Conductors who think they know better

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

How would you define "the purists", seabright?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

... and breaking and entering, theft, and attempted squatting. (The tepid is never what works in Art - it has to be white hot.)

Clearly I wouldn't support her ethics - just her discernment.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Clearly I wouldn't support her ethics - just her discernment.

Well, that's ethics girl for you.


(With all due insincere and far too late now apologies to all girls, women, transgender readers from that much-maligned county, and their families, friends, and partners. )

[cloughie]

I feel much more - yes, I know it's an emotive word, but I can't think of an alternative - cheated by performances that claim to be "the real thing" but which re-orchestrate and/or make cuts to and/or ignore dynamics, tempi etc clearly marked in the score as part of the composers' own concept of how the work should be presented.

...but strangely enough I do not usually, or come to think of it, very rarely have the score in front of me, nor do I always know a work suffiently to know, whether fidelity to the score and dynamics have been observed. If many years ago I have become accustomed to hearing a work in a certain way, then that's probably how I am happy to hear it that way. There are many works which I have several recordings, and I tend to rely on what I hear to decide whether I like it or not. Interesting also that certain conductors over their conducting careers record works and indeed cycles more than once eg Abbado in Mahler, Karajan's Beethoven Symphonies, on each occasion were they getting nearer to the true score, or were they just doing what they thought sounded nicer? ...or some clever musicologist comes up with a new edition which bcomes the new gospel - but who is to say it improves on what was perceived before?

[Bryn]

Re. the exposition repeat of the scherzo and trio in the third movement of Beethoven's 5th. While I don't rate the performance that highly in other respects, I will remain grateful to Pierre Boulez for including the repeat, with a comment re. a thesis by one of his students arguing in favour of the repeat, in his recording of the work. It came as quite a revelation when I got the LP shortly after its release. The recording finally appeared in CD format in the Sony complete Boulez conducts box.

[The Boulez recording was made around a decade before Peters Edition published the Peter Gülke edition which restored the repeat. Since then Jonathan Del Mar has argued against the repeat, but several conductors whose recordings claim to be based on his edition have overridden his viewpoint and included the repeat.]

[jayne lee wilson]

It’s deja vu again isn’t it, re interpretation, re free vs devoted…?

I’ve been as devoted as anyone, through purchase, listening and commenting on this site, to HIPPs and period-instrument, repeats-warts- and-all recordings of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and other classical symphonies and concertos; at times I simply couldn’t take this music in any other style. But the discovery of those older, more subjective traditions of performance evinced by such as - Toscanini, Furtwangler, Mengelberg, Horowitz etc has shown me the vital importance of the individual, the subjective, above all the (re)-creative, brilliantly insightful contribution a gifted performer can bring to music; an input going far beyond the printed score. And their performances are all very different, almost unrepeatable, on different nights, in different halls and cities; they offer an important reminder of humanity in performance, a necessary corrective to the HIPPs - or the score-reverential - hegemonies of today…

“Time and again, he brings out details in Beethoven’s writing…. which simultaneously violate the text and illuminate the moment..”
Richard Osborne on Mengelberg’s 1940 Amsterdam Beethoven Symphony Cycle, Gramophone, 4/1986.

***
In any case, earlier performers were not always faithful to their own scores as written .
In the notes to Ironwood’s recordings of Brahms Op.25 and Op.34., Brahms’ own performances of his works are described as “very free, elastic and expansive” by one of his own students, Fanny Davies, who witnessed many of those performances herself.
The note goes on: “Richard Barth, a violinist in Brahms’ own circle, noted that within a few years of the composers’ death, the performance style appropriate to his music was already being ignored or forgotten. The aesthetics of performance underwent a rapid change in the 20th Century, with a developing insistence that the score encapsulated all that the composer expected… notation started to be taken at face value….without consideration of the myriad un-notated conventions that were intrinsically linked to the artwork as conceived by the composer.”

***
Bruckner is a classic case, of course….

Take a historical journey through Bruckner performances from the 1940s to now, and take a lesson in how to make music live and breathe, make it dramatic, compelling and above all: individual. Note how “reverence for the score” applied to those editions most frequently recorded across the 1960s to the 1990s, produced too many unvarying, inexpressive, steady-state results (and still do, even in a potentially very creative, younger performer like Yannick Nézet-Séguin), not least because (but not only because) those editions - usually Haas or Nowak - had very few expression or dynamic markings in them. Earlier, initially and still less-respected editions, often those published in Bruckner’s lifetime, had far more - which may well have encouraged earlier conductors like Knappertsbusch or Konwitschny to go much further in their creative response to the moment, their tempo variabile - but what a shame conductors like Karajan or Wand didn’t take a more subjective, recreative view themselves a little more often, without the need for such explicit instructions.

“The truly lost tradition would seem to be Furtwangler’s unique style of rubato that almost convinces that there really is a technical dimension to conducting beyond time-beating, that the conductor is ultimately a performer rather than the vehicle of a mystic vision…”
(John Williamson, in “Conductors and Bruckner” in “The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner”).

***

I think there’s a deep human need for new experiences, creative change and variation, making things our own. There’s a vital creative tension between rules or instructions and what the performer decides to do with them.

I often feel that those sanctimonious comments from performers or critics about “just play what’s in the score… always be faithful to the composers’s intentions…” etc., exhibit as much fear of creativity or freedom as any justifiable, necessary or unnecessary devotion. And a fear of the unfixed: so many scores are changed in rehearsal, or revised after a performance, often in discussion with soloists and conductors. A Work of Art is not finished, only abandoned, as Paul Valéry almost said.

[Richard Barrett]

I I often feel that those sanctimonious comments from performers or critics about “just play what’s in the score… always be faithful to the composers’s intentions…” etc., exhibit as much fear of creativity or freedom as any justifiable, necessary or unnecessary devotion.

This is very true. In any case there's no such thing as "just what's in the score", it always involves a great deal of knowledge and opinion and often unquestioned assumptions. The "composer's intentions" are in principle not possible to know exactly, and in any case are a slippery concept to say the least. If someone asks me about some detail of a score written 25 years ago I first have to look it up and try to work out what my "intentions" were. I might have changed my mind in the meantime. This happened only a few weeks ago; the musician in question had also written some comments on the piece in his ongoing doctoral thesis that made me think yes, that is exactly what was "intended", although I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time, being in the thick of it, and not even completely conscious of what was "really going on". So: intended by whom? Composers have always expected and encouraged imagination on the part of performers.

And one more thing, since HIPP has been mentioned. It's a complete fallacy to imagine HIPP is motivated by some kind of historical "purism" - even if that's the way some of its exponents might express it. It's a way of making the music contemporary, just as Mahler's arrangements of Bach were in their time. Everyone who expresses an opinion on this subject should first acquaint themselves with Richard Taruskin's 1995 book (20 years ago!) Text and Act. One might not agree with it, but it does set out the parameters in a more thoughtful way than "I know what I like and I like what I know".

[vinteuil]

. Everyone who expresses an opinion on this subject should first acquaint themselves with Richard Taruskin's 1995 book (20 years ago!) Text and Act. One might not agree with it, but it does set out the parameters in a more thoughtful way than "I know what I like and I like what I know".

... to which I wd add Bruce Haynes -

http://amzn.eu/2GAGVcX

.

.

[Maclintick]

Hiya Gradus,

That's far too sensible an idea for R3 presenters to undertake! But it would get in the way of inanities and trying to be your mate.

I've often heard the R3 announcers give details of the instruments played in a particular performance, Hewitt on a Fazioli, Pletnev on a Bechstein, Schiff on a Bösendorfer & so on.
Petroc erupted into rapturous detail during a recent concert by Pavel Kolesnikov on a Yamaha piano in which the company's technicians performed a 'pit-stop' change of the action mid-recital -- not while Pavel was actually tinkling the ivories, of course...

Apologies for off-topicality, but getting back to the theme of composers' wishes being flouted for whatever reason -- arrangements OK (Bach/Stokowski) tinkering (Holst/Stokowski) NOT OK...Bruckner/Klemperer.....Hmmm...I don't want to provoke Bruckner edition enthusiasts into action on this thread. There's quite enough of that already elsewhere..

[teamsaint]

Tangental to this, the first work on Ao3 today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098h33x