Richard Egarr, interview - Telegraph "Early music" has now been around long enough to breed its own dissenting voices, who take an interestingly different view of what constitutes authenticity. One of them is the energised and voluble harpsichordist Richard Egarr, who I meet in Amsterdam. Now aged 50, Egarr directs one of the world's great "period-instrument" orchestras, the Academy of Ancient Music. This year the AAM is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a cycle of Monteverdi operas, beginning this weekend with Orfeo. Next month the first CD on its own label is released. Clearly the ensemble still feels there's a job to be done, and Egarr has impeccable credentials for leading it. "I studied music at Cambridge in the 1980s, and for someone like me it was a playground," he says. I was surrounded by people who had the same interests. The violinist Andrew Manze was there, Christopher Hogwood, the founder of the Academy of Ancient Music, lived in Cambridge. Andrew and I and two other friends came here to Amsterdam to do advanced study, as it was one of the nerve centres of early music. I've lived here ever since. With that background, you'd expect Egarr to toe the orthodox line in early music. But he thinks in some ways the movement has got things wrong. There's this idea that back in the 18th century and before, people played in a very strict and unsentimental way. Then along came Romanticism, and people started to play Bach and Handel in a more free and overtly emotional way, putting lots of their own character into the music. So this idea grew up that being true to old music meant getting rid of all that, and sticking to the written notes. It was all about being correct. To me this gets everything back to front. How so? Well, I think it's become pretty clear that those Romantic players of Bach and Handel weren't perverting the true spirit of Baroque music by being free and easy with it. They were just continuing something that was already there. One thing that's helped us to get a feel for this is listening to really old recordings. Take someone like the pianist Carl Reinecke. He died in 1910, which was just into the recording era, but he was born in 1824, when Beethoven was still alive. His recordings are amazingly free, in a way which I think links directly back to Mozart and before him to Bach. Where did it come from, this ideal of frigid, clipped correctness? I think it came in between the wars. Maybe it was the influence of modern composers like Stravinsky who liked precision, creeping into the way people thought about old music. You start to hear that very precise chronometric sound, where everyone is playing absolutely on the beat. Before that everything was much more fluid. So has it been a waste of time, all that patient work reconstructing Baroque violins and oboes, and making those huge "collected editions" of old music that fill acres of space in music libraries? It's a huge advantage to have instruments that make the right sound and are also right for the style, and it does help to know you're playing the right notes! The bad thing was that this went hand in hand with the idea that interpretation and personality weren't required, which is crazy. There's always been interpretation - performing music can't just be about "getting it right." Take something like the violin sonatas of Corelli, the Italian Baroque composer from the generation before Vivaldi. He writes out ornaments for the player, but he never thought people would actually play them. They're just a guide. He'd expect players to make up their own. What I want to do with the Academy is encourage the creativity and sense of risk which makes that possible. The Academy of Ancient Music's 40th anniversary season begins with Monteverdi's Orfeo on Saturday at the Barbican Centre (020 7638 4141; barbican.org.uk). Their recording The Birth of the Symphony is released next month.