HIPP (Historically Informed Performing Practice)

[Bryn]

And an amazing performance of op.77!

Absolutely!

[jayne lee wilson]

Fascinating trivia regarding your last sentence, Ferney. According to wiki, the first revival of Zelenka was by that eminent HIPP
Practioner Bedrich Smetena, who copied scores that he found in a Dresden library and presented them in Prague in 1863. The first recordings of Zelenka were in the mid 1950s by small Czech ensembles and may not have gotten much exposure in the West. The first Zelenka recordings that I remember were by Camerata Bern, I think, and I think that they used modern instruments, but I’m not sure.
More generally, I am not sure that HIPP was necessary to stimulate interest in relatively unknown pre Classical era Composers. Interest in J.S.B. and Handel, amongst others, was prevalent in earlier generations, and I think that it only would have been a matter of time, once the trauma of WW II and the onset of the Cold War had passed, before enterprising Musicians and listeners would have wanted to explore more, regardless of the types of instruments utilized. The results would have sounded different than what we have come to expect as the norm for pre Classical Era Music, but not un recognizably so.

Zelenka's Orchestral Works were recorded for DG (Collectors' Editon boxset latterly) by Camerata Bern, much embellished by Holliger, Bourgue et al in their expressive, brilliantly virtuoso persuasions.
Sonnentheil on CPO offers a purer HIPPs sound, so Zelenkians can enjoy the contrast.....but we have to thank the very specialised HIPPs groups under Adam Viktora, Bernius, Luks etc for the wonderful range of vocal works now available...

IIRC my first period-instrument encounters were the Eroica (R3, Collegium Aureum, early/mid 1970s) and Rameau Suites from the same ensemble. I was stunned. It was ear- and life-changing. I recall an early JEG Rameau LP, bought after a Gramophone review, which I loved as well.
Some disillusion set in during the 1990s when live (usually Proms) performances of Mozart and Beethoven from JEG and Pinnock sounded very fast, flat and inexpressive. My belated acquisition of a CD player changed everything into the 21st Century, when I heard what Bruggen, Harnoncourt and Norrington could do with their wonderful bands (with recordings going back to the 80s, or even, in the case of NH's CMW Telemann, the mid-60s), live or in the studio ....and I'm a huge JEG fan now, whether he uses modern or period orchestral performers. His work with the LSO is a marvellous example of how the one speaks to the other, with stunningly refreshed results in Mendelssohn and Schumann....

Making it new indeed, just like the latest starry addition to the catalogue, the just-out Brautigam/KA/Willens Beethoven Piano Concertos...wow to that one!

Not to mention Haydn! No composer has benefited more from such sonically-renewing performances than him, especially in the Sturm und Drang Symphonies...what a revolution that has been...

[Richard Tarleton]

My own experience with these matters began very inauspiciously

My first live lutenist was inauspicious - distinguished Basel alumnus Eugen Dombois playing in the Holywell Music Room in 1969, sharing a recital with Lina Lalandi on clavichord - it being the Oxford Bach Festival, they were both playing Bach. As we took our seats Dombois was sitting to the side of the stage area practising the Prelude to the 4th Bach Lute Suite (aka BWV1006A, the lute version of the 3rd violin partita), and looking worried. When he came to play what was billed on the programme as the suite, he started with the Gavotte en Rondeau, missing out the first two movements altogether. It actually wasn't very good. It was to be a year or two until I saw Julian Bream play the lute live, although I was familiar with his lute records especially the seminal Dances of Dowland, and had been to his guitar concerts. Bream of course brought a guitarist's technique to the lute, and played powerful instruments with fixed metal frets....but helped inspire a generation, not to mention reviving the broken consort, and putting the early composers for the lute on the world stage. He met with a lot of resistance at first - his account of the early days is amusing:

Thurston Dart [his early music mentor at first] said that the lute was an intimate, inward instrument, not suited to the concert hall, and thus should be played with the finger tips, and not the nails, as I did. By playing it with the nails, he said, I made the lute seem brash. Also I should pluck nearer the bridge, and avoid the considerable changes of dynamic and tone that were already becoming characteristic of my guitar-playing. His criticism, of course, came from the point of view of considerable scholarship. But there were also the nut-cracker purists who said that my string-length was too long, the strings were too thick, and my lute too heavy, and that I shouldn't use metal frets....Only tied gut could give you the proper sounds. I ask you! I mean, here I was playing music that almost no-one had heard for three hundred years, and suddenly out of the woodwork came all these clever dicks who knew so much more than I did. At least Bob Dart helped and encouraged me....[and even wrote sleeve notes for his lute records] .....

....It could be said that I am moving towards a more historically correct set-up. Who knows? One day I might even play with a feather-weight dinky cardboard lute, with strings so light that it will feel as if the right hand fingers are poking a cobweb....

38 years later I sat in the same Holywell Music Room to hear Jakob Lindberg play an all-Dowland recital on his reconstructed 1590 Sixtus Rauwolf of Augsberg lute - lute playing had moved on in the intervening years. In later years Bream and the Lute Society became the best of friends, and of course the next generation of professional lute players all acknowledge their debt to him. But if it had been left to the 'purists' in the early days it might have taken another generation....

My very first HIPP experience of any sort, also in 1969, was a St John Passion in the Sheldonian, August Wenzinger with the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Sitting hear the performers I was blown away by the experience.

[jayne lee wilson]

Ronald Brautigam from 2017 on his pianos, just when he was starting to record the newly-released Beethoven...

https://bachtrack.com/interview-ronald-brautigam-historical-pianos-piano-month-october-2017