by Royal S. Brown

I seem to be spending a lot of time in churches these days. Last issue it was the spectacular Church of Saint John the Divine in upper Manhattan, where I interviewed Frederick Renz. This issue it is the much less spectacular but nonetheless atmospheric church of Saint Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street in Manhattan, where, as organist, Gwendolyn Toth wears one of her man! musical hats and where she and her husband, keyboard artist Dongsok Shin, met with me, in an upper-floor rehearsal room, this past July to talk about her early-music group, Artek, and the recording they have just made (which Shin produced) of Monteverdi's Orfeo for Lyrichord's Early Music Series, with Jeffrey Thomas in the title role. Artek actually consists of four ensembles; eight-voice group called "The Artek Singers"; "458 Strings," which is the Artek Continuo ensemble: the "Artek Baroque Orchestra"; and the "Artek Chamber Players." All of this was begun by Toth in 1987 on the heels of a series of solo concerts entitled "The Art of the Early Keyboard" that she gave in 1986 after returning from Amsterdam, where she studied harpsichord with Ton Koopman. I first asked Toth, who names Jordi Savall as one of her big influences, what led her to create Artek, with its propensity for a big sound in the continuo part.

R.S.B.: How many continuo players do you tend to use?

D.S.: As many as are available!

G.T.: In the Monteverdi Vespers, we mustered five lutes, two harpsichords, and two harps.

D.S.: There is documentary evidence of Italian Baroque operas being done with forests of lutes. You just see all these tails sticking up. I think that when a lot of us started doing this stuff, you couldn't even find more than one or two lute players. And I think people got very used to using one harpsichord and one cello in eighteenth-century Baroque practice, which doesn't necessarily go with the earlier style.

G. T.: I think the idea of one harpsichord is largely a twentieth-century idea. Handel usually has at least two keyboards. It has a lot to do with the size of the hall you're playing in.

D.S.: The country also. The practice depends so much on where it's happening as well as the time.

G.T.: It's a very modern sensibility to say that we have to decide how they did it, and this one way will be authentic performing practice. It seems very clear to me that a lot of things went back then. There was a lot of variation, not only from country to country but from town to town, from composer to composer. Sometimes it was just who happened to be around at the time. I even find, if I do a piece a second time, that I often do something different, because I think it's more interesting to try it.

G.T.: Oh, absolutely. A big part of it. Everybody who plays continuo with us is absolutely fluent at simply reading either from figured or unfigured bass lines.

D.S.: You'd be surprised!

G.T.: Sometimes I find, when you hear it on the recording, that we all have kind of the same feeling of a big chord here, a small chord there, because it has to do with how we're supporting the vocal line. Sometimes, kind of the opposite happens. They do something, and I just go, ''Boy! In that case, just one of us is enough.

D.S.: Sometimes, in the rehearsal process, someone will have an inspiration, and we'll say ''Oh, let's keep that."

G.T.: To a greater or lesser extent. I don't want to make it sound as if we work it out in the rehearsal either. I don't play a bass part the same way twice, which drove the editor of the recording quite crazy, because there was a lot of variation with what the continuo was from take to take Especially sessions that were separated by some time. The lute players that we use, Richard Stone and Grant Herreid, play a lot together, and they have this amazing ability to be in each other's head. They'll be improvising and suddenly they'll come up with this wonderful thing in thirds. And I'll' ask them, ''Did you plan that?'' And they'll say, ''No, it just came out."

G. T.: It is. There have been a few times where we were debating about whether the final choice is minor or major. I remember one concert where we got to the final chord. I don't think we'd written down what we decided. But we all looked at each other, went "Uh huh," and we all played major. It was a totally extrasensory kind of experience. You either know or you don't know. And if you don't know, you leave the third out! It's also the nature of the early seventeenth century. It's certainly much less harmonically complicated than Bach, and so you have, I think, a greater latitude for a kind of improvisation that can go on. It really isn't as interesting if you don't improvise and have a sense of really locking into the other people.

D.S.: Definitely, in music history, the later music goes, the more control the composer wants to observe over the performance of it. Because of that sensibility, we've gotten into this idea that there is that one way to do it. What's fun about this kind of music is that it gives you more latitude to change your mind, if nothing else.

G.T.: I would say that Artek does more of that kind of music than any other, although we do plenty of Bach concerts. We haven't for a few years, but we have done some large Classical pieces too.

G.T.: We have a small amount of government support. And we have a lot of private donors who in general are not big donors—we're talking in the range of fifty to five hundred dollars. But we have a lot of people who believe in what we're doing. And that's the backbone, about sixty-five I percent of the money that we get. We've never been easily able to break into the foundation money, I which is now going more to social services. We came on board at a time when everything was starting to come down. Of the nearly ten years we've been in existence, it took about two years to really get going. If we had started fifteen years ago, we would have hooked into a lot more financing. And of course we have our artists, who are very generous with their time. They can't make the kind of money that they can make when they go to Europe. They're very understanding. I've had a lot of the same performers since the very beginning, people like Jennifer Lane and Lisa Terry. I wish I could say something positive, such as that I think Artek is going to expand enormously in the future. But we've grown slowly, and I'm sure we'll continue to. Unless the climate changes in this country....

G.T.: It's hard to do operas, because that really involves a tremendous amount of support. Money for the technical part of it, rental of the hall. The price is just a certain price, and that's that.

D.S.: I think that the big disadvantage we have here is that it's very difficult to present a show the way William Christie can in France or England, under a completely different set of circumstances. It's comparing apples to oranges: the kind of money they have and the kind of support system they have to keep that going. Even in these times they still have a lot more of that. Here, just finding an appropriate hall that sounds good for this repertoire and that seats the audience comfortably: it's impossible.

G.T.: You have to decide which area you're going to compromise on. Are you going to spend a lot of money on a nice hall that's acoustically dead? Most of the really nice theaters are not really as live as some of the halls where they're performing over in Europe. Or do you use a hall that's, how shall I say it, off the beaten track—sort of the musical equivalent of off-off Broadway—where the acoustics are a little better and the seating is realistic. You can sell it every night. But then you're dealing with the economics of just selling tickets. If the Metropolitan Opera says they can't make money at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, where they can sell a lot of tickets, how can you really do a Baroque opera where, just because of the nature of the acoustics, you want to do it in a 500-seat hall? If you can only sell 500 tickets, there's almost no way, unless you have government funding. We do a lot of fund-raising on a constant, small level. It's the biggest part of my work.

D.S.: All directors find themselves in the unenviable position of having to be a professional administrator instead of being an artist. That's the way things are now.

G.T.: If my own fund-raising abilities were greater, we'd be somewhere else now. I think that's the only thing that's kept us from having real, international acclaim.

G.T.: We have kind of different backgrounds. I went to Middlebury College in Vermont, and I had a quite wonderful organ and conducting teacher there, Emory Fanning, who had studied with Robert Fountain, who apparently was a very big influence on his life. So that sort of came to me through him. And he had also studied at one point with Gustav Leonhardt. He's a very intensely musical man with a very strong sense of text in organ music as well as in choral music. He communicated a sense of rhythmic vitality in the music, so that it's alive and breathes at all times. It dances, and it is always expressive. That's the absolute first ideal you aim for. I won't call it performance practice at that time, since I was playing mostly modem organ and piano. But that's something that has remained with me as the most important quality that we want to express. I really have trouble with putting the first things as, "Well, we do our trills the right way." That's something that you learn, but it's in the background. At one point I had gone to Bruges and realized that there was this whole culture of early music that I had no idea of, and I found it fascinating. In between that time I had done a lot of composition work. It was a period of my life when I wanted to be in contemporary music, and so I sort of did the uptown scene at that time. I came back to the United States and studied at Yale. I did a doctorate there. I studied harpsichord with Lola Odiaga, who comes from the Ralph Kirkpatrick tradition. And so l have a little bit of that, too. There's something there: a sense of musicality, a sense of rhetoric: the music speaks words when you play. She took me to meet Ralph, shortly before he died. He was blind at that time. He lived in this incredibly beautiful, wooded setting, and I felt very sad to realize that he couldn't see it anymore. Then we open the door, and there are artworks on every wall. It just sort of tore at you, because you realized that it was all gone for him, except in his memory. What was interesting musically was that he had his Dolmetsch harpsichord—it had been Busoni's harpsichord—and I sat down and didn't find it very different from the Dowd harpsichord. In other words, from the turn of the century to the early 60s, there was sort of this big gap. We could have been where we were in the 60s in 1900. Something happened. Some of us think it was maybe Landowska! It certainly wasn't the early music tradition. They went for a different kind of sound that was totally different from what the eighteenth-century people were after. After Yale, I ended back up in Europe, where I studied with Ton Koopman for a while.

G. T.: I did do quite a lot of what they call avant-garde downtown music for a short time in the mid 80s. It was good, because I had been involved in the uptown scene, and the downtown scene is very different. What I would say is that I don't find contemporary music and early music that different. If you're somebody doing medieval music, which isn't what I do, I think there's the same aspect of creating and composing. I wish the people who write grant applications would recognize that. Certainly, there's personal creativity involved in Romantic music. But to a very great extent, the composers wrote down as much as they could. When you go back to seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century music, there are rather distant limits, and you have a lot of leeway. That's why, if you listen to a variety of Orfeo recordings, there are a lot of differences in the way things are realized. The further you go back, the fewer directions we have, and it becomes almost like composing your own music. It's interesting the way two types of twentieth-century composers have written for the harpsichord, for instance. There have been some very interesting things written for the harpsichord, especially by the minimalists or by Louis Andriessen over in Holland. Things like that. On the other hand, music that comes from the academic compositional world tends to feel to me more like piano music on the harpsichord. I just don't tie in to that tradition as much anymore.

G.T.: It's very similar.

D.S.: Think about Marais's Sonnerie. It's like minimalism. There are a lot of notes, but it's very repetitive in the way Glass is. But it develops over a period of time.

G.T.: It also doesn't have the grand ending that you associate with, say, Romantic music. There's a sense of closure, but it's a different kind of thing.

D.S.: I was born in Boston. My mom is a pianist. She taught me from the time I was about four until I was sixteen. Then I came to New York and studied with Nadia Reisenberg at Mannes. But even from the time I was in high school, I was always interested in harpsichord, and early music, and Bach in particular. When I was in college, I was the only pianist who could be persuaded to sit down at the terrible harpsichord they had at Mannes at the time and accompany Bach sonatas for flutists and violinists. Once I graduated from Mannes, with a piano degree, the school decided to start a group called the Mannes Camarata. The director of the Mannes Camarata was Paul Echols. He was brought in to start that group. I was drafted to be in that group. I remember when I went to the first rehearsal: the first thing Paul says to me when I walk in the door is, "So, do you know how to tune this thing?" I said, "No." "Well, you gotta learn!" And it was uphill from there. That's when it really started, around '82 or '83. In early music, he's probably one of the greatest influences of my life. Not just there, but in other ways too. Early on, I also did a summer workshop with a group called the Musica Antiqua of Cologne. It was in Canada. The harpsichordist there was Andreas Staier. Just that two-week workshop had a great influence on me. There was nothing generic about it, it was very left wing. I don't consider myself left wing as a player, but that certainly pushed me in that direction more so than anything I'd ever done before. Over the past dozen years, the Mannes Camarata did a number of Baroque opera productions, and I was directing the music for those.

The other thing that happened at Mannes was that, in my second year, I started running the audio department there. That was sort of an accident where I had been at a chorus/orchestra concert, and they had been looking for something, I don't even remember what it was, at the concert when they were trying to record it, and I found it for them. So I was asked if I wanted to work in the audio department, and I ended up taking over when the guy who was running it left. There's where my interest in recording began. I've always enjoyed editing and record producing to a certain extent. But most of what I was doing was demo tapes and audition tapes, as well as live concerts. When the Orfeo project came along, Gwen and I talked about producers, because she thought that maybe I should perform in it instead.

G.T.: He convinced me that I needed somebody whom I could really trust with some of the decisions, since basically I would not be able to make all those decisions in the process of recording. I mean, it was my first recording. So I eventually came to the realization that I should have somebody I really trust with my life behind the microphone listening. Obviously, the best person was him.

D.S.: A lot of it also has to do with the kind of recording producer I tend to be. There are a lot of people who are terrific recording producers who also sort of throw in their artistic comment during a session. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but for my own personal taste that's a little too much interference. If the artists are good enough, they don't need that. I've been at some recording sessions where I've been very amazed at the arguments the artist will get into with the recording producer about how the artist should be doing something. That always strikes me as completely off the wall. So I don't tend to be that kind of recording producer. And of course I would never argue with my wife about anything . . . ! And there aren't too many producers in this country who do Baroque opera. That's a very peculiar set of circumstances just on its own.

G.T.: Lyrichord, to their credit, heard the tape and called us back instantly with a contract offer.

D.S.: And that was only a rough edit of ten minutes of it.

G.T.: The other thing that interested me about Lyrichord was that they had not only made a commitment to recording early music, but to recording American artists. I felt strongly that I didn't want us to be one of the American groups on a label that would be more interested in pushing their European groups. We have some future things planned with them. We're making plans to do a recording of seventeenth-century Italian music with [countertenor] Drew Minter and our continuo ensemble. He hasn't really had much chance to record that repertoire, which is surprising, since he does so much of it. He's really one of the great lights of the early-music movement.

D.S.: It's good for us too, because American singers have done very well in breaking into the European market and the European groups. Many of the singers with us—Jennifer Lane, Jeffrey Thomas, Dana Hanchard—all of these people have recorded and performed with major groups in Europe.

G.T.: The whole European thing is simply that they tend to be doing more exciting projects that are better funded and better supported. It's not that we all want to work in Europe. It's more that. we wish we were doing the same kinds of exciting things here more often. An artist is treated with a sort of cultural respect by the society, whereas here, very often, even your closest family and relatives will say, "Yes, but don't you have a real job?" Well, wait a minute, this is a real job. It's a life that you dedicate yourself to in a real way.

D.S.: Chris Greenleaf, the engineer for the recording, wanted to do it at Saint Mary the Virgin, which is on 46th Street in Manhattan. We had performed the opera in the hall which was adjacent to the church itself. But that hall was too small for recording. It was dry. So we moved into the actual space, which is like a cathedral. It's a huge space, and it's got an incredibly long ring of about, I think, four seconds. Saint Mary is a noisy location. It's right in the middle of town, and we couldn't even start recording until after shows let out at night. So we had some very late nights! We did a total of five sessions during the month of November 1993. The intellectual part of me thought that this opera would have never been performed in this large a space. The thing I was afraid of was that it might sound churchy, which the music certainly isn't. But the place sounds spectacular. Chris Greenleaf set up the mikes—a two stereo-pair setup, one for the orchestra, one for the singers, not that far apart from each other—in such a way that he got a wonderful sense of the space, but it's still incredibly clear. There's no muddiness. In comparison to the other Orfeo recordings, it's a completely different sound, and it's a very exciting sound. You have to have added reverb for most modern recordings. There's nothing wrong with that, since artificial reverb doesn't sound artificial any more. It sounds quite authentic. But when you have the actual reverb, the musicians react differently to it. It's hard to react to something you don't hear yet. I think it comes across in the other recordings that they don't have that sense of the space around them.

GT.: I have a way that I hear something, and it's very strong in me. Dongsok is really interesting to me as a producer, because he hears my way and can know what I want, but he can sit and hear somebody else's way too. He's much better at that than I could ever be.

D.S.: That's probably the only thing about me that's Asian, philosophically. I'm an American. I was born here and raised as an American. My parents are Korean. But trying to compromise and I see other ways of doing things is the way I've always been.

D.S.: Moving harpsichords!

G. T.: I did some little thing at Mannes, and this guy showed up, and he said, ' 'What kind of harpsichord is that? Who made it? When did you build it? What are you playing? What is this piece?" And I thought, "Who is this guy?" because he asked so many questions. I didn't see him again for a while. Now, I had a station wagon, but I also lived in a walkup, and I always had to get somebody to carry this big harpsichord up four flights of stairs, which was really a drag. And Dongsok had this situation where he had a huge, French harpsichord that did not fit in the elevator, and he lived on the third floor. So he called me up one day and said, "I have this deal to offer you. Every time I need to move my harpsichord, you'll come and help me, and I'll come and help you every time you move yours.''

D.S.: She had the car, I had the muscles!

G.T.: This was no easy deal. His harpsichord is heavy even at the light end. The one he used to have.

D.S.: I got rid of it and got one that fits in my elevator.

G.T.: So I thought, "This is a deal. I won't have to pay anybody anymore." Driving around in a car moving harpsichords is just so romantic! The funny-thing is that now we each mostly use a small harpsichord that we can carry by ourselves. And he's also perfected the technique of moving a large harpsichord single-handedly.

D.S.: It's all in the wrists!

G.T.: We don't actually do this too much any more, except for this room. We have to carry that piano up, and it weighs a ton. It brings us back to the old days! Our idea of real success for Artek is having somebody else move the harpsichords.