BaL 16.12.17 - Schubert: Piano Sonata no. 21 in B flat D960

[jayne lee wilson]

Well no, he isn't: he's specifying a kind of texture where the precise placing in time of the aleatoric elements makes no effective difference to the effect of the whole. At no point does Lutosławski suggest that players invent their own material. He has simply found a simple and easy way of notating the kind of desynchronised relationships between instruments that make up his sound-textures. Boulez conceived a related situation in those pieces of his (not Rituel, which is precisely notated throughout) where components of the music may be played in different orders or at different times: these changes do not affect the very clear and detailed concept the composer has for the work. To find music where the composer does suggest a "considerable individual creative input" for the performer you are looking in the wrong place with Lutosławski and Boulez. You'd have done better to mention someone like Vinko Globokar, the 1960s music of Stockhausen such as Spiral or Aus den sieben Tagen, Cornelius Cardew's Treatise, many of the compositions of John Cage, or indeed several of my own pieces from the last 15 years or so in which performers alternate between precise notation and free improvisation for which no directions are given in the score. Lutosławski's pieces on the other hand do not "sound different each time" except in a very limited sense, whose limits are strictly delimited by the score, as one can easily see by glancing through it.
So what new insights, new intensities, new truths are accessed, in your opinion, by leaving out the repeat of Schubert's exposition in the first movement of D960, and with it what might be considered the centre of gravity of the poetic identity of the movement, in the form of the bars that are accordingly excised?

The reason I chose to exemplify the Boulez and Lutoslawski was precisely because they offer some creative freedom (not improvisation) within a clearly determined structure, as the notes(**) I linked to clearly show. These works can, and do (in my own experience) sound different in different recordings and performances. I’m sorry but what is the point of such choices, if not to make the works sound new in new performances? Alike-yet-different, as in Nature, the renewal of the seasons, the turning of the tides.
Seek out recordings (eg - Rattle’s Luto 2 vs. Gardner’s) and try them yourself.

That was why I compared them to interpretation of classical works, which also offer any performer the possibility of “free interpretation” in the performance of the set of instructions constituting a score. (This has always been the case in classical performance traditions even if "not written down" as I've exemplified above. A species of now largely forgotten, musically intuitive knowledge.).
The history of recorded music shows how many of the most valued recordings are indeed very free with their interpretative choices, and only a few decades ago, repeats were rarely observed.
Would you be critically dismissive of Toscanini’s Beethoven or Horowitz’s Brahms, Knappertsbusch’s Bruckner….(so many others!) just because they don’t follow the score-reverential hegemony of the more recent fashions? They were making creative choices, often literally in the moment of performance, following their own inspiration. In the context of such a rich history of performance, telling them off for “not following the composers’ instructions to the letter” or "knowing better than the composer" seems to me utterly trite in its pedantry, an ahistorical denial of human creativity in all its rich variety.
A given listener may dislike such an approach but she can’t deny its large, significant and for many listeners, emotionally rewarding place in musical history.
***

Anyway, would Bach or Mozart have made a hard-and-fast distinction between improvisation, or ornamentation of a fully written-out score? Or played their own works the same way-as-written every time, with all repeats?
I do not believe it.
As my earlier posts tried to exemplify, this reverence for the printed score (often themselves erroneous, hence the need for new & revised editions e.g. Barenreiter’s Beethoven) is a modern fashion - in some ways a failure of creative nerve on some performers’ (and listeners') part.
***
As for those "new insights intensities and truths" I experience - these are scarcely definable verbally; I'm thinking of those flashes of emotion and imagination, the momentary musical thrills that arise when a familiar work is suddenly de-familiarised by a moment of performer-inspiration....éclairs sur l'au delà....Horowitz/Toscanini in the Brahms B Flat....compared (unfairly!) with the dull literalism of Kim/Elder...

"The centre of gravity of the poetic identity of the [1st] movement" of Schubert's D.960? I'm not sure it has only one, but for me it would possibly be those distant rumbles of thunder, those dark trills that first occur as a pause in the main theme in the exposition...
***

(**)
“Each musician should play his part with the same freedom as if he were playing alone. … the rhythmic values, serve only as a guide….
…The bar lines, rhythmic values and metre are intended only for orientation…. the music should be played with the greatest possible freedom….
in Section D, the 1st Violin part should be played independently of the conductor, and the rest of the ensemble.”
(from Lutosławski’s note to Jeux Vénitiens)

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

... yes : with a sub-committee to explore why it is inappropriate to perform piano music composed before the invention of the double-escapement on instruments equipped with double-escapement. I promise to behave myself.

.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I felt impelled to try to inhabit Brendel's viewpoint, when it was being so dogmatically dismissed on this thread. He is a great re-creative artist, in my book, whose views should at least make us pause and think.

But that suggests that you believe those of us who disagree with him haven't "paused and thought" about his views, silvestri, and that such disagreement is based only in "dogma". Not the case with me - I have read what he has had to say, considered it (without dismissing it as "dogma") and on due reflection, and after listening to the Sonata, concluded that what he says is relevant only to how he thinks the Music should be played. I side with the composer "against" Brendel, not from "dogma", but from the experience of the Music and from the dissatisfaction I feel when the Music isn't performed complete. If "dogma" is involved, it arises from the Musical experience(s) - my dissatisfaction wasn't a result of already-held dogma, nor was my "dismissal" of Brendel's writings and performances.

[Richard Barrett]

The reason I chose to exemplify the Boulez and Lutoslawski was precisely because they offer some creative freedom

"Creative freedom" implies that the musicians contribute something (some musical material, some substantive variation on the notated material) of their own to the performance. This is not the case with either of these composers.

I’m sorry but what is the point of such choices, if not to make the works sound new in new performances?

That has been explained, but clearly not to your satisfaction! All music should ideally sound new in every performance. The rhythmical latitude (for that's all it is - you still have to play all the pitches and dynamics in the order in which they're notated) offered by Lutoslawski isn't qualitatively different from the rhythmical latitude of much other music.

Would you be critically dismissive of Toscanini’s Beethoven or Horowitz’s Brahms, Knappertsbusch’s Bruckner….(so many others!) just because they don’t follow the score-reverential hegemony of the more recent fashions?

I don't recognise the "score-reverential hegemony of the more recent fashions", but I wouldn't be "critically dismissive" of those musicians and I can't imagine why you'd think I would, although their work doesn't interest me particularly, largely because I find it difficult to listen to "historical" recordings.

Anyway, would Bach or Mozart have made a hard-and-fast distinction between improvisation, or ornamentation of a fully written-out score? Or played their own works the same way-as-written every time,

No, of course not, although they would almost certainly have regarded "improvisation" as connoting music played without any score.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, if any, apart from just to put up straw people. The reasons I and others would argue for the desirability of the repeat in the first movement of D960 have nothing to do with restricting performer freedom (since performers are of course free to play all the notes in reverse order, or whatever, if that's what they feel like doing) or with unthinking reverence to the score, or with wanting it to sound the same every time, and least of all to eliminate or devalue the "flashes of emotion and imagination, the momentary musical thrills" you speak of: leaving out the first-time passage in this movement would seem to be a guarantee that at least one opportunity for such flashes would be removed, compared with the challenge of playing those bars as a moment of illumination, or darkening, or distraction, or terror (or some combination of these, or something else entirely), on which the entire emotional cast of the movement might depend. Surely you would wish to preserve that opportunity, unless all you want to do is argue.

Anyway this is all going round in circles somewhat. I think and hope I've made my points as clearly as possible. "Make sense who may. I switch off."

[Alison]

186 messages before the Bruckner 3 BaL last year. This could surpass that very memorable thread.

[waldo]

186 messages before the Bruckner 3 BaL last year. This could surpass that very memorable thread.

The funny thing is, DON will almost certainly dismiss this entire controversy with a single, breezy comment at the outset. "I don't know about you, but I like to hear the whole of the piece as it is actually written........"

Something like that.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

186 messages before the Bruckner 3 BaL last year. This could surpass that very memorable thread.

Yes, but this one's more like a fracas between two opposing groups of football fans.

[Alison]

The funny thing is, DON will almost certainly dismiss this entire controversy with a single, breezy comment at the outset. "I don't know about you, but I like to hear the whole of the piece as it is actually written........"

Something like that.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes, but this one's more like a fracas between two opposing groups of football fans.

I was thinking more of the Lilliputian "Big Enders" and "Little Enders". (And, as anyone who has met me will testify, I am incontestably a Big Ender.)

[EdgeleyRob]

Yes, but this one's more like a fracas between two opposing groups of football fans.

Which puts a few people off contributing

[Alison]

Yes, but this one's more like a fracas between two opposing groups of football fans.

I'm certainly learning stuff along the way. It's not as if all military leave has been cancelled just yet.

[MickyD]

The funny thing is, DON will almost certainly dismiss this entire controversy with a single, breezy comment at the outset. "I don't know about you, but I like to hear the whole of the piece as it is actually written........"

Something like that.

Please heaven he will, because as just a music-loving amateur listener myself, I confess to not understanding much of this thread!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

... yes : with a sub-committee to explore why it is inappropriate to perform piano music composed before the invention of the double-escapement on instruments equipped with double-escapement. I promise to behave myself.

I shall be arriving at the Forum Conference by bicycle - either a penny-farthing or a velocipede.

[Richard Barrett]

So, moving on from the (inexplicably contentious!) issue of the first movement, another thing that's struck me on listening to various performances of this piece is the feeling that, although I prefer to hear piano music of that time played on period instruments, this is especially the case in Schubert's piano music which is so dependent on timbre and texture as a foreground feature, possibly to a greater extent than any previous keyboard music. Having said this, I was listening yesterday to Jan Vermeulen's recording of D960 from his complete set of Schubert's piano music and finding it much too harsh and percussive, though maybe this can be put down to the way it was recorded, to some extent. I always return to Andreas Staier as the recording that (until now) most clearly embodies what's in this work as far as I'm concerned. No performance on a "modern" piano comes close; they all seem to a greater or lesser extent attempts to adapt Schubert's textures to a medium they weren't conceived for.

(PS this isn't "dogma", it's heartfelt individual response to the sound of the music, if anyone's wondering...)

[Richard Tarleton]

another thing that's struck me on listening to various performances of this piece is the feeling that, although I prefer to hear piano music of that time played on period instruments, this is especially the case in Schubert's piano music which is so dependent on timbre and texture as a foreground feature, possibly to a greater extent than any previous keyboard music......No performance on a "modern" piano comes close; they all seem to a greater or lesser extent attempts to adapt Schubert's textures to a medium they weren't conceived for.

An off-thread thought (I've got Alison's 186 total in mind ) : how many period pianos, of the right period for playing Schubert, are there out there? At least one forumite above has spoken of playing D960 at home.... This puts the poor old amateur at a disadvantage, having to have (at least) two pianos.... This approach does seem to create a bit of a gulf between the amateur and the professional, the amateur knowing that however well they play, it'll always be on unsuitable equipment.... Different with the lute, my partcular area of interest, where it's perfectly feasible to have several instruments as they're cheaper and take up less room....I know we're talking about recordings here, but Schubert has always seemed a composer at home in the domestic setting.