Dynamic Duo—Nicholas McGegan and David v.R. Bowles Discuss Creating and Capturing Art in New Era
“We’re all dressed up for nobody — which is kind of fun, actually,” muses Nicholas McGegan shortly before a performance at Cleveland’s Severance Hall, certainly a sign of the times in which concert life proceeds without an audience, and of the conductor’s unwavering high spirits, even during a challenging year.
I had the chance to catch up with McGegan and his husband, recording engineer and producer David v.R. Bowles, in the midst of their busy schedules — McGegan was in Cleveland to conduct The Cleveland Orchestra in a program for their streaming platform, and due to conduct the Houston Symphony shortly thereafter; Bowles had recently returned from recording an album of Hanukkah music in a New York City synagogue, with a further recording project at the Fresno Philharmonic around the corner. Our enjoyable and wide-ranging conversation covered both of their remarkable careers, collaborations, current projects, and the state of affairs in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
McGegan turned 70 last year, and has amassed an exhaustive discography of over 100 recordings. Well established as a pre-eminent Baroque and classical specialist, he recently stepped down as music director of the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO), a post he held since 1985, and currently holds the title music director laureate.
Bowles formed Swineshead Productions in 1995, providing production, engineering, editing, and mastering services for a broad array of classical record labels and artists. His work has been tapped for Grammy and Juno nominations. Indeed, he has done such efforts for many of the entries in McGegan’s discography with Philharmonia Baroque and others wherein their careers have intertwined, resulting in often fascinating collaborations. The couple make their home in Berkeley, California — a house which Bowles quips is sufficiently sound insulated such that “I can edit my music in Hebrew and Nic can be practicing his Lutheran Bach, and they don’t interfere!”
A musical symbiosis
When asked about his lifelong fascination for music of the Baroque and classical periods, McGegan reminisced, “when I was a teenager, I actually wanted to be a composer which was a disaster of course — I'm not good at doing solitary things. But when I was at university I started to learn to play period instruments: the harpsichord and the 18th century flute. And the 18th century is a period that appeals to me. I find it a fascinating period culturally, the art, the music, the literature. And I sort of dabble at musicology so I'm interested in how they wrote it and what they were thinking.
“I tend to get a little turned off by about 1850. It's also that the ultimate Baroque art form is opera. It comes in with Monteverdi or a little earlier. I sort of turn off by the time you get to the ‘tubercular’ operas where the heroine dies of tuberculosis in Act Three. I prefer that they end up happily. And you know, The Ring is wonderful, but it can be very funny. I prefer my Mozart and Handel and Monteverdi. It’s a period that appeals and I find that I'm constantly happy to find out more and more about it.”
It was indeed a shared affinity for this historical period that brought McGegan and Bowles together. The two first met when Bowles was a cellist in the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra — “I had a complete change in career in the mid 90s, which led me to where I am today. Nic put up with me during that period, which I am eternally grateful for,” Bowles muses. The couple will be celebrating some 34 years together this April. “We’ve been making music together pretty much all of that,” says McGegan, “so it’s a long track record of music, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a list of it all!”
A comprehensive list notwithstanding, they estimate they’ve made over 30 recordings together, among those collaborations captured on disc are more than a dozen albums with Philharmonia Baroque, recordings with Hungary’s Capella Savaria dating back to the 1980s (and where McGegan continues to serve as principal guest conductor), and chamber music recordings with Bowles on cello and McGegan on harpsichord (notably, a recording of Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach that also featured mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson).
McGegan highlights the Philharmonia Baroque recording of Handel’s infrequently-heard oratorio Joseph and his Brethren as a particularly memorable collaboration, in no small part due to the location — Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’ film studios which the conductor reflects was “a pretty amazing place to record — and has the best espresso machine in Northern California!” Bowles further underscores PBO recordings done of the Brahms serenades, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, and — a quite recent addition— a disc of Handel arias with Avery Amereau as particular sources of pride.
During the current pandemic, the two have collaborated on a forthcoming recording of Bach cantatas with Cantata Collective and singers Sherezade Panthaki and Reginald Mobley, recorded amidst the wildfires that ravaged California this year.
Conducting and producing during a pandemic
Inevitably, much of our conversation centered on the COVID pandemic’s incalculable effects on the musical world, and how both have managed to adapt their respective disciplines. “I’m busier than ever,” remarks Bowles, noting that the demand for music and arts is one constant in otherwise shifting times. If anything, the demand for recording has increased with the various streaming platforms orchestras are utilizing, and moreover, this makes for an opportune time for musicians to embark on recording projects. As McGegan adds, “this is a golden time for singers who want to do their voice and piano recitals and of course for solo pianists who want to record — I mean they’re more or less solitary. It's not the greatest time for Strauss symphonic poems.”
With social distancing regulations in place, the very process of making a recording has to be tailored accordingly. In recording programs of the Fresno Philharmonic, Bowles details a cumbersome process, recording various subsets of the orchestra piecemeal. “We're recording by instrumentation so the first session will be heavy brass and percussion. The second we'll add some strings. Then we come back two weeks later, and do a third session with piano and a fourth session with winds."
When the familiar becomes unfamiliar, Bowles further notes something of a shift in mentality, wherein “nothing is treated like a gig anymore. People are extraordinarily well prepared, realizing that this is a new situation and we have to treat it differently. And so, sometimes it's sort of like being slightly disembodied because you're doing everything that you did before, but there's these layers on top like COVID, and like the fire dangers in our area. And yet you have to function in spite of all that.”
There are, however, some wonderfully unintended and fortuitous discoveries that come about as a result of recording in these circumstances. In the aforementioned Hanukkah music project, the singers were arranged in 12 foot spacing throughout the synagogue, bleeding into where the congregation usually sits. In order to faithfully capture everyone, Bowles explains “I had to throw out my assumptions about standard microphone arrays. The same thing with Chanticleer standing in a circle [presented by Stanford Live]. I couldn't do it just with two microphones or even four microphones — I ended up using eight microphones and a particular configuration. And so I tried this array out, came back, edited it, and ended up using that for the broadcast. But I would not have thought of either of these if we hadn't had the situation with people either spaced out much further than normal, or standing in arrangements that you wouldn't see in a concert hall.”
McGegan points out a current trend that harkens back to much earlier in his career, when recordings were generally not coupled with live performances. “The trend over the last 15-20 years,” he illuminates, “has been to play the music live in a concert and then take it into the studio. And here we are back in the 1970s style again: we're going into the studio, without having given the live concert. And that's making it a different atmosphere to record. A few years ago we'd say, well let's just try and recreate what we did in the concert, or you remember how you played that in the concert. We haven't had that experience in the last year, it’s just straight into record. We've never actually maybe played a piece all the way through. And that's back to how it was years ago.”
Streaming concerts, with their sudden surge in prominence, present a unique set of both challenges and rewards. The Berlin Philharmonic was perhaps ahead of the curve in introducing the Digital Concert Hall back in 2008, and it’s been fascinating to see orchestras across the world now embrace such technology as indeed necessity is the mother of invention. As McGegan puts it, “some orchestras are really seizing the whole COVID nightmare and finding fantastic opportunities.”
In terms of the complexity of such an undertaking, there’s the logistics of integrating the necessary technology and equipment into the concert hall, often structures built many decades before the digital era. Bowles comments, “I think that concert halls will have to retrofit themselves to be able to handle the high bandwidth required for a good live stream. In cases like Severance Hall, it’s a listed building and anything that's done has to be done very carefully.” There’s also the issue of determining the proper price point for such offerings, in a culture where so many of us are accustomed to consuming content online free of charge. Bowles cautions that “there are a lot of consumers, there's a lot of high tech, and people tend to view arts as something which is just like a product you buy, and not something that's created by living people — and I think the biggest challenge is to appreciate the fact that these are human beings on stage, doing something, in real time.”
On the positive end, the most obvious perk of the streaming format is its inherent accessibility to a broad audience. McGegan notes the Houston Symphony to be one such ensemble that has particularly risen to the challenge to offer a robust streaming series, him having made no less than three appearances there during the Fall 2020 season. With over 3000 online subscribers, he comments that “there were people [tuning] in from the UK, from Germany, from all over the world. And I'd say all the ones in Europe had never heard the Houston Symphony live. There will be people who I hope will tune into this video broadcast with Cleveland, who again may never have had the opportunity to hear the orchestra live. And so the audience is a really wide-ranging international audience, for all I know somebody could be watching in the space station or in Antarctica. So each orchestra has the opportunity to have global outreach, and I think that’s a new and very exciting thing.”
In addition to the wider geographic range, one also notes the possibility of a greater diversity in audience age. “I think it's a great way to introduce a younger audience in there,” says McGegan, “the under 20s are very used to computers.” At the other end of the spectrum, he reflects that it’s a meaningful way to reach out to “people in assisted living places where there's a tremendous loneliness factor. They can all switch on and watch this stuff coming to them personally, from the local concert hall or from the concert hall anywhere in the world. I think that's fantastic.” While there still may be no true substitute for attending in person, streaming can further engross the viewer in offering vantage points not attainable when seated in the concert hall. The conductor notes a November performance in Houston which featured Johann Christian Fischer’s Symphony with Eight Obbligato Timpani in which a camera was mounted on the ceiling, granting the virtual audience a bird’s-eye view of the timpanist, who looked like, as McGegan puts it, “a really hyper-caffeinated sushi chef!”
One additional irregularity in pandemic-era concert life McGegan observes is the glaring absence of a usual holiday season mainstay, namely Handel’s Messiah, with its large forces not terribly conducive to social distancing. “The only thing I'm doing for Messiah this year — for the first time in practically my entire life — is the overture, the pastoral symphony, and about three arias, as opposed to the whole thing 10 or 12 times.” If there’s a bellwether of extraordinary times, surely it would be the paucity of December Messiah performances!
Looking ahead
“We have a long history between each other,” Bowles reflects. “I look forward to the next 30 years. As audio technology advances, we can get ever closer to that ideal of enjoying something very transparently — of really hearing what you hear in person. I'm looking forward to what's going to happen with streaming. I think that will pick up in quality quite a bit. I think we're in for a great time of discovery.”
On the return to the concert hall, McGegan predicts that the large, open-air venues will be a comfortable way to gradually bring people back to live performances this summer, and perhaps some semblance of business as usual to follow by September. He continues, “I think the next thing is going to be to see what stays from what we're doing now. And whether two and two will make five which would be awfully nice, and we get the best of both worlds.”
Moreover, there’s a hope for some lasting lessons learned during the pandemic. “Our biggest hope,” Bowles remarks, “is that when things stabilize after this massive distribution of the vaccine, that people will start enjoying music and the arts, certainly not the way they did before, but in a way that they'll really appreciate who's creating it.” McGegan adds, “there’s also what I might call a democratization of classical music, rather than having to pay a lot of money, dress up, and go to some temple of music. Classical music should be out there for all and be easily available and affordable, be it streams, Spotify, on your computer, and live in a concert hall.
“I hope that everyone will come through this terrible time better than before. It will have been a trial by fire, in a sense, but I hope that the net result in spite of everything will be something new and wonderful. That’s something of a challenge and an excitement. And David and I are just very lucky and fortunate to be part of it.”
