It sounds like Irish Baroque Orchestra, drawing on the genius of the Bachs, is working on a world-class CD, writes Eileen Battersby.
Inside a truck parked at the side of the Aula Maxima building at Maynooth University campus, two men are at work. One is watching an elaborate control panel featuring what looks like a graph registering sound levels, the other is having an intense conversation, making suggestions, offering opinions that are in fact directives. He is wearing ear phones.
The pair could be spies, particularly as they are watching a small screen which in turn is following the activities of a group of casually dressed people, themselves busy at work.
No one is noticing the sunshine; no one cares about the World Cup football currently dominating the minds of many nations. Sound is all in this particular truck and the sounds being made are impressive. The figures in the little monitor are musicians. Irish Baroque Orchestra has come to Maynooth to record its debut CD, which draws on the collective genius of a family called Bach.
The man in the Lyric FM mobile recording unit seems difficult to please and makes remarks like "Really nice, but it squeaks a little bit" or "Fine, just one or two little corrections" or "okay" followed by a pause: he seems satisfied, but no, and decides "let's do it again".
He could be accused of being hypercritical, but the French producer Francois Eckert, a classical music recording specialist, is merely looking for perfection, and this orchestra, led by its newly appointed musical director, internationally celebrated baroque violinist, Monica Huggett, formerly concert master with Ton Koopman's Amsterdam Baroque, is intent on delivering perfection. Each retake sounds pure and fresh, with Huggett sharing the wealth of her experience and understanding of the inner life of the music.
If the musicians are getting tired, it does not show. The second man, the one sitting at the control panel, which is a mixing desk, is Mark McGrath, an RTÉ sound engineer with particular expertise in classical and jazz recording.
Huggett and Eckert have worked together before, and this dynamic is crucial. Huggett always requests Eckert's involvement on her recordings, precisely because of his tyrannical attention to detail.
It is hot inside the truck. Eoin Brady, executive producer of the RTÉ Lyric FM CD label, paces outside with all the anxiety of a father-to-be. Except that his anxiety is more like controlled excitement. This looks like a world-class CD in the making, and it is going to be on the Lyric label.
Another man is standing outside the van: Mark Duley, organist, artistic director and co-founder of the Irish Baroque Orchestra, which began life 10 years ago as Christ Church Baroque then playing on modern instruments. Duley had originally arrived in Ireland in 1992 to take up the post of organist at Christ Church Cathedral. Born on a farm in New Zealand, he had gone to Auckland University as an organ scholar also studying piano and discovered Baroque music.
"The university had a Baroque orchestra, playing on period instruments - well, they had period bows and some of them had copies of old instruments. It is dangerous music - for all its formality, it appeals to the emotions, and I see it as is exciting, and daring."
At Christ Church, Duley set out to reinstate the great Baroque sacred repertoire to its rightful ecclesiastical context, in other words, returning it from the concert platform to the church. By 2000, Christ Church Baroque was performing on period instruments, the instruments for which the music had been composed. Three years ago, the orchestra changed its name, becoming Irish Baroque Orchestra, committed to performing the music throughout the country.
If it started as something of an artistic crusade, it has certainly been effective. Irish audiences are increasingly responding to this rich, vibrant music which emerged with Monteverdi (1567-1643), who had begun to mark the move away from the Renaissance pattern of continuous polyphony, and ended with Bach and Handel.
The great legacy of the Baroque is the concept of contrast. Tone and colour is emerging loud and beautifully clear from the equipment in the mobile recording unit. There is a palpable energy.
A slight pause makes it possible to creep up the stairs to the gallery space of the Aula Maxima for a close-up of the musicians at work including, at the harpsichord, one of Ireland's most outstanding musicians, Malcolm Proud.
This recording is unusually civilised in terms of preparation in that the orchestra has not only had a week's rehearsal, it has already performed the programme in concert. "To have this level of preparation is an absolute luxury," says Brady. The old-style, almost Victorian hall is an ideal recording space. Alert to the irony, Duley remarks on the amount of effort going in to recreate this very quality of acoustic, "because of the need to have a delay or echo of about two seconds to give the orchestra something to play against", when spaces such as this already exist.
Pointing to a pair of stereo mikes on a high boom stand - a tall pole to the rest is us - positioned almost in the middle of the orchestra playing space, Brady says "this stereo pair is doing 90 per cent of the work in creating a pure sense of the sound".
The musicians are preparing to resume playing and Huggett has already glared up at us.
"Are you speaking?"
She seems to be looking right at me. "You have to be quiet."
Proud has slipped back to his seat.
Brady explains the approach being taken to this recording. "What we're trying to do is to get as accurate a reproduction of the sound of the orchestra as possible. If the mikes are too close, the effect could be too harsh. Too far away and the acoustic of the building can take over and there can be a loss of clarity."
Tonight, Irish Baroque Orchestra perform three of JS Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos - Numbers 3,4 & 5 - at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Individually and as a body the six concertos, dating from 1721, each present a different aspect of the form and each showcases Bach's mastery of the form. Also on the programme is Bach's Double concerto for two violins, which will be performed by Monica Huggett and Claire Duff, who will also record the piece for the CD. Bach's Sinfonia from Cantata 209 is also on the programme and will feature on the CD.
Brandenburg Concerto Number 5, featuring flute, violin and harpsichord, is the first keyboard concerto in the modern sense, and will be performed in tonight's concert. It is the most forward-looking of the concertos which Bach had intended to be performed by the court musicians at Cöthen, where he was Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold from 1717 until 1723, when he moved to Leipzig to become the Kantor at St Thomas's school, where he remained for the rest of his life. Concerto Number 3 explores the tonal possibilities of three groups of strings: three violins, three violas and three cellos.
The Lyric CD deliberately features only one of the Brandenburg Concertos, the instantly recognisable Concerto Number 4, BMW 1049, featuring violin and two recorders, in which both solo and grosso co-exist with immense panache.
As Brady explains, "there are so many good recordings of the complete concertos, we decided to do something a little different and chose Number 4 to put the rest of the works on the CD into relief."
Also on the CD is Suite in G Minor by JB Bach (1679-1749), JS Bach's uncle. On hearing this piece for the first time as it was recorded, I was struck by how French it sounds. Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-84), the eldest of JS Bach's six sons, four of whom were musicians, is considered the most gifted. His Adagio & Fugue is featured, as is JS Bach's Sinfonia from Cantata 209.
As this CD seems such an inspired idea, the most obvious question is why it took Irish Baroque Orchestra so long to start recording it? Approaches were made to Lyric FM on behalf of the orchestra, about the possibility of a CD. Lyric FM saw the potential - a union between Irish Baroque Orchestra and the Bach family. It will be the ninth CD on the Lyric label, the most recent being the RTÉ Vanbrugh's Quartet Classics CD, tracing the string quartet from Haydn and Mozart to Gershwin.
Brady has fond memories of the genesis of the Vanbrugh Quartet recording that CD in St Colman's Cathedral, a medieval church in Cloyne, east Cork, once the parish of the philosopher George Berkeley. "A bird kept flying in through a broken window; his singing was also being recorded," recalls Brady. "I had to climb up a ladder and seal the hole with tape to keep the bird out."
The birds at Maynooth are not as intent on recording fame and are content to wait outside.
Irish Baroque Orchestra perform Bach Concertos tonight at the National Concert Hall. The Bach Family CD will be launched at the National Gallery in Dublin on Sept 14, following a Mozart programme
