Roy at helm as Irish Baroque Orchestra perform Messiah

Date Published: 28-Nov-2012

Handel’s Messiah is a bit like sailing – it never lets you down,” says Roy Goodman, who will be guest conductor when the Irish Baroque Orchestra and Resurgam Choir return to St Nicholas’s Collegiate Church with Handel’s masterpiece on December 8.

English-born Roy is a perfect candidate to conduct Messiah, as he has specialised in the music of the Baroque era.

In fact, he says the invitation from the Irish Baroque Orchestra to conduct Handel, “is taking me back to my roots, to a small Baroque chamber orchestra which was my bread and butter”.

It’s also bringing him to Galway City for the first time, although he has seen more of the county’s coastline than most of us, on a solo sailing trip around Britain and Ireland in 2010. Roy stayed on Inis Mór for three days, where he cycled around the island on a fold-up bike he keeps on the boat, and he enjoyed the Irish music sessions in Tí Joe Watty. He also visited Inishbofin and sailed into Killary Harbour where he had a cup of tea and savoured the views.

Since turning 60 a year ago, he has scaled back on his workload, but before that, he was “a musical workaholic”, performing as a guest conductor with over 120 orchestras and opera companies worldwide from the Berlin Philharmonie to the Royal Albert Hall Proms.

He was also a founder of the Brandenburg Consort in 1975, working with the ensemble until 2001. He was music director of the European Baroque Orchestra from 1989-2004 and co-founded London’s Handel Orchestra in 2001, as well as being principal guest conductor of the Auckland Philharmonia in New Zealand from 2007 until last year.

“I started as a chorister in Kings College, Cambridge – I was a lucky young lad,” he says. That choir performed a lot of 16th and 17th Century music, so his love of Baroque was nurtured from an early age.

As a youngster, he played organ and violin, and studied at the Royal College of Music in London in the late 1960s, at around the same time that the first groups in Europe started playing music from that era on historic instruments.

“It sounded perfect to me, and inspired me enormously,” he says, although when he listened to some of these recordings years later he thought they sounded terrible, he adds with a laugh.

But it was a formative experience. Although Roy has embraced modern instruments when playing music from bygone centuries, learning about them was a vital education, he says.

“You learn what they are able to do and keep it in you inner ear, to [help you] know the parameters of what was possible and not go wildly, extravagantly away from it.”

That’s as true for any era as it is for Baroque, he adds. That interest in historic detail has spanned his career. During the 1980s he directed the Hanover Band for CD recordings in the first ever performances on historic instruments of the complete symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Weber, as well as 14 symphonies by Mendelssohn and 60 symphonies by Haydn.

He came to conducting through performing.

As a young man Roy studied both organ and violin and was awarded a fellowship to the Royal College of Organists. But being an organist, usually playing in churches and recitals, was “a rather lonely” career. The violin was more sociable because he could get involved with orchestras.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.