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In Reply to: RE: I have two dozen versions, and my favorites are... posted by Jay Buridan on March 10, 2012 at 08:03:43
Thanks, this is the one I have been thinking about.
Follow Ups:
As a performer of Bach's music for mor than 50 years I can assure you I know of no-one who finds HIP to diminish the music or limit it.
Quite the opposite.
The music becomes far more expressive, more dynamic, richer, and far more human.
Much more difficult? You bet. More open to interpretation, yes but within that as in what to bring out within each passage, and NOT about how heavily to lay on the trowel of rubato, wobble and THICKNESS.
If you love Jazz you should love HIP approaches, despite the nay-sayers here the expression is far richer and varied between and within HIP performances than between say Klemperer, Jochum or Munchinger.
The music and its players were as much working class as middle class and constantly pushed against the envelope of what those in charge wanted or could accept.
It is a good thing that this music was kept going by some musicians.
The instruments sounded more different from each other than their descendants (where they exist) do.
There is no modern equivalent for a cornet (a cow-horn split and glued, with a trumpet mouthpiece), or a basset horn, and all of these missing items were vital to the way the music was made.
Note that a post in response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
Hell, the Mass in B minor is one of the most exhilarating and emotionally engaging works of music ever penned. If you aren't getting this from a performance, it must be bad indeed.
While I've never heard his Mass, I'm not wild about Suzuki's cantata performances. I'd vote for the Klemperer, it's from a time before misapplied historical performance practices robbed the music of feeling, drama, and musicality and left it a dry, dessicated, jumpy thing.
Bullshit, and ignorant BOF _ I hate change - BS, at that.
I have been singing this pre-romantic music - at cathedral choir level since I was nine - 53 years ago.
IMO, HIP has been the best thing that has happened to classical music.
Performers have taken it on en-masse,
because it works.
But you can't? Who's the informed thinker here? NOT you.
The market has accepted it, too.
Klemperer's Bach is ponderous, slow, and excessively reverential - to the IDEA of BAAAAACCCHHHH!
His music, like Haydn's and Mozart's is vigorous, lithe, human, randy, loving, romantic, hungry, reverent to God and to being here, but not SLOW and HEAVY it is richly dynamic*, immensely complex*, funny, basic, rich and smelly. like life is.
* As another poster pointed out only Wagner and only occasionally, get's close on either front.
When HIP came along, I felt ROBBED as a performer by previous practice. And that's with Neville, and Argo, Loiseau Lyre, and Telefunken already happening in the early 1960s.
Are you sure you're into classical music for the challenge, which it should constantly be?
Take off the tie, and the suit, and BOOGIE, Josh!
Note that a post in response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
The B minor mass shouldn't be reverential?!? Timbo, you have got to be kidding!
I'm not into classical music for the challenge. I'm into it for the music. And I confess I don't much care whether performers take to something or not. What I care is whether the music touches me in the many ways that great music can.
If a backwards performance on a kazoo did that, I'd say, great.
Actually, in case it isn't clear (I did have a discussion of this here at great length a few weeks back), I have no objection to the use of original instruments -- a sound I often but don't always love. Or historically correct ornamentation. Or historical pitch, or Werckmeister III, which whether or not Bach actually used it is certainly interesting (the contemporary description of his tuning, and the presence of Werckmeister's tome in his library, are suggestive but not conclusive). Or to what is known of other historical practices, so long as they make musical and practical sense.
Which, unfortunately, they often do not.
An extreme example: harpsichord continuo in Carnegie Hall that YOU COULDN'T EVEN HEAR.
What, exactly, is historically informed about that?
Less extreme: Sending half the performers packing in a hall that is many times the size of the space for which the music was originally scored, and so robbing it of impact in an attempt to preserve purity of line.
But my real objection to the HIP movement is in the realm of interpretation. IMO, HIP interpretations have more to do with Rorscharch blotting a 20th century aesthetic onto partially-understood 18th- and 19th century practices than with historical versimilitude.
For one thing, it frequently doesn't even match the historical descriptions of the time.
Performance practice through the time of Mozart was extremely improvisatory. We are told by a reasonably credible source that Bach wrote out all his notes. But other composers did not. So what we hear are the musical skeletons of the works. And that aspect of performance is largely lost.
At least one baroque source says that there was a difference style of performance for religious works than for secular ones. Just as there is today, because it's the natural thing to do: a mass is not a dance tune. But you wouldn't guess that from listening to some of these "informed" performances.
We know that Bach favored the cantabile style of playing. In describing it, CPE Bach wrote of rubato in the right hand, played against a firm rhythm in the left. Like a singer, as the name implies. Instead we get playing that would do a player piano proud.
We have a blow-by-blow description of a few bars of Beethoven's piano playing. It is much more expressive, takes far more liberties, than any playing today.
But the bottom line for me is the musicality of the performances. So what if Bach played the B minor mass at a faster clip than Klemperer, as, since we're told that Bach took his tempi fast, he undoubtedly did? What matters is whether an interpretation works or not. And while I don't believe I'm quite as uninformed as you apparently think, that doesn't make any difference, because listening is what it is, and interpretation is something that you can't bottle. It comes from skill and training and study, yes, but also from an organic tradition, communicated by playing the music itself, shared between performer and audience, and from within -- from the musical understanding of the performer himself. There is no text that can impart more than the rudiments of it, and no theory that can make an insensitive performer into a sensitive one, or deprive a great performance of its greatness merely because it didn't follow some dry academic precepts.
Those precepts can be useful, even valuable; one can't hear a Bach cantata with the original instruments without understanding that these are the sounds he had in mind. Sometimes, they're necessary: it just isn't possible to play the Moonlight sonata on a modern instrument and achieve the remarkable effect Beethoven achieved.
But when those precepts are poorly understood and conflict with musicality, I say out the window with them! And I have no doubt that Bach, who was not beyond arranging a concerto movement for chorus and is said to have had little patience for dry theory but to have taught instead by example, would agree.
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