Monica Huggett, Rock Goddess?

Coming of age in swinging London of the 1960s, Monica Huggett wanted to become the next Eric Clapton. She became a violinist rather than a rock-guitar goddess, but any disappointment has been eased by a long international career as a top specialist in baroque music and a leader of chamber orchestras in Europe and the United States. … Music from the baroque era, spanning the 1600s through the first half of the 1700s, has seen renewed popularity in the past century. The music “has a kind of simplicity,” Huggett said. “Everybody can get it; you don’t have to be educated to get it. It has a strong rhythmic drive.”

Huggett grew up in a musical family, although baroque selections didn’t monopolize the playlist. “I heard lots of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. King Crimson, Cream — I just adore Cream.“I thought it was extraordinary that I didn’t end up as a rock guitarist; that was where my heart was. I adored Clapton, Jeff Beck. “I went to conservatory when I was 16; I was such an anti-authoritarian and didn’t like school, so they sent me to conservatory. . . . I started playing string quartets in a pizzeria. You got £3 and a free pizza.” Eventually, “a friend said, ‘Oh, you are such a natural for a baroque violin.’ She put a baroque violin in my hands, and I fell in love with the sound of the gut strings in 10 seconds.”

The mellowness of the strings made from organic material, used in baroque violins instead of strings of metal or synthetic materials, had won her over. So did the improvisational element of baroque music. “Now, the composer writes everything, but in those days, there was a lot left out of a composition and you were expected to add to it.” In Huggett’s eyes, a baroque ensemble is a little subversive. When she was concertmaster of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Huggett said, founder Ton Koopman “was obsessed with making music clear and making sure the gesture, the rhetoric, wasn’t just a little thing that happened onstage but that the audience got it, that the baroque music really delivered emotional oomph. OK, I can be a classical musician and really deliver the oomph. OK, I can actually get through to my audience in a way that a rock band gets through to its audience. That’s what I really wanted.”