Classical music: The 'irrepressible' McGegan

Nicholas McGegan -- a man routinely labeled "ebullient" and "irrepressible" -- has led the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra regularly since November 1988, serving as director of its Baroque Series and later as one of its original artistic partners. This week he takes leave of the orchestra in properly pyrotechnic fashion -- with the "Royal Fireworks Music" of George Frideric Handel, the composer with whom he's been most closely associated.

Also on his program: more Handel, Edward Elgar's Handel-influenced "Introduction and Allegro" for strings, and (with SPCO principal second violin Dale Barltrop) Peter Maxwell Davies' "A Spell for Green Corn," which recalls an ancient Scottish blessing of the crops.

While he lives in Berkeley, Calif., and is music director of the Bay Area's Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, McGegan takes his Scottish heritage seriously: His hobbies include furnishing his 19th-century flat in Scotland, and his preferred scotch is Lagavulin.

McGegan's conversation is no less stimulating than his conducting. Here are extracts from an interview recorded in December.

On new music:

I usually do music by dead white European people. Rarely do I do music by live composers. So it was great to do the Libby Larsen I did last year and actually have the composer present. Max [Peter Maxwell Davies] is a friend, and a wonderful composer. The "Green Corn" piece is one that I adore, partly because I have a certain amount of Scottish heritage. (The McGegans are actually Irish but came from Ireland to Scotland in the 18th century.) "Green Corn" is based on dances from a wedding in Orkney. It's a perfect piece for Dale [Barltrop], a violinist who I admire the hell out of. This will be the third or fourth time we've worked together.

On chamber orchestras:

On the SPCO:

The SPCO has about the most loyal group of musicians I've ever come across. It's got a sort of collective personality that's been built up over the years. They have an incredible stylistic flexibility -- they can play Purcell one week and Mozart the next and something written last week the next -- which simply didn't exist 20 years ago.

On conductors:

Conductors spend most of their time in airports these days, unlike the old days when Toscanini, say, would spend the entire season with the New York Philharmonic and they would play his way or the highway. The only time I ever see any of my conducting colleagues is in airport lounges. We tend not to meet. We listen to each other's CDs.

On the homogenization of performing style:

On the period-instruments movement:

Modern orchestras had an appreciation of style which resembled the way one buys cheap gloves: one size fits all. Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky would all be played in essentially the same way. The corollary of that was that earlier period-instrument performers were obsessed with style, to the point where content didn't matter at all, but we were oh-so-correct. That meant that there was a sort of priggishness which has happily gone out of the period-music business -- that sort of brown-rice baroque that I always rather hated. It was a kind of musical granola.

On his past:

I was a flute player in Chris Hogwood's and John Eliot Gardiner's and Roger Norrington's period orchestras. It was very exciting. We did feel that we were discovering something, though I'm not sure we were.

On his future: