Digital approaches to Haydn's solo keyboard music
JA Irving · Early Music · 2012
Tom Beghin’s Naxos recording The Virtual Haydn: Complete works for solo keyboard (Naxos 8.501203 rec 2007–9, 1235′), is a worthy and very special addition to existing accounts of this repertory. Whereas Ronald Brautigam’s superb and well-known set on BIS is exclusively on fortepiano (an early instrument by Paul McNulty, based on a 1795 Walter), Beghin has developed through this project a relationship with four present-day builders of harpsichords, clavichords and fortepianos, some instruments being commissioned specifically for this project from Martin Pühringer, Joris Potvlieghe, Yves Beaupré and Chris Maene. Seven instruments are used altogether. Nine ‘virtual rooms’ are also heard on these discs, hence the ‘Virtual Haydn’ of the title. These ‘rooms’ were digitally mapped and then re-created in the studio to offer sample acoustic spaces in which Haydn’s keyboard works may have been heard in his own lifetime, adding a novel, and valuable, dimension to the listener’s experience. ‘The Virtual Haydn’ is thus a mighty collaborative project, involving Tom Beghin in the dual role of musicologist and performer, four expert instrument-builders, and two sound recording and engineering colleagues, Martha de Fransisco and Wieslaw Woszczyk from Beghin’s home institution, McGill University in Montréal (the website www.thevirtualhaydn.com presents detailed information on the project). Such collaborations do not come cheap, and the various authorities which contributed to the realization of ‘The Virtual Haydn’ deserve our sustained applause. They comprise the Schulich School of Music at McGill (École de Musique Schulich); the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada); Fonds de recherches sur la société et la culture, Québec; Canada Foundation for Innovation (Fondation canadienne pour l’Innnovation); Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada); Valorisation-Recherche Québec; MSBi Valorisation; and, finally, Naxos. Together, they are a shining example of what can be achieved through imaginative partnerships unconcerned with artificial timescales and exercises such as a Research Excellence Framework. The project would never have happened in the United Kingdom: one can imagine the institutional risk assessments for such an exercise leaving Deans of Research quivering in their shoes (and those documents would as likely as not extend to something approaching the length of the 96-page booklet included in this multi-CD set). Far too long a timescale; far too expensive in terms of overhead costs; the potential for possible equipment failure; the potential for possible instrument failure; no guarantee of publication in a measurable form; too risky to submit as a ‘double-weighted item’, of course; and so on… I don’t doubt the Canadian funding agencies also have their bureaucratic nonsenses (well, I know they do), but they funded this unwieldy-looking project, and the result is an exceptional triumph vindicating the judgement and faith of all concerned in a project worthwhile in and of itself, and not simply in order to deliver QR funding a few years down the line.