Founder of Solomon’s Knot and now director of the Monteverdi Choir, Jonathan Sells looks back at the key changes that have reshaped Baroque opera in recent years. At a time when productions increasingly rely on transpositions, additions, and ever more spectacular effects, the British-Swiss singer and conductor asks how early music can be brought vividly to life for audiences today without compromising its integrity. On 3, 8 and 10 October, he rejoins Solomon’s Knot for Bach’s “Mass in B minor”, in Leipzig, Antwerp and London this month. 
By Mark Seow
Jonathan Sells recently went to see an opera in Paris. And he hated it. “I found myself thinking, ‘Am I getting old?’” he says. “There was so much interference with the musical material. Not just cutting passages, adding instruments, and pimping things up—so much was being pulled around too.” The 44-year-old British-Swiss musician is concerned, perhaps especially in France, to see all this becoming “a little postmodern.” Yet his own career is hardly that of a “traditionalist: exploring the margins of the repertoire, reinventing formats, right up to the extravagant L’Ospedale staged in London in 2015, but always in order to attend more deeply to text, musical structure, and practices of collective listening—the absolute principles of his ensemble Solomon’s Knot.
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