Are We Having Fun Yet?

‘If it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.”

The phrase is repeated over and over in an almost fugal set of variations when Nicholas McGegan is interviewed. The wry, witty conductor, music director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque--perhaps America’s leading period instrument ensemble--has a focused, almost single-minded approach to his work.

While he often adheres to the tenets of historical accuracy and authentic performance practices that mark the early music movement, he is not a slave to them. In fact, he spends a lot of time conducting bands that play steel-string violins with nary a harpsichord or wooden flute to be seen onstage.

This week, he makes his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl leading two programs. The first, on Tuesday night, includes Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 and features fortepianist Robert Levin in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466. The second features a Levin-reconstructed Requiem, K. 626, by Mozart and Bach’s Magnificat, BMV243.

So what will the McGegan-led Philharmonic sound like at the Bowl?

“Hopefully,” says the 46-year-old Englishman by phone from his home in Berkeley, “they’ll sound as good as they always sound. I’m not going to preach to them about early music or anything silly like that. The wrong attitude to take is that I’m the only person with the right answers. That’s not the way to go. And besides, I’m much too short!”

He adds that he hopes to bring out a chamber orchestra quality in the Philharmonic and, at least on the Mozart concerto, “make all the woodwind players feel like soloists because there’ll be a lot of good tunes to play.”

In general, the puckish McGegan doesn’t do anything different with a modern orchestra than he would with one playing on period instruments. “It’s all music. There’s nothing worse than coming in and saying, ‘No vibrato for the next three days.’ To make stylistic pronouncements like that is a terrific arrogance and gets you nowhere. I like to work with orchestras. If I’m having a good time, and the orchestra is having a good time, hopefully the audience will, too.”

McGegan’s democratic approach to conducting is in part a legacy of the period of early music foment in which he got his start. The period-instrument baroque movement in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s was characterized by collaborative relationships between players and conductors. Groups such as the Academy of Ancient Music, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Hanover Band were formed in an atmosphere that rejected the hierarchy of superstar maestros, bandleaders who ruled with an iron baton and didn’t allow the player to make his or her own interpretive decisions.

Like many early music performers of his generation, McGegan, a flutist and harpsichord player, got into it sideways. Earning a music degree at Cambridge required hacking through a course in acoustics, studying the physics behind sounds made by instruments and their reverberations in concert halls. The class often met at the professor Nicholas Shackleton’s house, which had a large collection of 18th century wind instruments--and a tenant named Christopher Hogwood.

One day, McGegan, who’d been studying 20th century music, borrowed an 18th century wooden flute and was on his way, eventually playing with all the major groups in England, most extensively with Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music.

“He was always very friendly,” Hogwood recalls. “Fun to get on with, always reading, quick with literary quotes.” McGegan played flute on the landmark period-instrument recordings of Mozart symphonies that made Hogwood a star and made some serious money for English Decca Records. He also served as harpsichordist and vocal coach when the Academy performed a Handel oratorio.

But, Hogwood says, McGegan never expressed any desire to conduct back then. McGegan says he’s actually been conducting since he was about 18.

“I did a lot of opera on the quiet while I was still at Cambridge, and later I was playing so much in that gray area of early music where you play harpsichord and conduct at the same time.”

McGegan specialized in conducting 18th century French opera around London, what he calls the “souffle music”of Philidor and Rameau, before

accepting an academic post at Washington University in St. Louis. He resumed his podium career in the U.S. with a 1983 performance of Handel’s oratorio “Semele” at the Washington Opera in D.C. and followed that up the next year with Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”

He joined Philharmonia Baroque as music director in 1985, when the then 4-year-old group was a players’ collective looking to organize into a proper orchestra. “This was during its Birkenstock period,” McGegan recalls. “We’ve gone from 12 concerts a year to 50, so I guess it’s been a great success.”

Under his leadership, Philharmonia--which he conducts from the harpsichord “when appropriate”--and its chamber offshoot, the Arcadian Academy, have also recorded extensively, racking up a number of awards and accolades, especially for a series of Handel operas and oratorios for the Harmonia Mundi label.

An irony of his status is that the role of the conductor, as we know it today, didn’t exist until the 19th century. “Very possibly in the 18th century, I would have been the composer. New music was what it was all about then.” Composers conducted their own works, often from the keyboard.

“Conductors didn’t interpret for the musicians,” McGegan says, “musicians interpreted for themselves. Arrogant 18th century singers would have eaten alive any conductor who tried to tell them what to do. In terms of authenticity, I’m the one person who shouldn’t be there, which is a great comfort.”

Reviews of McGegan concerts stress his wacky irreverence at the podium. He gets involved, moving about, gesticulating, grinning a lot. He’s been compared to Leonard Bernstein and to Groucho Marx.

Said McGegan: “I like to make a concert that’s an event rather than piously playing notes that were written 200 years ago. The soloists are all my mates, and I treat it like a dinner party that I’ve invited people to because they’re delightful.”

McGegan credits his experience as an orchestral player for his approach on the podium. “A lot of conductors were pianists and soloists who never played in orchestras. It’s like being a team manager in a sport who never played the game.”

Musicians who’ve worked with McGegan note his simpatico style. “He gives singers a lot of freedom,” says countertenor Drew Minter. “Some conductors are like Nazis, with their hand around your throat all the time. But once Nick chooses you, he believes in you and lets you be who you are.”

Adds mezzo Judith Malafronte, who’ll be singing the Bach at the Bowl Thursday: “He’s always telling the orchestra to imitate this or that thing the singer is doing, especially in Bach, where there’s so much imitation going on. He can talk to a modern orchestra, which a lot of early music people can’t do.”

McGegan crosses the bridge between early and modern more than most period specialists and studiously avoids working with period instruments in large halls or outdoor venues.

“A baroque orchestra sounds silly in those halls; a modern orchestra sounds good in those halls. I’ve done a Bach festival with the San Francisco Symphony at [San Francisco’s] Davies Hall and loved it. I’m against the idea of a modern orchestra not playing stuff that was written before 1850.”

When McGegan returns to Southern California later this year, however, he will be firmly in his early music / authentic practice mode. After four years of appearing as part of the music programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque will move to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. The first concert features music by Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi and a newly discovered oboe concerto by Giuseppe Tartini.

“The people [at LACMA] were great,” he says, “but it was hard for us to build an audience there.”

For future gigs, McGegan will be directing Philharmonia on a U.S. tour, as well as leading the Hanover Band and the Arcadian Academy. He is also scheduled to record, for Virgin, the complete Concerti Grossi, Opus 6, by Handel with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. All this in addition to his other regular duties--as artistic director of the Gottingen Handel Festival in Germany, principal conductor of Sweden’s Drottningholm Court Theater and principal guest conductor of the Scottish Opera--which keep him about half time in Europe.

Despite a career that clearly emphasizes his place in the spotlight, what McGegan would really like, he says, is a role that splits the difference between the non-conductors of early music and the podium stars of today. “I’d love to be a conductor who’s like a stage director and work on the performance [in rehearsal], then go sit in the audience and let the players get on with it.”

Which sounds relaxing, and like a lot of fun.

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* Nicholas McGegan conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Tuesday and Thursday, 8:30 p.m. $1-$75. (213) 850-2000.