Class of 2000

Steven Fox recreates 18th-century Russian music with Musica Antiqu

During his foreign study program in 1998, Steven Fox fell in love with the city of St. Petersburg, Russia: the architecture, the people and the music. Almost every night he attended concerts and found that while the city's 18th-century architecture was perfectly preserved, there was little 18th-century music to be heard. He has since been working to fill that void, founding Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, the only Russian orchestra devoted to playing 18th-century music in an historically accurate way. To figure out how an orchestra would have performed Mozart or Haydn in the 1700s, Fox turns to musicology research. He learned, for example, that playing with vibrato—the fluttery sound made by stringed instruments—was considered inappropriate in an orchestra and that period flutes were made of wood, not metal. "Performing in an historically informed manner doesn't limit the way you play," he says, "it opens up realms of possibility." With Fox as its musical director and conductor, Musica Antiqua released its first album this spring on Naxos Records and is recording two more. In October it will perform the opera Le Fils Rival at the Hermitage Theater, marking the first time a Russian opera has been performed on period instruments in modern times.