How does Baroque music inspire a recipe for almond cakes with apricot jam?
Always the polymath, and baker of Leipzig Larks, Nicholas McGegan says kneading dough strengthens his fingers for playing the piano — and then he runs through the history of larks as a delicacy and subject of art.
That’s just the first minute of the hour-long documentary, Passion: a Celebration of Music and Community. Produced by Katrine Gray and directed by Tal Skloot, Passion celebrates McGegan’s 75th birthday and his decades of conducting around the world. The film will have a private world premiere in Berkeley this week.
McGegan led the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra from 1985 to 2019, conducting a thousand concerts and producing 40 recordings with them. He’s now music director laureate, and well known and appreciated in the Bay Area for his love of music, jovial leadership, and his quirky humor with encyclopedic undertones. Even during the worst days of the pandemic, he was able to inform and entertain with a musical history of the bubonic plague.
After the film’s baking lesson, Passion turns its attention to Berkeley rehearsals of McGegan conducting the Cantata Collective in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion which he calls “a music of profound humanity.” In Passion, we see that McGegan is aware every note and nuance, but behaves in the very opposite manner of a stereotypical “Maestro” — relaxed, encouraging, sympathetic to the instrumentalists. He resonates with them, having played the flute, viola, piano, harpsichord, and clavichord himself.
“Nic loves to dance,” said a musician who played under his direction. Another spoke of how “he skips over the intellect and goes straight to the heart.”
As he speaks of Bach’s Passion, McGegan embraces and coddles the score he has been studying and marking up for 40 years.
Besides Philharmonia Baroque and hundreds of guest-conducting engagements, McGegan has decades of leadership experience with the Göttingen Handel Festival, Scottish Opera, Hungary’s Capella Savaria, and other groups. His “living musicology” project of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s The Temple of Glory in Berkeley received rave reviews
Choreographer Mark Morris — with whom McGegan frequently collaborated, including on acclaimed productions of Rameau’s Platée and George Frederick Handel’s Acis and Galatea — says in the film (referring to a famous Duke Ellington tune): “The one thing I’d say about [McGegan’s] conducting and playing is that he has swing, and as we know it don’t mean a thing, etcetera.”
The conductor’s grand musical history is summarized in a few minutes, from playing in a school orchestra to Cambridge, writing an opera as a thesis, and joining fellow student Christopher Hogwood in his Academy of Ancient Music.
McGegan went on to teach flute at the Royal Academy of Music, studied French Baroque opera at Oxford, was invited to teach at Washington University in St. Louis, and was hired from there by the Philharmonia Baroque.
Collecting awards in his spare time, McGegan is Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a member of the Order of Merit of the State of Lower Saxony (Germany). He also received the Halle Handel Prize and the Medal of Honor of the City of Göttingen. The mayor of San Francisco declared a Nicholas McGegan Day in recognition of his work with Philharmonia Baroque.
Of Passion, McGegan told SF Classical Voice:
“I had lots of fun working on the film. Katrine Gray, who first proposed the idea of making the documentary, is a good friend and I am eternally grateful to her. Tal is someone who I have known for a long time and this is not the first thing that we have done together.
“I suggested that a few musical friends might be kind enough to be interviewed, and I was both thrilled and touched that all of them said yes!
“The project was centered around the rehearsals and performance with the Cantata Collective in Berkeley last March but ranges further afield looking back to my early life in the U.K. (with some amusing ‘blackmail’ photos) and other performances such as Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Danish Opera in 2024.
“Earlier this year, I turned 75 and I am so grateful still to be busy making music. Also, this year marks my 40th year of performing in the Bay Area. So, this film really celebrates both of these.”
“I admire the way Tal has shaped the film. He captures my passion for music and my desire always to put that passion across to my fellow musicians and the audience. Also, how I love making music with friends. I am so privileged that in the Bay Area after 40 years I have so many.”
Producer Gray said there are no specific plans for the film beyond the private screening on Nov. 13.
Skloot said, “we are planning to submit the film to festivals with a music focus and to look at the possibility of a local public television broadcast. We’re also interested in educational screenings at music festivals, conservatories, and schools with a strong classical music focus.”
Among adventures during the making of the film, Skloot recalls:
“After interviewing soprano Sherezade Panthaki, I wanted to get a little ‘b-roll’ of her singing an aria she would sing during St. Matthew Passion. The cameraman and I set up a nice close-up shot, framing her against a piano, with warm afternoon light streaming in.
“As she sang the first note, the cameraman and I literally jumped back from the power of her voice. On the next take, we discretely pulled back the camera a little down the hallway.”
