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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: Yeah, I guess we do need to define our terms posted by Chris from Lafayette on January 24, 2017 at 19:56:28:
It was awhile ago, but I remember an interview with Harnoncourt where he noted that everything he was doing was conjecture, and that we really couldn't know what it sounded like in Bach's time. I wonder if it was truly accepted practice to play and sing without vibrato, or if in fact, as I suspect, there were then many acceptable ways to perform the music.
We have gone through stages - at the beginning of the LP era, when Baroque music was starting to mushroom, many of the conductors played it as though it had been composed in the 19th century - Klemperer, Beecham, Ormandy, etc. Then we started to see the rise of specialists like Karl Richter who used smaller forces and attempted more of 18th century sensibility. I have great respect for these folks - they were pioneers - but I don't know if today we find much room for their recordings. I once owned Richter's St. Matthews Passion, and honestly it was a bit boring.
At the same time, we had some non-specialist like Scherchen who also attempted to drive a new sensibility into the works. So, were these performances HIP (for the time), using modern instruments and operatic voices for the vocal parts?
Then, of course, during the 60s we had the start of the use of older, more authentic (allegedly) instruments, and a different sound picture for the works. At the same time, the Marriners and Leppards, while still using modern instruments, drove a greater sense of period authenticity into the works. Were both of these HIP?
Then of course, coupled with the digital age, we have the completion of the HIP revolution, with very choppy rhythms and vibratoless playing and singing, no to mention the extension forward from the baroque into the classical era, and further into early Romantic music. We also had further thinking about choral practice. How do we feel about the one to a part choral work in Bach? (I personally think it sounds wrong, but that is an opinion).
Personally, I prefer "authentic" instruments in Baroque music, but modern ones thereafter, even though I own a ton of HIP performances of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. I will take the harpsichord over the piano for Bach's keyboard works, even though I own a lot of Gould recordings of Bach (he tries, and succeeds, in making the piano sound much more like an appropriate instrument than does, say, Perahia). I don't care to hear the fortepiano very often - Brautigam's survey of Beethoven is a marvelous exception, but in general, it doesn't sound like a real instrument to me, authentic or not.
Fortunately, there are a lot of roads to Rome, when it comes to both performances and recordings.
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Follow Ups
- Definition of terms - TGR 09:11:28 01/25/17 (1)
- Like! nt - Travis 14:30:22 01/25/17 (0)
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