Chamber Music New Zealand presents

PHANTASMPEARLS OF POLYPHONY Elizabethan VisionsJacobean VoicesCommonwealth Vagaries

Interval

Restoration VenerationsArts of Fugue

Duration: 100 minutes – including interval.

30 April, 7:30 pm Concert Chamber, Auckland Town Hall 1 May, 7:30 pm MTG Century Theatre Napier3 May, 7:30 pm St. Mary of the Angels Wellington5 May, 7:30 pm The Piano Christchurch6 May, 5:00 pm Glenroy Auditorium Dunedin

Kia ora tātouThe tour by Phantasm is quite a special one for me personally. As a postgraduate student in Oxford, I had the magical world of 17th-century English polyphony opened up by a group of friends who persuaded me to join them in playing through (rather badly, probably) fantasias by Ferrabosco, Gibbons, Tomkins, William Lawes and Purcell. This is immensely sophisticated and richly expressive music. It is too little known, mostly because the instruments of the viol family lost out to their brash violin-family cousins. And only since the emergence of a handful of groups like Phantasm have we been able to hear performances of sufficient quality for the music to be able to make its point. With Phantasm we have a level of technical perfection and expressivity that this music deserves. But what makes this my favourite consort, is their imaginative flair. They will delight – and surprise. Incidentally, their Director, Laurence Dreyfus, is hugely respected in the musicological world – partly for his work on Bach and his world but also for making scholars think critically about the rationale for period-instrument performance. I would like to welcome Laurence and his colleagues on their first tour to New Zealand. I don’t expect the viol consort to displace the string quartet in CMNZ seasons any time soon – but I hope that you will find tonight’s programme deeply satisfying.Peter WallsChief Executive

Music Up Close | Puoro Taupiri | Chamber Music New ZealandELIZABETHAN VISIONS 15 minutes

ALFONSO FERRABOSCO (1543–1588) A FancyWILLIAM BYRD (ca 1540–1623) Kyrie from Missa a4 Fantasia III a4 In manus tuusFantasia III a3Fantasia II a3ELWAY BEVIN (ca 1554-1638) Browning a3THOMAS TOMKINS (1572–1656) Alman

JACOBEAN VOICES 12 minutes

ORLANDO GIBBONS (1583–1625) Fantasia No. 4 a2Fantasia No. 4 a3RICHARD MICO (c1590–1661) Pavan No. 3 a4Fancy No. 4 a4Fancy No. 5 a4

COMMONWEALTH VAGARIES 10 minutes

MATTHEW LOCKE (1622–1677) Sett No. 6 in G majorFantazie-Courante-Ayre-Saraband

INTERVAL

RESTORATION VENERATIONS 15 minutes

HENRY PURCELL (1659–1695) Four Fantazias (1680)Fantazia No. 2 a3, Z. 733Fantazia No. 6 a4, Z. 737Fantazia No. 8 a4, Z. 739Fantazia No. 11 a4, Z. 742

ARTS OF FUGUE24 minutes

W.A. MOZART (1756-1791)Fugues Arranged for Quartet from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier II, K. 405Fuga 2 in E-flat Major (after BWV 876,2)Fuga 3 in E Major (after BWV 878,2)Fuga 5 in D Major (after BWV 874,2)J.S. BACH (1685-1750)from Art of Fugue, BWV 1080Contrapunctus 1, 2, 11, 9

PEARLS OF POLYPHONYThere is arguably very little great music in the Western European art tradition which doesn’t engage seriously with the wondrous combination of individual lines subsumed under the concept of ‘counterpoint’. The fundamental rules of consonance and dissonance – the latter introduced only when they are ‘prepared’ ahead of time by ‘suspending’ a note from a previously consonant collection – gave rise to the enormous flowering of Western European polyphony, above all, in sacred choral music. Perhaps the most fundamental value of the resulting notion of harmony was the independence of each strand within a many-voiced musical web: each musical line was composed with a sense of its own integrity, with little sense of hierarchy or domination of one voice over another. This principle of relative linear independence led a vital afterlife even after new values of musical expression eclipsed the older polyphonic model: from the vantage point of opera and solo song, the older approach to counterpoint appeared to stifle the expression of a single subject and impede the quest for a melody-dominated framework underpinned by orderly chords in which the ruler was always distinguishable from the ruled. Euphony in the older style, from the later perspective, seemed rather a by-product of combinatorial processes and hence harmonically chaotic or even primitive. This was not the view, however, of composers who studied the old masters to learn contrapuntal technique and employ it in new contexts: the likes of JS Bach, and Brahms are only the most obvious examples of those who returned to the scores of contrapuntal masters before them so as to understand

the secrets of linear combinations. But one also sees an equal devotion to contrapuntal principles in the works of less likely composers such Domenico Scarlatti, Mozart and Chopin whose works are, on the service, far removed from province of academicism and yet who cultivate counterpoint in the most rarefied and often touching forms in their compositional practice. The pearls of polyphony presented in our programme represent composers whose works take some fascinating contrapuntal risks in their compositions - risks understood not only in the technical sense of audacious harmonies, peculiar melodies, and unsettling rhythms but also in the more global sense of endangering conventional ideas of musical character and styles, sometimes even threatening musical coherence itself. It's a tribute to the genius of these composers, and especially that of JS Bach, that one's fascination with the worlds these composers create grows by leaps and bounds the more one considers the achievement of writing such great music based on independent and ‘democratically’ constructed individual lines. Counterpoint also bears an uncanny – and also underexplored – relation to dance. Although the notion of the simplest kind of dance tune might seem antithetical to the complexities of polyphony, one can well imagine, for example, the sense in which the polyphonic negotiations of many parts sounding at the same time may be understood to mimic the identities and gestures of individual dancers combined together in a group choreography. In the long-standing tradition of polyphonic dance music, the composition of art music for the dance – whether for 16th-century pavans or for

19th-century polonaises – no longer merely accompany actual gestures enacted by human bodies, but instead enfold and embody the actions and expression of the dances within the musical substance itself. So long before Chopin wrote Waltzes in which counterpoint often signals the male and female couple both as individuals and as dancing pair, the English, with their peculiar devotion to polyphony, were cultivating dance genres for keyboard and viol consort in which the imagined bodily gestures of subtle human relationships seen in courtly and country dancing are recreated in a new and purely instrumental idiom, as one hears, for example, in the Alman by Tomkins, the Pavan by Mico and the Courant and Saraband by Matthew Locke.Our programme surveys nearly 200 years of a highly contrapuntal repertory dedicated to the cultivation of individual lines in which a consort of viols especially excels. On the one hand, there is a marked break from the purely vocal models of sacred polyphony, as in the English fantasies (shortened sometimes to ‘fancies’) as well as JS Bach’s Contrapunctus, all of which are genres based on the idea of fugue. The links with sacred music remained in some cases, and we know from some wordless sources of liturgical repertories that viols must have played this music as well: we play the Kyrie to Byrd’s Four-Part Mass in this spirit. When English composers in the 1550s, for example, became obsessed by two minutes of music found in the Sanctus of a Mass by John Taverner – and began composing short instrumental works called In Nomines based on one obscure patch of plainchant – little did they know that they were initiating a tradition of consort music for viols that would last 130 years and produce some of the most

splendid chamber music ever written. But that is exactly what happened.Henry VIII had brought over some viol players from Milan and Venice with some suspiciously Jewish-sounding names and, within a few years, native English composers were competing with one another to write artful pieces of music in four, five and six parts called In nomines and Fancies. This was music which neither sounded quite like choral music for voices nor was at all suited to dancing. In fact, it was the beginning of the a truly independent instrumental polyphony in England, and led to an outpouring of part-music which liberated itself from the written word (the ‘dittie’) and gave free rein to a composer’s imagination – to his ‘fancy’ or ‘fantazy’.In such music – writes Thomas Morley (1597) – ‘more art may be shown than in any other music because the composer is tied to nothing, but may add, diminish, and alter at his pleasure’. Lacking words, such music might be thought abstract, even mathematical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because the composer takes a succession of themes (called ‘points’), each laden with its own character, and ‘wrests and turns it as he wishes’, the effect was a kaleidoscope of emotion and experience. As late as 1676, a connoisseur of consort music – Thomas Mace – recalls how this kind of music evoked thoughts of sad stories, compelling, inspirational speeches, subtle and deep discussions which so suited and agreed with the interior, private and logical sides of the mind and soul, music which contributed to a mystical experience that temporarily ordered unruly thoughts and feelings, and nudged one towards level-headedness, sobriety and calm.

A matched set or ‘chest’ of fretted viols in three sizes – treble, tenor and bass – is the ideal medium to indulge in these ‘Subtil, and Acute Argumentations’, as Mace put it. The movable frets act to make each note in the contrapuntal web resonate like an open string, and the combined blend warms the tone produced as much as it allows each line to be heard as a single voice. No one part ever wins an argument. One hears a real freedom of expression and a great sense of daring in all the great consort composers, which allowed their compositions to open out onto a more private space in which one glimpses aspects of a composer’s character usually more circumscribed in liturgical pieces or in official court entertainments. In surveying this long tradition, we can distinguish a panoply of colourful personalities who tried to write pieces that were far more than merely fine representatives of a genre, but rather aspired to a unique utterance in works that sound like no other.William Byrd (c1540-1623), called the 'Father of English Music', started writing consort music in the 1560s with hymn settings which – because of the wrong number of verses – were clearly for instrumental performance or practice and not for the liturgy. His three fantasies are late works, and remarkably concentrated and intense in their contrapuntal material and expression. We play these without bar lines to capture the freedom from regular accents found in the individual lines. Elway Bevin based his variation set – called Divisions – on ‘Browning’, a popular Elizabethan tune set to the following words:The leaves be green, the nuts be brown, They hang so high, they will not come down.

The three-part fantasies by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) are the only pieces of viol consort music which made it into a printed edition with individual parts during the composer’s lifetime. They are imbued with a fluency of idiom and with such a concentration of ideas that they’re best heard as a group. Playing or listening to them is like peering into a kaleidoscope: one can decide to follow the fortunes of one pattern over that of another, thereby gaining new insights each time into the coherence of the whole. Not that one knows exactly where to fix one’s attention, even when the patterns appear exceedingly simple. For all the metrical conflicts, Gibbons manages to produce the most glorious euphony. The brevity of some imitative points creates a dazzling array of lightening flashes, with each strike visible if never predictable in its location. Richard Mico, a pupil of Byrd’s who was attached for a while to the recusant Petre family, likewise upholds this tradition, though in a somewhat lighter vein. Matthew Locke (1622-1677), a fascinating and cantankerous character known for his argumentative writings shows his flair for breaking rules and undoing conventions in his Consorts. By the time of the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Locke was England's leading composer. He was appointed composer to the King’s Private Music, the pool of musicians that played in the royal apartments and continued the tradition of consort music developed earlier. However, by that time he had to put up with King’s ‘utter detestation of Fancys’, his dislike of the old fantasy tradition and his preference for the French-style dance music. We know that Locke had little time for French dance music, except, he writes for some French

courantes which he anglicises in his own peculiar way. His constant fits and starts, along with the drawn out appendages to the stylised dances as a kind of grave apotheosis, mark a new turn in the English tradition, one which strongly influenced Henry Purcell’s Fantasies of 1680.In Henry Purcell's (1659-1695) youthful viol works, most of which he composed in the year 1680, the composer adds what was to be the final and most brilliant chapter in the history of the English viol 'fantazia', as Purcell spelled it in his autograph. These are works which find the 20-year old Purcell composing in a contemplative idiom that many would think better suited to an old man, that is, turning to the most severe forms of imitative and invertible counterpoint as a highly speculative and experimental field for musical exploration. Purcell makes clear his awareness of past masters of the Fantasy but goes far beyond them in creating a sense of musical inevitability even whilst pursuing the most remote harmonic connections. A young composer in search of a valid musical technique, Purcell’s polyphonic method depends on a new harmonic sensibility wholly his own.Claiming strict counterpoint away from dry and academic ‘eye-music’ was always one of JS Bach’s artistic goals: we see it especially in the title to his Kunst der Fuge, whose title itself asserts the artistry of fugue over his artificiality – Kunst, not Künstlichkeit. The idea that even advanced counterpoint can be passionate, lyrical and expressive is a huge achievement, especially as in the double fugues in Contrapunctus 11 and 9 from the Art of Fugue in which one hears a compelling piece of music precisely because of Bach’s dramatic delivery of the fugal devices of contrapuntal rotation and

distribution of the parts. No. 11 - at times almost losing its tonal bearings in truly wild chromatic sequences resembling the dramatic turba choruses in Bach’s Passions, while No. 9 – with its arcane double counterpoint at the interval of the 12th – seems to demand a virtuosic tempo so as to maintain intelligibility of the Art of Fugue theme as a cantus firmus.It was especially after Mozart discovered the works of J.S. Bach in the early 1780s that he quickly developed a passion both for fugal analysis and writing, to which his fascinating string quartet arrangements of fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 2) bear witness. Through Mozart's intensive contacts with the Baron van Swieten, the young composer was given access to old music very much out of vogue in contemporary Vienna, and the experience made an indelible impression on him. Van Swieten was an Austrian diplomat who had been posted in the 1770s to the Prussian court in Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of Bach’s student, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, himself an avid connoisseur of fugues and strict counterpoint. Van Swieten’s Bach collection included a good number of Bach's keyboard works, among them at least some parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and a few people who knew Mozart in this period, including his English pupil Thomas Attwood, recall that 'this volume of fugues was always lying open on [Mozart's] pianoforte.' Of the nine four-part fugues in the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, Mozart transcribed six, and the autograph, K. 405, comprises five of these: in order, the fugues in C minor, E-flat major, E major, D-sharp minor (transposed to D minor), and D major. None of the five are mechanical transcriptions, and it makes good sense to

hear these works as evidence of Mozart's serious engagement both with the aesthetic and analytic issues of Bachian voice-leading. By separating out the individual strands of the four voices for stringed instruments, moreover, Mozart has rethought the potential of the fugues surely for some kind of performance. The issue of performance is clear not only from the occasional articulation marks and bowings (a few of which we have had to adapt for viols), but also from what may have been intentional reworking of the counterpoint to suit the dramatic delivery at home with a string quartet. One can also guess that Mozart took some harmonic matters into his own hands when he altered some of Bach's chromatic voice-leading; perhaps he found the harmonic language in need of 'updating', as in his arrangement of Handel's Messiah. The fugues Mozart chose, moreover, are those especially preoccupied with close imitation or stretto, a technique in some disrepute, as when Joseph Riepel wrote in 1768 that 'You mustn’t reveal this and all other fluent advantages of this science [of stretto], lest someone reproach you that composition is perhaps not an art'.NOTES © 2018 LAURENCE DREYFUS

PhantasmPhantasm, an award-winning consort of viols, was founded in 1994 by Laurence Dreyfus and has become recognized as the most exciting viol consort active on the world scene today. The ensemble catapulted into international prominence when its debut CD of works by Henry Purcell won a Gramophone Award for the Best Baroque Instrumental Recording of 1997. Since then the consort has travelled the world over, performing in cities such as Tokyo, New York, London, Brussels, Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Helsinki, Leipzig, Istanbul, Hong Kong and Stockholm, in festivals and on concert series such as the Lufthansa Early Music Festival and at the Wigmore Hall London, Brussels’ Palais des Beaux Arts, the Festival of Early Music Utrecht, the Berlin Philharmonie and many others. Phantasm’s 19 recordings have won consistent praise, and several have received awards, including a Gramophone Award in 2004 for the music of Orlando Gibbons, which was also a finalist for CD of the Year. Their first recording for the Scottish LINN label was Editor’s Choice in BBC Music Magazine as well as a finalist for the 2010 Gramophone Early Music Award. Their CD with the Complete Consort Music of William Byrd was awarded a Diapason d’Or, CD of the Month by BBC Music Magazine, and was a Gramophone finalist for the best Early Music recording of 2011. Lawes's Consorts to the Organ was nominated for the annual Chamber Music Award in BBC Music Magazine, September 2012. Their most recent recording,

Dowland‘s Lachrimae, not only became the CD of the week in various broadcast stations all over Europe and in the US, but also ranked high on the UK specialist Classical Charts for several months and won the Gramophone Early Music Award in 2017.Phantasm was based at the University of Oxford from 2005 when they were appointed Consort-in-Residence. In Autumn 2010, they began a new association as Consort-in-Residence at Magdalen College, where they performed, recorded, and collaborated with the acclaimed College Choir. Phantasm have been named Ensemble-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall in London for the 2017-2018 season, where they have appeared regularly in the past. The consort, with its members from the USA, Britain and Finland, have been based in Berlin, Germany since 2016.

LAURENCE DREYFUS, treble viol and director, was born into a family of musicians, and was taught to read music before he could read English. His father played violin in the Philadelphia Orchestra, and his mother was an operatic mezzo-soprano. Laurence played piano and cello as a child, and was particularly drawn to chamber music, having been coached by Edgar Ortenberg, a member of the famed Budapest Quartet in the 1940s. As a teenager, Laurence bought an obscure recording of Buxtehude trio sonatas which featured a viola da gamba, and was immediately drawn to the special sonority of that instrument, vowing to learn it someday.

His talents led him to the famed Juilliard School in New York where he studied cello with the legendary American cellist Leonard Rose. At Juilliard he helped found what later became the Emerson String Quartet. Leaving the conservatoire to pursue academic studies in politics and theology, he soon found his way back to music by studying for a PhD in musicology at Columbia University where he was supervised by leading Bach scholar, Christoph Wolff. At the same time, Laurence started teaching himself the viola da gamba, and ultimately landed in the class of Wieland Kuijken at the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels, where he completed two diplomas within two years, the last ‘with highest distinction’. A dual career as musicologist and performer took him all over the world to research music history, perform concerts, give lectures and performance classes. As a scholar and lecturer, Laurence held professorships at Yale, Stanford, Chicago, King’s College London, and most recently at Oxford University and Magdalen College. In 2002 the British Academy elected him a Fellow for his his academic research on Bach and Wagner.The move to England in the early 1990s sparked a burning desire to form a world-class consort of viols which Laurence wanted to lead from the treble viol. It had taken many years to find the right players who shared his enthusiasm for English consort music and were unafraid to test out a radically new approach. Phantasm was formed in 1994 and aimed to challenge the status quo by developing a rich and vibrant sound based on historically aware practices, technical mastery of string playing, and borrowings from the expressive

traditions of early 20th-century string quartets like the Flonzaley and Busch. Phantasm thus brought Laurence’s youthful interest in chamber music together with his music-historical savvy. Early Music, in his view, connects seamlessly to mainstream and even contemporary music making by bringing such leading lights as Byrd, Gibbons, Locke and Lawes to public awareness. ‘Credo in unam musicam’ might be Phantasm’s byword. For a decade from 2005-2015 Phantasm was Consort-in-Residence at Oxford University and Magdalen College.As a performer on the viola da gamba and baroque cello, Laurence toured and recorded with leading figures in Early Music, and for many years gave regular summer master classes in Norway, Portugal, and in the USA. (No fewer than three other Phantasm members met him on one of these summer courses.) In 2015 he retired early from Oxford to devote himself more to performance and independent writing. He has been honoured with Emeritus status in both College and University.With three well-received and wave-making books under his belt – two on J.S. Bach and one on Wagner – along with over twenty commercial recordings, many of which have been nominated for or received international awards, Laurence decided to make his home in Berlin, where as a research student years before he had spent two stimulating years researching Bach on both sides of the (then) Wall. After nearly 25 years in Britain, Berlin serves as Laurence’s base, where he continues to explore, perform and record new repertories, bringing them to music-lovers round the world.

EMILIA BENJAMIN, treble viol, came to the viol by a somewhat circuitous route. Initially interested in studying English Literature, she chose the University of East Anglia based upon a hazy memory of the campus - hazy due to the effects of her father's sleeping pills, two of which she had taken the night before her interview in a panic about not sleeping. Given that he ordinarily took only one half, which was sufficient to knock him out, it is a wonder she made it up there at all. As it was, in what was a rather prescient mistake, she found herself touring the music department, giggled her way through the interview and then realised, when she arrived to start her first term, that the campus she thought she had remembered was in fact the University of Warwick. This turned out to be a fortunate error, since at UEA Emilia was able to get involved in the music department as part of her degree, led the orchestra from the violin, which she has played since she was five, and went to a life changing concert of Dowland's Lachrimae, the sound of which was so heavenly – even in the concrete box they called their recital hall – that she instantly became a viol player. Luckily the university owned a chest of viols and employed an enthusiastic teacher of consort playing. During her four years there, Emilia changed subject to History of Art and made her own treble viol in the workshop of a lute maker, which she still plays today. At some point she was struck by the insight that if she was going to spend most of her life working, then that work ought to be the thing she enjoyed most. This was, and

is, consort playing. So she duly went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to do a postgraduate course in early music, specialising in viol and baroque violin. Since then Emilia has spent the intervening 25 years or so performing and recording, not just viol consort music, but a healthy pickings of most Western music written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, playing not only viols but violin, viola and lirone. She spends her down time looking after her toddler, her dog, her garden and her husband, not necessarily in that order.

JONATHAN MANSON, tenor viol, was born into a musical family in Edinburgh. Growing up on a farm in the north of Scotland, he fell in love with the cello at the age of six – mainly because the bottom string sounded like the engine of a friend’s Land Rover – and started having lessons at the local primary school. Jonathan and his violinist sister Catherine received their formative training at the International Cello Centre in the Scottish Borders under the direction of Jane Cowan; greatly influenced by the teachings of Pablo Casals, she insisted on all her students using gut strings and, to this day, Jonathan has never played on anything else. At the age of 18, he left Scotland to study with the great cello teacher Steven Doane at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Shortly after arriving, Jonathan heard a recording of the Bach gamba sonatas played by Laurence Dreyfus which inspired him to take up the instrument seriously, devoting himself to lessons with his teacher, Christel Thielmann, and delving into this exciting new repertoire. It was this fascination that

eventually led him to Holland, where he studied viola da gamba with Wieland Kuijken for three years. Jonathan was still a student in The Hague when he was first invited to play with Ton Koopman’s Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, sitting alongside and constantly learning from the Dutch cellist, Jaap ter Linden. He was subsequently invited to become principal cellist of the orchestra, with whom he performed and recorded more than 150 Bach cantatas and, together with Yo-Yo Ma, Vivaldi’s Concerto for two cellos. Nowadays Jonathan specialises mainly in chamber music, performing repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the Romantic. As the cellist of the London Haydn Quartet, he has finally been able to indulge his passion for the classical string quartet repertoire. Their most recent recording, of Haydn’s op. 50 quartets, is due to be released soon on the Hyperion label, and this season they will also be touring Australia, Canada and the USA. A long-standing partnership with the harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock has led to recordings of the Bach gamba sonatas, and, together with Rachel Podger, Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert. Jonathan frequently plays with the Dunedin Consort, Arcangelo, The English Concert and other leading early music groups. Recent highlights have included recitals with Elizabeth Kenny, Carolyn Sampson and Laurence Cummings, being invited to play the solo viol part in George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin at the Royal Opera House, and concerto appearances in London’s Wigmore Hall and the Carnegie Hall in New York. Jonathan teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London and lives in an Oxfordshire village with his oboist wife, their daughter

and their golden retriever.

MARKKU LUOLAJAN-MIKKOLA, bass viol, enjoys the challenge of playing some of the most demanding pieces written for his instruments, which he performs on various viols and historical cellos ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day. Counting all the concerts he’s given – in his native Finland and abroad – he found there had been more than a thousand given in 30 countries. Contemporary music is also important to him, experiencing all the new possibilities for expression and communication offered by living composers. Markku introduced the novel idea of ‘Home concerts’ at the Helsinki Festival in 2010, and has even performed concerts where audience members relax on a mattress. He was president of the Finnish Soloists’ Association and artistic director of the Finnish Baroque Orchestra, and in 2010 founded the BRQ Vantaa Festival as its artistic director. As a soloist, he has received the National Janne Award, the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s special honour prize and the Classical Music Emma Prize. Markku began teaching the modern cello at the Sibelius Academy in 1970s, even before graduating there himself: many of his students from that period now play in leading European orchestras. He currently teaches both viol and Baroque cello at the Sibelius Academy. Since children best learn to appreciate music and culture in general when they are 10–18 years old, he has made a point to teach them at the West Helsinki Music School since the 1980s. In addition to the Sibelius Academy Markku studied also at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. During his

student years, he was taught by Art Noras, Jaap Ter Linden and Wieland Kuijken.