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Here's an example of ole Ekhardt's work...

Posted by krisjan (R) on March 16, 2015 at 17:54:36

In Reply to: Check out Eckhardt van den Hoogen's notes on CPO... posted by krisjan on March 16, 2015 at 17:07:54:

From a Musicweb review of Weingartner's Sym 7 on CPO by Paul Godfrey:

"One of the drawbacks of CPO's releases in the past has been their tendency to commission long and often not very enlightening booklet notes from European academics. These have been rendered even more impenetrable by over-literal translations. Unfortunately here we have another example of this kind. The lengthy essay (over ten pages of quite small type) by Eckhardt van den Hoogen, translated with accuracy if not a totally felicitously English style by Susan Marie Praeder, tells us a great deal about the views of the author and not a lot about the music. One example from the first page of this essay is typical: "A fine materiality imperceptibly increasing with fineness, capable of being sympathetically roused by precisely synchronized musical waves and thus suggesting to us the idea that there must be 'something more' to art in general and music in particular? Limitations of space mean that such speculation cannot be continued here." However these limitations do not prevent the author from continuing his speculations for a further nine pages of this sort of writing, in which the name of Weingartner is only mentioned once in the whole of the first page. It takes him some seven pages to get round to any discussion of the symphony which is the subject of this recording. A couple of pages before the end the author rounds on an unnamed critic: "The coda of the main part, as Weingartner waggishly communicates, 'is designed after a sketch by Beethoven,' which in praxi [sic] not even a donkey can hear with his donkey's ears. One must have read this note in advance and then not as yet know as much as the critic for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung who in February 2012 reviewed the performance heard here as a live recording and in these five or six measures believed that she immediately recognized the 'strongest' effect of the whole symphony. That the same lady encountered Schubert, Mahler and (of all people!) Bruckner at every step was final proof of a gift that the likes of us have labored in vain to acquire to the present day!" Well, I suppose I may have donkey's ears, but I can certainly hear reminiscences of Schubert, Mahler and indeed Bruckner - just listen to the very opening, with its echoes of the Te Deum - in this music. Never mind; I am sure once the author has had a good lie down in a darkened room for a while he will feel better.

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Kimber Kable

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