William Christie is busy as ever at 80 and putting his imprint on the period-instrument movement

NEW YORK AP William Christie a conductor renowned for Baroque performances thought back to a phone call from Nikolaus Lehnhoff a year before the German director s death I think a Tristan with Christie would be really a great thing Christie recalled Lehnhoff referencing Wagner s opera I mentioned That s a bad joke I declared I d be coming into an arena as a puny little boxer who doesn t know sort of how to sort of box someone who has no idea what all this is about I d be sliced to ribbons In a season celebrating his th birthday this past Dec Christie has no Wagner plans He is as busy as ever as a leader of the period-instrument movement conducting playing the harpsichord administering his Les Arts Florissants ensemble and teaching at The Juilliard School He s invariably brought his flair and say-so director Peter Sellars noted He was the chef de cuisine at a certain moment in history You look at the personnel on all of his early recordings and anybody who s done anything came through the apprentissage in his kitchen Christie s - season included a striking Robert Carsen staging of Rameau s Les F tes d H b The Festivities of Hebe at Paris Op ra-Comique It moved the action from to the contemporary lys e Palace and featured the French national soccer organization celebrating during a ballet followed by a closing scene on a Seine tourist boat passing a sparkling Eiffel Tower I like mixing epochs visually and musically Christie reported I can remain I think true and faithful to the things that I think make my music eloquent old instruments and being faithful I think to performance practice Teaching the next generation Christie has become an elder statesman of the movement highlighting th and th century performance practice Since he s offered to Juilliard students his knowledge of Baroque articulation subdued vibrato and lower pitch They eat through maybe eight to different conductors a year and specific of them I admire and particular of them I think are on the merry-go-round just because it s fashionable and I wouldn t have hired them he mentioned Particular of them have well sort of very perverse ideas about French music for example And so I try to say to them first of all I m here because for certain repertory I have at least better ideas than you individually and I think I can sell them to you He founded Les Arts Florissants in to impart knowledge he felt was getting ignored He used his own orchestra when he led Charpentier s M d e at the Palais Garnier last spring I worked with orchestras that have made me feel so awful and so low and so mean and miserable he mentioned Baroque orchestras are not Sergei Prokofiev or Dmitri Shostakovich orchestras They re not Ravel orchestras They re not Korngold orchestras But then modern orchestras playing Mozart sometimes are hideous He adds that one dug holes feet under and buried Mozart Emmanuel Resche-Caserta Les Arts Florissants concertmaster since was uncertain whether to stay with music pursue political science or switch to art history before he encountered Christie at Juilliard If I can do music with this intensity that he is asking for I can dedicate my life to it he noted I was very impressed by his natural charisma He enters the concert hall or the rehearsal room and we play differently because we want to please him Christie founded Le Jardin des Voix Garden of Voices in Lea Desandre joined the academy in and has blossomed into a star mezzo-soprano He is a wonderful tutor because he knows so much he reads so much she commented I feel like I have someone who s going to put me in a very calm place even if maybe was not a confident role for me First encounter as child Christie grew up in Williamsville near Buffalo New York and then South Wales His mom Ida arranged piano lessons when he was and conducted the choir at St Paul s Lutheran Church And so when I was or years old I heard Bach and I heard Handel and I heard Purcell and I heard Orlando Gibbons and we sang th century hymns he disclosed It was a curious kind of childhood because I was playing sports and summer vacations were down at the lake But I already had this extraordinary idea of a different world Christie first heard the harpsichord when he was or and his mom and her mother Julia took him to Handel s Messiah at the Buffalo Philharmonic s Kleinhans Music Hall with conductor Josef Krips and Squire Haskin at the keyboard He Haskin was part of this funny groupings of cultural people in cultural boondocks like rural New York upstate New York Christie commented That was a great moment for me to hear this instrument that was going to be the center of my life Christie took piano lessons from age with Laura Kelsey His mom worked at the music store Denton Cottier Daniels and in he became fascinated by an Erato recording with French harpsichordist Laurence Boulay and soprano Nadine Sautereau of music by Fran ois Couperin It sort of changed my life he disclosed Moving to Europe Christie received a Harvard undergraduate degree in and a Yale master s in then taught at Dartmouth He moved to Europe in the fall of to avoid the U S military draft and in bought a house in the Loire village of Thir where he has created a grand garden and launched a vocal academy He gained French citizenship in Christie does like music he isn t known for He calls my secret life playing Liszt s Transcendental tudes or Schubert But those are not for populace listening I think myself what I would do differently he reflected but I m not courageous enough to say all right in the season William Christie is going to recycle and is going to start with Haydn and finish off with I don t know how about Dvorak How about Bruckner motets Source