Orchester Wiener Akademie — Martin Haselböck Interview | Op. 15
Orchester Wiener Akademie is a period instrument orchestra based in Vienna. Founder and music director Martin Haselböck talks about how Vienna provides unique opportunities to feel closer to Classical-era composers, such as the ability to perform in the original performance settings with their RESOUND concert series.
In this episode, you’ll:
Learn about the background and discoveries of the early music movement
Listen to Beethoven come alive on period instruments in the original spaces in which he performed his works
Understand the philosophy to balance research with artistic interpretation in historical performance practice
Hear how musicians have been affected by the coronavirus situation
For the best experience, please watch the video at the top of the page.
Episode Transcript and Timestamps
DANIEL ADAM MALTZ: Grüß Sie from Vienna, Austria.
Welcome to Opus 15 of Classical Cake, the podcast where we discuss topics relating to Viennese classical music and Austrian culture while enjoying one of Vienna's delicious cakes.
I'm your host, Daniel Adam Maltz.
If you're new here, welcome. Please subscribe and be to visit ClassicalCake.com for more.
My guest today is Martin Haselböck, founder and music director of Orchester Wiener Akademie, an orchestra dedicated to playing on period instruments.
He has received numerous awards and accolades for his service to Viennese music and culture. And, his Orchester Wiener Akademie has a discography of over 100 recordings featuring repertoire ranging from the Baroque to Romantic eras.
Martin, thank you for joining me.
MARTIN HASELBÖCK: It's a pleasure.
Featured Cake: Erdbeer-Obers Torte [0:47]
MALTZ: Our cake today is Erdbeer-Obers Torte or strawberry cream cake.
This summery dessert features a light and fluffy strawberry cream between layers of sponge cake and buttery pastry.
A layer of whipped cream is covered by a thin layer of strawberry jam on the top of the cake.
So, let's dig in.
HASELBÖCK: Wonderful. Great! Thank you.
MALTZ: The good thing is you never run out of cakes in Vienna.
HASELBÖCK: Delicious.
An unusual day in Vienna [1:17]
MALTZ: The last time we saw each other was during a rehearsal on March 10th, which ended up being a very unusual day in Vienna.
HASELBÖCK: Sure, sure.
MALTZ: So, what happened and what was your initial reaction?
HASELBÖCK: It was very emotional.
We played the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Benjamin Schmid — who is one of our favorite soloists — and, at the interval, we got a phone call that it might be that our next concert, which was supposed to be the Sunday afterwards, was in danger because the government might start the curfew or a closure of the concert halls.
And, indeed, we played the Schubert C Major Symphony. Very emotional for us all the time at the Musikverein, with students in the chairs in the audience.
Afterwards, the general manager came up and told us there will be no concert.
And this is like a train at full speed crashing into a wall. It was very emotional and everybody almost cried.
We had the additional problem that we were supposed to do a photo shoot of the orchestra and of myself. So, we had to smile and we had to cheer up, but all the thoughts were very sad.
This was the first of, so far, I would say, 52 concerts which were cancelled — because this would have been our main time of touring and of concertizing after our recordings of the symphonies and the piano concertos. So this would have been… we would call it our harvest after the recording period.
But, that's life. Right now we're in the middle of a different situation.
Cultivating tomorrow’s audience [3:01]
MALTZ: We'll come back to how musicians have been impacted by the Coronavirus crisis in a bit.
Something I noticed was that this rehearsal was also being observed by a school group. Is this normal, as well?
HASELBÖCK: This is very normal. I remember, when I was a school child, I went to the concerts there. This has changed very much because we were just allowed to sit in and to be silent. Right now, it's a process of talking to the audience and talking to the young students.
And, for many of them, it's not just the music which is new. It's this Musikverein, which is kind of like a castle in the middle of Vienna. It's kind of a limit for some people to enter the hall. It's in the interest of us, and of the concert hall, and of the schools that these young kids see a concert – have the occasion to go there. This is the audience of tomorrow.
The beginnings of Orchester Wiener Akademie [3:59]
MALTZ: So why did you start Orchester Wiener Akademie?
HASELBÖCK: It's connected with the Musikverein. I am an organist and I started very early with organ concerts.
In '85 there was the big Bach anniversary. So, everybody played Bach. I played the complete organ works.
We had a concert series connected with the Musikverein and then the main librarian, Dr. Biber, came up and said, ‘We have this congress here, would you be interested in playing — with some of your friends — some harpsichord concertos and the B minor suite?’
And I said why not? We just met together. If you're an organist in Vienna, you always play with orchestra and always conducted because all the church music in the churches is the Vienna-style classical church music with instruments and chorus.
So, I just called some of my friends and it was a lot of fun. And then we got another invitation.
The group was called, in the beginning, Vienna Bach Consort. Then we decided, okay, either we do it on a professional level, or we do it just as a hobby. And, so we decided for the professional level.
Then the repertoire got bigger. We said, okay, consort and Bach is not our only goal. And this was the time of the foundings of… we were the next generation after the Academy of Ancient Music, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.
For us it was the idea, why not call it the Orchestra Vienna Academy? Which was a nice idea. Sometimes, it was a problem because in some Eastern European countries, academies are schools. So many people thought in the beginning, ‘Oh, this is a school orchestra.’ What we are not.
This was a very quick start with the orchestra and a very fast beginning. We were lucky because we always had the chance to play in the most beautiful halls here and, in the beginning, to travel a lot because this was new. We were the first generation after Harnoncourt.
MALTZ: Right. I was going to say, this is the mid 80s. This is still very early onset of this early music movement. So, there must've been a lot of excitement around this.
HASELBÖCK: There was excitement. There were not many players.
I remember at the beginning we had to get some of the wind players from Holland. The trumpets came from England. At the same time, we were traveling a lot.
Still, we were not the very first pioneer generation, but we were very early. I remember, for instance, we were the very first orchestra to play the Mozart-Da Ponte operas on period instruments on the continent, in Europe, in modern times. So you had a lot of premiere possibilities.
And, connected with the orchestra, came a time where we started to discover a lot of un-played music. I was, at the same time, organist of the Court Chapel in Vienna… The Court Chapel where they have this huge library dating back to the 1400s. We discovered a lot of music from this library. So, it was a mixture of discovery and playing the normal repertoire in the new style.
[Music playing]
What is historical performance practice? [7:58]
MALTZ: How would you describe historical performance practice or historically-informed performance?
HASELBÖCK: It's a mixture of research and practical life.
I think the balance is not always easy to keep because you have to study, you have to read but, at the same time, you have to be careful that your own inspiration, your own personal style, doesn't disappear behind the books, I would say.
So, the problem is to have your personal style, your personal narration I would say — but based on enough scientific and historic evidence. We have to put our own interpretation in a scheme. You lever it where some extremes are wrong, and if you don't look for the extremes, you're boring because it's flat. So something in between means interpretation for me.
RESOUND: Getting closer to the composers [9:04]
MALTZ: One of the most interesting aspects of the Orchester Wiener Akademie today is the RESOUND concert series. So, what is your goal with this?
HASELBÖCK: RESOUND is if you go for the philosophy. We have this – right now in Corona — we have this time where we are not able to perform in real life. And so there were some theory guys who said real-life culture is over. Everything is streaming and it's just education: If it's Mona Lisa in the real painting or Mona Lisa on a screen.
For sure, this is totally wrong.
It's based on the word of Walter Benjamin: the artwork in the time of, how is it called in English, of multiplication, I would say.
So we look for the real thing and the real thing is not just knowledge, is not just interpretation. It's something what we could call the aura, the auratic surrounding of the art object. So, if you go to a museum and you see the Mona Lisa hanging on this place or you see this famous painting there, then you get a shiver and it's more than just seeing it and describing it. And the same with music.
As an organist, I had the occasion sometimes to play instruments where you knew — on these keys — Bach had his fingers. This is extremely touching. This is unbelievable. And there's a strong emotional thing.
The advantage in Vienna is you live in a city where if you keep your eyes open and if you know the history, you can connect every single house, every single corner to some event or to some musical event. And you have a subtext. You walk through the streets with all this touristic… but you can say on this corner Franz Schubert had a snowball fight with his school mates and so on.
And being in the court chapel, there's the manuscript of a mass where Schubert scribbled, “I crowed for the last time.” Because his voice was breaking as a boy.
And, for me, this is the basic idea of RESOUND. To live in Vienna, you have the occasion to go to the original places. You can hear the music at the place where it was performed. You can stand in the same place where Beethoven conducted his stuff. This is the emotional side.
And there's a scientific side — if you know how many violins played in this hall, if you know how the acoustic is, if you have the same instruments which Beethoven used at his time — you can say that you get quite a similar sound which Beethoven must have heard when he conducted the pieces himself.
This is something fascinating. You get more information than somebody who just sits with a modern fiddle in a modern hall. One of the main impressions was that these big orchestras in these small halls feel so strong that you just feel it under your skin – the physical sound of music.
[Music playing]
MALTZ: That's also the heart of the reason why I came to Vienna. My area of study and my interests in Wiener Klassik – Viennese classicism. Yeah, I knew that there was something to be gained by walking the streets. Even something to be… an aesthetic or an ethos to pick up on just because of the geographical location of Vienna.
HASELBÖCK: And, it's with your knowledge that you experience the city in a different way than just somebody who… We have many students here who come here to go to a teacher, to go to the lessons, but they don't use the many possibilities which are around them. Yeah, and, for sure, I tell my students, first thing: go to the opera, go to the Musikverein, go to the halls. And, for sure, this is part of musical life.
Differences between working with historic vs. modern instruments [13:33]
MALTZ: Are there any special considerations that you keep in mind specifically because you work with period instruments?
HASELBÖCK: I've worked a lot with modern orchestras too and, for sure, you have a sound in your ear. You know you can achieve a sound.
There are already some very characteristic examples: for instance, in the Mozart slow movements or operas, you have always this balance of flute, then the first violins and bassoon in octaves, which is one beautiful sound on period instruments because it melds automatically. With modern instruments, it doesn't meld automatically. But, you have this sound in your ear and then you tell your flute player, please play a little bit darker in your color. And you tell the violins that you have to dominate the sound a little bit more. So you learn a lot which you can use for modern instruments.
MALTZ: Why should today's musicians be exposed to these period instruments?
In the normal orchestras right now in Europe, if you're a trumpet player and you apply for a job, you have to be able to play baroque trumpet. The same with horn. For the woodwinds it's difficult. Clarinets can switch. Oboes cannot switch so easily, it's a different study. But, I would recommend… I would tell any young player try to get both, historic and modern.
[Music playing]
The effects of Coronavirus [15:39]
MALTZ: Concerts and other large scale events have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. How has this affected you, your orchestra, and the individual musicians themselves?
HASELBÖCK: I have these two groups. Vienna is my main subject, but I also have a small group in Los Angeles where I am music director – Musica Angelica.
In the beginning, I thought both situations are very different because, in Europe, artists have some protection. So, in the beginning, the first concert which was not played was paid by the organizer because we were still before the new law which said that this is force majeure — it's fate that Corona came.
Afterwards, I had major problems and it cost us a lot of time to secure the basic needs for the musicians because, in period instrument orchestras, the musicians are freelance musicians. They are not employed by the state like the Vienna Phil, or by the city like the Vienna Symphony.
So, the state provided, in the beginning, some assistance. The musicians got some assistance. But, right now, the situation is getting more complicated because we don't know when this is going to end.
So, I was working on several levels. I tried — when a concert was cancelled — I tried to get, immediately, a replacement date for the next season and so on.
But we all don't know how the future will be. We are all in the same boat and we have to be a little bit loud to be heard that the government and the sponsors – we don't know the possible sponsors because all the economy is going down. On the other side, I get the feeling that people are kind of longing for new concerts and we are trying to adapt as much as we can to the new situation.
There are strict laws right now to protect humans – for distancing. I told the concert organizers we are a baroque orchestra: we can stand, we can play with a bigger distance between the players. So, I hope that this will be a new start and then the rules will get a little bit less strict.
For sure, we all hope for the medication which allows that people can go to the concert without fear. Because the situation right now — both sides, for players and audience — fear is the worst enemy of any arts, of free arts. So if people are afraid… people who are afraid cannot listen and cannot play. I hope this can be resolved soon.
[Music playing]
MALTZ: Wow… and that was only a taste of what Orchester Wiener Akademie can do.
Thanks, Martin, for sharing this Classical Cake with me.
HASELBÖCK: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Suggested resources to learn more [19:05]
Learn more about Orchester Wiener Akademie. Check out their RESOUND concert series and their newly-released complete Beethoven orchestral works, including the symphonies and concertos with Gottlieb Wallisch.