Music: Musical Antiques

One night last week Chicago’s elegant Goodman Theatre was packed to its heavy oak doors. What drew this throng was no thunder-rousing maestro or pudding-fed diva, but a pair of pale, genteel young men who plunked softly on 18th-Century-model harpsichords. Before a silver backdrop, gently lit by amber lights, they joined in deft pluck-a-pluck duets by Mozart and Bach. Occasionally they were joined by two lush lady harpsichordists in 18th-Century lace and velveteen. To all this harpsichordery their audience listened reverently, applauded with loud smacks. For they were listening to the No. 1 harpsichord team of the U. S.: Chicago’s famed Philip Manuel and Gavin Williamson.

The harpsichord, which looks like an incubator-baby-grand piano and sounds like a choir of mandolins, was once the most important of concert instruments. Before it was ousted (at the beginning of the 19th Century) by the louder and more flexible modern piano, composers like Bach and Handel wrote sheaves of compositions for it. Even Beethoven turned out a batch of sonatas for the harpsichord. Today, harpsichord playing occupies the position that falconry does in the field of sports. And most early harpsichord music is now played on modern instruments like the piano. But today’s handful of harpsichordists point out the undeniable fact that only they can make this 18th-Century music sound the way it did in the 18th Century.

When they are not giving concerts, Chicago’s Manuel & Williamson tinkle their harpsichords in privacy in a handsome old greystone house on the South Side. Its 14 large, high-ceilinged rooms are filled with obsolete instruments, antique pictures, books about music of the long ago. Inseparable bachelors, they act, talk, think alike, have identical handwriting, birthdays within 24 hours of each other (June 29 and 30). Though they have toured the whole U. S., they have never appeared in Manhattan because Manhattan concert managers insist that they hire their own hall.

To Manuel & Williamson all music written since the 18th Century has come a long way down hill. Occasionally, for relaxation, they visit the concerts of Frederick Stock’s Chicago Symphony, consider the ponderous 19th-Century classics they hear there as comparative fluff. Last month when they heard Harpsichordist Yella Pessl play a lick of swing on a harpsichord broadcast, they turned away their dial in horror. Asked why they prefer 18th Century to all other music, they reply: “It makes us feel spiritually spick & span.”