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Posts: 26434
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004
Contributor
Since: February 6, 2012
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God knows I've had Hogwood's Handel biography on my bookshelf long enough (decades actually)! I'm about a third of the way through, and I'm enjoying it. I suppose if enough time goes by, I might even take up JEGie's biography of Bach too at some point. I take nothing away from these two pillars of HIP orthodoxy in terms of their knowledge and their writing. In terms of their actual performances though, it's "Get me outta here!". But why? What do I have against it? My own personal HIP history: In the early days of HIP (maybe up to the early-60's, before the acronym was invented), I actually DIDN'T have too much against the movement. Its adherents tended to focus on correct execution of the ornaments, correct number of performing forces, details such as horn parts which were notated an octave lower than the expected sound (e.g., in Haydn's Symphony No. 48), etc. Nothing to get too worried about really, and in fact, I supported those aspects of performance which they emphasized at that time. However, in the 60's, some wacko recordings were released under the authenticist rubric, not least the c. 1966 recording of Handel's Royal Fireworks Music on Vox by Richard Schulze and his Telemann Society band, which contained demo tracks of the goals they were after in the performance and which, they claimed, would have been the sounds that Handel himself had in mind at the time he wrote his music. They went back to valveless brass instruments, thicker reeds on the oboes and bassoons. . . and they even included an instrument made out of leather called a "Cavalry Serpent". It was certainly ear opening - but not in a good sense. The natural unmodified tuning of these valveless brass instruments resulted in terrible pitch clashes with the other instruments, and, even aside from these gross pitch problems, the whole performance seemed to be hanging by a thread, although, truth to tell, the winds didn't sound that bad. I had this album and I loved it, mainly for its potential as a "party record"! I didn't see how anyone could ever take this nonsense seriously. But I was wrong! Just a few years after this freak of music recording, both DG and Teldec were going whole hog (no pun intended) with their English Concert (Trevor Pinnock) and Concentus Musicus (Nickolaus Harnoncourt) ensembles in standard Baroque repertoire works. I'll never forget the first time I happened to tune in on the radio and heard this godawful performance of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto (Pinnock's), with its minimal to no vibrato in the string playing, clumsy-sounding over-articulated phrasing (with slurs exaggeratedly clipped off at the ends), and gross, amateurish messa di voce effects which made a joke out of any chord that was halfway sustained. And people were taking this seriously, because these Historically Informed Performance pioneers had the backing of an entire academic industry which was misreading and misinterpreting the contemporaneous music treatises of the Baroque period. It's as if all these academicians got together at some conference somewhere and decided that, for instance, vibrato was verboten in performances of music of the Baroque! It only got worse from there. Somehow, these feet of clay ensembles found enough of an audience (and, worse, enough kudos from bored and cynical critics who still should have known better) to allow them to sweep into the classic period. . . then the early romantic period. . . then the late nineteenth century (Bruckner, Mahler, etc.). . . then the first half of the twentieth century (Vaughan Williams - geez!). It was like a disease. It got so bad that some HIP maladies began to infect performances even on modern instruments (e.g., Paavo Jarvi's otherwise fine set of Beethoven Symphonies, with its minimalist vibrato in the strings). There was even a report that some musicologist in the 80's was seriously suggesting that performances of Boulez's "Le Marteau sans maitre" return "to the instruments of 1955" in order to realize the composer's intentions. (Somehow, when Boulez himself recorded the work for DG, he didn't take the musicologist's directive into account!) And although this last point sounds humorous, it does point up a very serious problem with HIP academicians and performers: their arrogance in deciding how the composer would have wanted his music played. Sorry to disappoint them, but, on evidence of this anecdote, they DON'T speak for the composer at all, even though they claim to. I see there's been some discussion on this thread about using the "original instruments" of the Beatles and other pop groups, plastic saxes, etc - the absurdity of this notion is plainly obvious in that discussion, but it's every bit as absurd when it comes to classical music too, except perhaps as experiments which, if successful, might lead us to tweak our own performances of older music too. Speaking personally, my own hostility to post-60's HIP performances resides in the following: - The paring down of string vibrato to little or nothing, making for a completely unsophisticated, amateurish type of sound
- The use of keyboard instruments ("fortepianos" - note the special designation) which sound like toy pianos, or strung-together rubber bands. Listeners have been brainwashed into accepting this type of sound, partly because of academic intimidation. In a way, it's a kind of "Emperor's New Clothes" mentality.
- The overphrasing and clipping off of phrase endings in a way that earlier generations would have called "mannered" but which are now par for the course in HIP performances. Sometimes, this type of playing is appealing to newbie and unsophisticated listeners who, because of the gross differences with traditional renditions of the music, can actually hear these differences themselves (unlike the more subtle expressive approach of traditional players to the music).
- The arrogance which underlies HIP academics' and musicians' often unstated assumption that, unlike musicians who play modern instruments, only THEY know what the composer had in mind
- Another form of arrogance by which HIP musicians and academics claim that THEY were the ones who reinvigorated music by returning to the (often fast) tempos which earlier composers notated - as if traditional conductors like Toscanini, Reiner, Dorati, Szell, et al., didn't know a thing about the composer's markings. (Hint: the first conductor to take the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at Beethoven's own metronome mark was not some HIPster - it was Dorati!) On this point, the HIPsters are nothing short of deceitful.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some additional objections I have to HIP and HIPsters, but this is sufficient for now, and I've posted about a lot of this stuff before.HIP - it's a bad scene!
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