but still a frustrated teenager finding his way in a form that he, J.C. Bach and Haydn were almost developing between them. It is small scale, a string section only complemented by a pair of oboes and horns. Even genteel Salzburg would not have been alarmed.
The much bigger “Posthorn" Serenade came five years later, in 1779. Mozart had been away for two years, finding fame in Paris but also having to deal with the death of his mother there, and deeply resented the limitations that working for the unimaginative Archbishop entailed. This serenade was commissioned by students graduating from the university that August, part of a tradition known as “Finalmusik", and Mozart made the most of one of the grandest events in Salzburg`s establishment calendar. This is not a slight piece for serenading lovers in the garden; it is the longest purely orchestral work Mozart wrote, and the orchestra was missing only clarinets and trombones from a Beethoven symphony band. The “Posthom" reference was not part of its original title but is relevant because the sound of the instrument (a version of the curled natural horn familiar from letterboxes all over the old Austro-Hungarian empire) was the signal that a post coach was about to depart, which is probably why Mozart included it in a piece marking leaving student life, even though he already had two normal horns and two trumpets in the orchestration. He only uses it in the sixth of the seven movements, in other words just before the Finale.
The focus then shifts to London 15 years later, where a subscription series called the "Professional Concerts" had taken over the Hanover Square Rooms events after the death of J.C. Bach. Johann Peter Salomon led his orchestra playing the same Stradivarius that Corelli had used. For the new violinist impresario, Haydn and the premieres of his Symphonies Nos. 100, “Military”, and 101, “The Clock", were the star attraction in the Spring of 1794, seven months after Queen Marie Antoinette (Maria Antonia of Austria) was guillotined. Those politics intervened because Salomon had to end the concerts a few weeks later after war with newly Republican France made getting musicians to travel across Europe too complicated. He and Giovanni Viotti (who had also been playing a Stradivarius violin in the concerts) joined forces at The King's Theatre (now Her Majesty's) in the Haymarket where Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, was soon working too. Viotti eventually joined his friend Cherubini in Napoleonic Paris where they made the Paris Conservatoire the dominant force in 19th-century music education.
A decade later, Archduke Johann, Maria Antonia's nephew, was fighting Napoleon's armies from the top of the Adriatic to the part of Styria that is now in Hungary - and he was losing. Beethoven's sympathies were with political reformers, not the armies of either side. Like many intellectuals he was appalled by Napoleon's move from General to Emperor but equally firmly against the rightwing autocracies fighting France. From 1805, Beethoven was simultaneously working on his opera Leonore (later Fidelio) and his Fifth Symphony; the opera concentrating on the rescue of a political prisoner, the symphony on the idea of a free society. There is a theory that the famous opening motif refers back to a revolutionary song, “La Hymne au Panthéon", written in the same year as Haydn's “Military” Symphony by Cherubini, whom the invading Napoleon appointed Director of Music in Vienna in 1805 (and who, in a nicely circular accident of history, had only moved to France after his friend Viotti had taken him on a trip to Paris from London and introduced him to Marie Antoinette). Things were much calmer when Beethoven was writing his Seventh Symphony seven years later in the Bohemian spa of Teplice, where he met Goethe. By then, Archduke Johann was less involved in military duties and concentrating on his governing of Styria where, in 1829, he ruled himself out of succession to the imperial throne by marrying Anna Plochl, the commoner daughter of a postmaster (back to the serenade?). Their great-great-grandson was Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
At the other end of the century, in the first part of the 1880s, Vienna must have seemed a place of inalienable civilisation, politically atrophied but secure. When Brahms was writing his Tragic Overture and, afterwards, his Fourth Symphony, Europe's battles seemed a thing of the past. The new wars were those of imperial expansion and no longer needed to be fought on European soil. What a compiacent illusion that turned out to be. And when the Chamber Orchestra of Europe first worked with Harnoncourt to give these concerts, Bohemia was behind the iron Curtain, Austria was not in the European Community, and the regions of its old empire to the south were about to be engulfed in civil war. By the time the recording of Beethoven's Fifth was made in 2007, the European Union was over twice the size it had been at the first Styriarte Festival. An orchestra celebrating Europe's common values echoed a triumph of aspiration. Harnoncourt's restless exploration of the music and its context reminds us never to take anything for granted.
Enno Senft, Double Bass
The name “Nikolaus Harnoncourt" is synonymous for bringing music of any era to life as if it was written today, and to give it lasting relevance for all listeners. The COE's musical belief embodies this philosophy entirely, and we worked with Nikolaus over decades to make this a reality. Uncompromising in quality, with unrivalled energy and commitment in our live performances - we are proud to have made his musical language part of our unique style.

Marieke Blankestijn, Leader
I am very, very proud of what we did with Nikolaus over all those years, and he once wrote me a message on a bottle of local Sekt that he was happy with me too. This bottle will never be drunk and is very important to me.

Fiona Brett, Violin
He became the greatest influence on my musical life, and I can neverthank him enough for the amazing new world which he opened up for me. We made many recordings with him and I cherish every one, but my favourite has to be the Dvořák Slavonic Dances when he used say: “You must dig out your Czech grandmothers."

Will Conway, Cello
I have many inspiring memories of working with Nikolaus, but none more so than during a Smetana opera performance where I witnessed him, a man in his 80s, with both feet off the ground in a demonstration of his total commitment, transcendent in every way!

Iris Juda, Violin
He gave us the courage to express the right emotions at any moment in a composition, even if it meant not producing a “beautiful” sound. He asked us to “convey the strong statement of each composition to its full potential"; that for him was the beauty.

Dane Roberts, Double Bass
Nikolaus Harnoncourt belonged to a category of conductors and artists who were driven by and served music. This was a mutual friendship with much respect, laughter and many gifts given in this shared 30-year musical journey. It was this human side of Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt that perhaps in the end connected and committed the COE the most to so many years of collaboration.

Leo Phillips, Violin
They are indelible memories: heady, intense periods of work, when even his simple “Good Morning!", enigmatic and earnest, wide-eyed and wonderful, seemed, at the outset of each rehearsal day, to hold almost infinite promise.

Kalrine Yttrehus, Violin
The quirky, but very descriptive imagery he came up with to explain a certain atmosphere or musical line will stick with me forever - I still know when the accompaniment of the second violins needs to “provide the barbecue the first violins get roasted on!"

Josine Buter, Flute
Alice was always at the rehearsals with a score, I think he couldn't have done it without her! Wonderful memories.

Geoff Prentice, Timpani
Three people taught me how to play timpani in an orchestra. Two were my timpani teachers. The third was Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Christopher Gunia, Bassoon
I never missed a COE/Harnoncourt project, I didn't want to miss the fun! Working with Harnoncourt was always a learning experience, stimulating, inspiring and constantly challenging any sense of routine. To paraphrase his philosophy on making music: “For an artist, there is no beauty in safety."

Jaime Martin, Flute
Playing with COE and Harnoncourt has been the musical highlight of my life.

Dorle Sommer, Viola
No one was able to escape the incredible energy and the conviction that the piece we were currently working on was the greatest thing of all. The live recordings on this CD box set bring back the most beautiful and vivid memories. Truly heartwarming!

Tomas Djupsjöbacka, Cello
As a musician, I am challenged and often required to think about my opinions - “why do I play the way I do” or “why should this phrase be played this way..." This is the key to learning, and after a project with Maestro Harnoncourt, I always felt I had learnt something new about music. That is one of the biggest gifts a musician can receive.

Howard Penny, Cello
Putting a work in its context, recognising the limitations and idiosyncrasies of notation and always questioning received “traditions", are things I've learnt from his groundbreaking work with us: a flame I hope to keep burning as long as I am making music.

Jonathan Williams, Horn
Always a practical musician, the basses and horns were placed together to better achieve his aim of producing the fundamental swing he believed was common to all music, and the orchestra was liberated by this freedom.

Clara Andrada de la Calle, Flute
I wish every musician could have had the chance to work with him. I am convinced there was a “before and after Nikolaus Harnoncourt” effect for every musician who ever worked with him.