Instruments you struggle with

[Richard Barrett]

I love Bach's music and it is versatile enough to be adapted to many arrangements, instruments and interpretations

That is of course true, but it's also true that if you find the sound of one of a composer's principal and favourite instruments objectionable there will always be something about their music you won't "get". What you're saying is you get enough from it while still missing out on that something, which is fair enough.

[Once Was 4]

[QUOTE=Barbirollians;630102]

I could have written that!

I took a long time to hear the horn in a positive light - but sometimes it can sound just too strident. It really does depend on who the player is.....

Alan Civil, David Pyatt - I like very much as well as Radovan Vlatkovic - in the Mozarts.[/QUOTE

Not Dennis Brain ?

Of course there are horn players and horn players. I remember Alan Civil saying that he had to be very tactful when sitting on juries for international competitions. A very fine, British, Scandinavian or American player would perform to Mr Civil's satisfaction but he would see that a juror from Eastern Europe was sitting with a distinct frown on his/her face. Then perhaps a Yugoslavian player would perform; he would think "that's awful" but the Eastern Europeans would be beaming with delight. Civil himself coined some rather insulting nicknames for the big, heavy sounds of the USA players of his time (this style seems to have gone out of fashion).

There was a 'Manchester School' of horn players whose style was set by Franz and Otto Paersch (father and son - Franz being a German emigre) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (BTW: they were playing 1st and 4th horns respectively in the first performance of Elgar's 1st Symphony). Otto Paersch taught the older players who were still working in Manchester when I was a student in the 60s and a young professional in the early 70s. It was a very direct 'open' sound. Curiously Dennis Brain was very much in that mold although his horn playing antecedents went back though his father, uncle and grandfather to another German emigre - Adolf Borsdorf who was the biggest influence in London in Elgar's time (Elgar consulted him on some of his horn parts). There is still a definite 'London sound' which presumably goes back to Borsdorf (one of the founders of the LSO).

[BBMmk2]

I am not keen on fortepiano sat all. Just gnaws always at my mind, like nobody's business

[Pulcinella]

The electric organ, in almost all its variants; never really heard a good one.
And lots of those already mentioned, the fortepiano being a prime one, and bagpipes, unless from extremely far away, another!
I agree that listening to 20 minutes of some harpsichords is worse than being in the dentist's chair.

[richardfinegold]

I am surpirsed that atthis point in a thread that starts off complaining about the sound of a harpsichord that no one has resurrected Beacham's famous bon mot.
The Dentist drill is one instrument whose sound will induce a Pavovian terror response in me. Probably because my mother insisted on her offspring using her ancient family Dentist, who didn't believe in that newfangled numbing medicine.
Back on the musical instrument side, the theremin produces a sound that either has me putting fingers in my ears or convulsing in laughter looking for teacup shaped flying saucers.

[visualnickmos]

Back on the musical instrument side, the theremin produces a sound that either has me putting fingers in my ears or convulsing in laughter looking for teacup shaped flying saucers.

Unless, surely if scored in a symphony by Vaughan Williams or Shostakovich...

[MickyD]

I'll try again with my defence of the harpsichord, with this sublime recording by Sophie Yates of Handel's first harpsichord suite. The opening prélude sounds wonderful to my ears. I need Vinteuil to give me some support here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAyBGiW3KwA

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm struggling with the piano currently.

You aren't the only Forumista with this difficulty, Edgey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73QtwAOq8LA

[ahinton]

You aren't the only Forumista with this difficulty, Edgey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73QtwAOq8LA

Indeed - http://www.company7.com/bosendorfer/...7_275drop.html ...

And although most fotunately I didn't see it happen, a similar fate befell an even larger one, a Bösendorfer 290 8-octave beast, that was being used for recordings sessions as a church over two weeks but had to be hired out over the intervening weekend; apparently, the movers were having a laugh and a joke and evidently not concentrating and they let it fall off its shoe and it smashed onto the church floor. The damage to the floor cost more than £5,000 and the piano was a write-off. Most fortunately, the second week was rescued by the instrument's hirer who hurriedly supplied his own personal Bösendorfer 290 at no further cost.

[cloughie]

That is of course true, but it's also true that if you find the sound of one of a composer's principal and favourite instruments objectionable there will always be something about their music you won't "get". What you're saying is you get enough from it while still missing out on that something, which is fair enough.

I'll settle for the 99% appreciation without too much harpsichord, and I do acknowledge the importance of the harpsichord in the development of music but if it was that good why was it deemed favourable to develop the fortepiano and then the pianoforte. Can you honestly prefer to hear eg Beethoven's PC4 on a fp than a concert grand?

[Richard Barrett]

Can you honestly prefer to hear eg Beethoven's PC4 on a fp than a concert grand?

Without hesitation yes. Thinking of the evolution of instruments as consisting of "improvements" is rather akin to thinking of the evolution of music in the same way, surely. Musical styles change, and instruments are invented or developed or discarded to take account of those changes, not to play the same music "better".

[Richard Barrett]

no one has resurrected Beecham's famous bon mot.

A bon mot from Beecham? That would be a first.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Can you honestly prefer to hear eg Beethoven's PC4 on a fp than a concert grand?

I can, cloughie - the range of colours from that instrument makes modern instruments intended to play Rachmaninoff in Carnegie Hall sound ... well, monochrome in comparison. Getting the sound that Beethoven was more used to - as opposed to something he'd never heard - reveals so much about balance, timbre, and texture that are lost in 20th Century instruments.

[Richard Tarleton]

I can, cloughie - the range of colours from that instrument makes modern instruments intended to play Rachmaninoff in Carnegie Hall sound ... well, monochrome in comparison. Getting the sound that Beethoven was more used to - as opposed to something he'd never heard - reveals so much about balance, timbre, and texture that are lost in 20th Century instruments.

I've wondered about this. Beethoven only heard his later compositions in his head (I guess, not being able to imagine the compositional process). How do we know what he might have thought of, say, Op 111 on a Steinway? Some of the variations in the Diabelli (thinking of the BAL the other day)?....rhetorical question of course, we don't and can't know. I've wondered the same about Schubert. "Music for a later age" as LvB said (admittedly of a Razumovsky), but was he constrained by what was possible, and what he knew?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

How do we know what he might have thought of, say, Op 111 on a Steinway?

As you say, we don't and can't - just as we don't know what he might have thought of Op111 on a synthesizer. I'm pretty sure that he would have been furious that the una corda effects he so carefully wrote into Op110 cannot be reproduced on a Steinway, but that's by-the-by. He might have loved it - he might have loathed its homogenised sound; it's a pointless if amusing thing to consider - what we can be certain of is that he knew the sound of the pianos his heard as a young man, and the "feel" of the Broadway and Graf instruments he was given in later life. It is impossible that he could have imagined the sound of an instrument that only came into existence a hundred years after his death - it is entirely credible that the sound of the instruments he knew is much closer to the sounds he imagined, even if they might not have been exactly what those sounds might have been.