BaL 29.06.19 - Mozart: Piano Quartets 1 & 2

[Mal]

Chapter and verse, Mal?

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/beethoven-symphony-no-9-10

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nWQZAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA62&dq=%22We+have+period+instruments,+but+we+do+not+have+period+ears%22+Hans+Keller.&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwipp_OVhJLjAhXKasAKHWwnDagQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20have%20period%20instruments%2C%20but%20we%20do%20not%20have%20period%20ears%22%20Hans%20Keller.&f=false

[jayne lee wilson]

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/...mphony-no-9-10

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...eller.&f=false

Cheers Mal - wish I knew where and when though...a long time ago, and context is all.....

Anyway, which recordings of CPE Bach's Hamburg Symphonies will you be listening to this week...?

[richardfinegold]

I generally don’t have a problem with HIPP Orchestras, strings and winds. As Mickey says, standards of playing have improved so much, and my ears have become more conditioned. My problem is with early keyboards, which to my ears sound to brittle and honkytonk. I particularly think they have a problem playing legato, crucial in Mozart and these Piano Quartets. I sampled a few of the HIPP recommendations given by JLW and others in this thread, and I always feel like the music is threatening to break into Rocky Raccoon. Beecham bon mot about copulating skeletons on a tin roof always comes to mind.
I have heard Brautigan in Mozart and he is the only Pianist who makes me forget about the instrument and just relax with the music

[jayne lee wilson]

Anna Bylsma once remarked that with his cello, it was "harder to sing, but easier to speak..."
This was during a Radio 3 concert of Bach Cello Suites in .... IIRC the mid-90s... many more songful restorations out there now...

(I would, subjectively, take articulacy over legato in Mozart (almost) every time...not sure why legato should be deemed "crucial" (rather than a sometimes desirable option); it wouldn't necessarily help e.g.the development of k478 (i) to have its most telling impact...)

[Bryn]

Cheers Mal - wish I knew where and when though...a long time ago, and context is all.....

Strange that the citing of "Bowie 2007, 214" bears no reference number, as other citations in the book do. Anyone here know which book by Bowie is cited?

Curiouser and curiouser, the Osborne article in the Gramophone dates from 1999, eight years before the putative source.

[jayne lee wilson]

Strange that the citing of "Bowie 2007, 214" bears no reference number, as other citations in the book do. Anyone here know which book by Bowie is cited?

Curiouser and curiouser, the Osborne article in the Gramophone dates from 1999, eight years before the putative source.

See #135, but it's Andrew Bowie 'Music, Philosophy, and Modernity', Cambridge University Press 2007.... it is available complete online, but all there is on that page is that footnote... I have a memory (false or not) of hearing Simpson's voice saying this on Radio 3... so it remains subjectively intriguing...

[Bryn]

See #135, but it's Andrew Bowie 'Music, Philosophy, and Modernity', Cambridge University Press 2007.... it is available complete online, but all there is on that page is that footnote... I have a memory (false or not) of hearing Simpson's voice saying this on Radio 3... so it remains subjectively intriguing...

Thanks. An original citation of Keller still seems to be lacking, however. I wonder if Osborne's remark re. "Allegro, ma non troppo, un poco maestoso" might also be subjected to the same Keller 'quote'?

[edashtav]

I worry that this discussion is getting bogged down in who said what twenty or more years ago. We cannot turn the clock back, HIP performances are here to stay but that, perhaps makes them sound like a fixed entity or ideal. The explosion of research and knowledge means that HIP, too, advances and changes. Performance styles in baroque times were pluralistic, too, so there is breadth and depth in the pursuit of HIP.

It's almost twenty years since John Butt published his magisterial "Playing with History. His views and practices have developed since then as he acknowledges in an extended update on the Dunedin Consort's website. I quote his final paragraph:

"Are the more extreme conditions today at all propitious for the flourishing of HIP in one form or another? The narrow nationalist threats to what has been a truly international movement cannot be lightly dismissed. Indeed, the survival of classical music culture is itself seriously threatened, particularly if it is seen as of a piece with western modernity – that largely cultural movement stretching from the Renaissance and Reformation up to the present. If modernity in this larger sense is coming to an end, it may be that any debates about HIP are equivalent to ordering new paint for those deckchairs on the Titanic. In the meantime though, the best we can do is to continue interrogating our interests and cultural assumptions and develop stronger justifications for the survival of musical culture. It would be absurd to suggest that HIP, or even the culture of western classical music as a whole, in any way solves the problems of the world today (although some continue to claim this). But it can certainly continue to function as a serious critique and meditation on our current condition. To my mind, we need most to exploit the historical invitation to extend our range of aural awareness, together with the types of perception, embodiment, feelings and thoughts that this might suggest. We are unlikely to get much further with our enormously rich inheritance if we remain concerned solely with purging the 18th century of main-note trills."

"Here, here", I say.

[Steerpike]

I don't know if Hans Keller made his remark about instruments but he certainly said "there are no authentic performances because there are no authentic listeners", I know that because he said it to me! Of course, that idea was doing the rounds at the time and HK and several others were no doubt saying similar things. As with so many ideas it's probably a hopeless task to try and find the very first person who said it. Ideas are as much a product of events and the times as of individuals.

[BBMmk2]

Can anyone tell me what the reviewer said about the Paul Lewis recording?

[richardfinegold]

I worry that this discussion is getting bogged down in who said what twenty or more years ago. We cannot turn the clock back, HIP performances are here to stay but that, perhaps makes them sound like a fixed entity or ideal. The explosion of research and knowledge means that HIP, too, advances and changes. Performance styles in baroque times were pluralistic, too, so there is breadth and depth in the pursuit of HIP.

It's almost twenty years since John Butt published his magisterial "Playing with. HIs views and practices have developed since then as he acknowledges in an extended update on the Dunedin Consort's website. I quote his final paragraph:

"Are the more extreme conditions today at all propitious for the flourishing of HIP in one form or another? The narrow nationalist threats to what has been a truly international movement cannot be lightly dismissed. Indeed, the survival of classical music culture is itself seriously threatened, particularly if it is seen as of a piece with western modernity – that largely cultural movement stretching from the Renaissance and Reformation up to the present. If modernity in this larger sense is coming to an end, it may be that any debates about HIP are equivalent to ordering new paint for those deckchairs on the Titanic. In the meantime though, the best we can do is to continue interrogating our interests and cultural assumptions and develop stronger justifications for the survival of musical culture. It would be absurd to suggest that HIP, or even the culture of western classical music as a whole, in any way solves the problems of the world today (although some continue to claim this). But it can certainly continue to function as a serious critique and meditation on our current condition. To my mind, we need most to exploit the historical invitation to extend our range of aural awareness, together with the types of perception, embodiment, feelings and thoughts that this might suggest. We are unlikely to get much further with our enormously rich inheritance if we remain concerned solely with purging the 18th century of main-note trills."

"Here, here", I say.

I am not getting the point. What are the “narrow nationalist threats” that are threatening to torpedo HIPP specifically?

[edashtav]

I am not getting the point. What are the “narrow nationalist threats” that are threatening to torpedo HIPP specifically?

I cannot speak for Professor Butt but I do know that the narrow nationalism evinced by Brexit worries him. He knows that the EU with its 27 states with open borders for musicians has meant a deal of cross fertilisation, with expert British 'HIP' musicians finding a ready market for their talents within the more locally based HIP groups across Europe. He postulates that our self-imposed nationalist isolation will have a dramatically deleterious effect on the employment , and thus incomes , of our British contingent of HIP enthusiasts. Their income will reduce and, as a corollary, their influence and guidance will be reduced. Instead of HIP advancing on a broad, unified front, the future may be more fragmentary.

[jayne lee wilson]

I don't know if Hans Keller made his remark about instruments but he certainly said "there are no authentic performances because there are no authentic listeners", I know that because he said it to me! Of course, that idea was doing the rounds at the time and HK and several others were no doubt saying similar things. As with so many ideas it's probably a hopeless task to try and find the very first person who said it. Ideas are as much a product of events and the times as of individuals.

Yes.... I guess the conceptual problem is the term "authentic listeners" (or "period ears" etc.....). Just because we can't hear the music of say 1791 the way its contemporaries did, scarcely devalues the historically-curious adventure. As I said the burgeoning of musical creativity around the HIPPs movement this century has been stunning; marvellous.

The idea that Mozart or Beethoven would have preferred a modern concert grand could they only have heard one, is to say the least wildly speculative, and belongs to that old simplistic view of historical progress, where newer is inherently better. Anyone relishing the sounds of baroque woodwinds in Telemann, Zelenka, Rameau etc. already knows how false this is.

One is reminded of those Sci-Fi films involving time travel, where the constant danger is changing the course of history by influencing even minor events in the time you go back to.
With HIPPs, there's a parallel creative point.... returning to your own time and displaying your discoveries in texts and performances, you change both the view of musical history, and the perception of our own performance habits irrevocably.

With all the aforementioned effects on performances themselves... but - paradoxically perhaps.....
There's no going back....

[doversoul1]

Yes.... I guess the conceptual problem is the term "authentic listeners" (or "period ears" etc.....). Just because we can't hear the music of say 1791 the way its contemporaries did, scarcely devalues the historically-curious adventure. As I said the burgeoning of musical creativity around the HIPPs movement this century has been stunning; marvellous.

The idea that Mozart or Beethoven would have preferred a modern concert grand could they only have heard one, is to say the least wildly speculative, and belongs to that old simplistic view of historical progress, where newer is inherently better. Anyone relishing the sounds of baroque woodwinds in Telemann, Zelenka, Rameau etc. already knows how false this is.

One is reminded of those Sci-Fi films involving time travel, where the constant danger is changing the course of history by influencing even minor events in the time you go back to.
With HIPPs, there's a parallel creative point.... returning to your own time and displaying your discoveries in texts and performances, you change both the view of musical history, and the perception of our own performance habits irrevocably.

With all the aforementioned effects on performances themselves... but - paradoxically perhaps.....
There's no going back....

Can one seriously talk about historically informed sound of Baroque music when one is listening to highly engineered recording through ultra modern audio media (where newer is almost inherently better) in one’s own comfortable room? One could talk about research based interpretativity or some such but that is by no means a monopoly of HIPP. One may value many aspects of HIPP but that is entirely a personal choice and not the base to make it superior to non-HIPP.

Can we leave it to that before HIPP gets a bad name?

[jayne lee wilson]

Can one seriously talk about historically informed sound of Baroque music when one is listening to highly engineered recording through ultra modern audio media (where newer is almost inherently better) in one’s own comfortable room? One could talk about research based interpretativity or some such but that is by no means a monopoly of HIPP. One may value many aspects of HIPP but that is entirely a personal choice and not the base to make it superior to non-HIPP.

Can we leave it to that before HIPP gets a bad name?

"Before HIPPs gets a bad name"? My God DS, I think you'll find that already pertains around here!
I feel like a rearguard gunner in Catch-22........

But you've missed most of my essentially relativistic points entirely, as many of them are, as anyone can see for themselves, about Musical History and Performance Practice; finding fresh ways to think about it as it affects our everyday listening.
Don't forget that I give more attention than most to modern recordings and interpretations alongside HIPPs (see CPE Bach...).
I try to call it as I hear it. (e.g. the Fauré Quartett )....

I only brought audio into it to make a few comments about critical evaluation.
But on that score, about "modern audio media", e.g. the kit I use (or potentially, hi-res recordings) is that some monitoring designs can be more accurate than "hifi"; i.e, designed to evaluate recordings in the making, they try to let those recordings through without doing much to them. A clearer window.
Modernity isn't really the essence of it. Much of my own system (from CD transports to amps and speakers) dates from 1997-2000 anyway, albeit regularly serviced and in some cases modified/customised....

Perhaps I should add that as a crazy obsessive musiclover, I listen on Tivoli & Panasonic FM Radios and the Denon Soundbar beneath the TV almost every day too. It can be Classic FM Smooth, Radio 3, often baroque or soul-soothing Gesualdo drifting through the house... Anything for music when you need it....!

Happy Listening (and thinking about listening...)....