At the end of May, Reinhard Goebel conducted the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Schwetzingen through a program ranging from Jean-Philippe Rameau to Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, and the energy and juice, the compressed dynamics and vital flow of play that surged through the Rococo Hall made not only , but also visibly fun for everyone involved.
Just like in the old days: when the artist, coming from the violin, made a decisive contribution to making Cologne a center of historically oriented music cultivation for over thirty years from 1973 with the "Musica Antiqua" he founded.
Last but not least, thanks to Goebel's long association with "Archive Production" as a sub-label of Deutsche Grammophon, this initiative shaped the image among large sections of the audience of how Bach and his contemporaries were treated between the foothills of the late Renaissance and the Sturm-und-Drang generation to grasp: powerfully gripping and clearly marked, without transfiguring metaphysical superstructure and settled entirely in the musical here and now, where the joy of elementary virtuosity could be lived out and hardly ever an andante movement was emotionally bogged down, but literally "going" to the goal strived
This applied equally to the violinist's solo performances and to his work as leader of the ensemble, which, depending on requirements, could develop from a soloist association of highly qualified chamber musicians to a full small orchestra.
Being historically informed was never understood here as just a technical category, but also as an insight into the real-historical contexts, production and reception conditions of making music.
This essentially came from the boss, who had also acquired such skills through studying music history and knew how to represent them at all times with confidence and often polemically.
Accordingly, energy and a knowing goal-focusing that is somewhat reluctant to an emotional character also shaped his repertoire structure, which often included rather marginal composers such as Hasse and Veracini or recently dedicated an entire CD series ("Beethoven's World") to the underexposed contemporaries of the omnipresent classic.
And it was equally evident in the demands that the artist made of himself;
most dramatically when, after 1990, he changed his bow and grip hand due to a mechanical inhibition and rediscovered his instrument in reverse, and then when he finally had to say goodbye to him in 2006.
Since then, a remarkable conducting career has grown, increasingly also with non-historically oriented orchestras.
In any case, scaring was and is never the case for him, and his opinion-strong background knowledge is still not used, as with many other clever musicians, for a puzzling, dogged fixation on details, but fuels an elementary musical vitality - just like he does, who also uses his knowledge for clear, unpretentious program texts begins, about whom the Dresden Bach contemporary Johann David Heinichen wrote:
"Realistic and straight forward, immensely energetic and gorgeous, at times lovely but never broken or narcissistic".
Reinhard Goebel turns seventy on Sunday.