Play it again, Sam

[John Skelton]

I also think, JS, that calling recordings mere mechanical reproductions does a huge disservice to so many sonic documents created with great love and dedication over several decades!

I agree, Jayne, but I didn't call them "mere mechanical reproductions": I wrote "a mechanical reproduction of a performance, edited for distribution and repeatable." Not a hint of a "mere" . I don't deprecate recordings at all (I was thinking of an essay by Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit - usually translated as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). I suppose where we differ is that I don't see that any disservice or disrespect is involved in the listener interpreting a recording rather than treating it as an immutable object.

Entering into someone else's vision is a powerful thing to do, of course: but you can enter it and still be critical about it or decide to intervene critically in the way you respond to it. Otherwise it risks being very passive. I'm on the side of observing repeats (completely agree with aeolium on the character and variety of those Gulda Mozart sonatas, by the way). In the case of Schubert's D960 sonata Brendel's omission of the exposition repeat is for me ruinous, so I've no other interest in his recordings of the work. Others will feel differently.