Originally posted by french frank
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You are never alone with a Strad ….
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You are never alone with a Strad …. -
French frank doesn't need a Strad; she needs a Trad!Originally posted by antongould View PostComment
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Now that is a description/definition which I can really live with - no mission creep, no dogma. Thanks for a succinct explanation. I’ll still have an aversion to the sound but that short paragraph puts it into an objective context.Originally posted by Bryn View PostComment
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The performances? … some good, some bad and some downright ugly!Originally posted by Bryn View PostComment
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Sure, as with the range of performances using modern setups and techniques.Originally posted by cloughie View PostComment
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I wouldn't mind a Strad. I once played 2nd violin in a village orchestra that sounded a bit like a small Portsmouth Sinfonia: I don't know how our conductor had the nerve to have us perform in public. Though I think we sounded better than the players on this video. Or some of us did.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View PostIt isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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Reminds me of the Hans Keller comment regarding amateur orchestras - something on the lines of ‘you will recognise the love of music in amateur orchestras, even though you might not actually hear it’.Comment
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To me, and I hope many others, HIPP played by professionals just sounds better, several degrees of magnitude better, than what preceded it, at least for music before Haydn. Weighed down for a century by Victorian modes of expression, the pre HIPP performances often bring to mind the era of Steam Trains, very impressive in their chugging and blustering, but now obsolete, hopefully.Comment
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It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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Still can't see the point; even so, surely what the compser 'had in mind' was contained in the score he composed, and all its inherent instructions.Originally posted by Bryn View PostComment
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Yes, but Bryn’s ‘definition’ makes sense without that ‘it’s what he would have wanted’ implication. I’m no follower of HIPP at all, if I have to nail my colours to the mast it sounds rather thin and antiseptic to me, but that’s all down to listener preferences and nothing else. Nevertheless, if it’s your thing that’s fine.Comment
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There may, I suppose, be composers who write music without knowledge of the instruments they write for. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their like were not of that 'school'. When Bach rewrote many of his compositions for alternative instrumentation, he made adjustments suitable to the new instruments. Boulez held that such composers had no interest in timbre. O.K., he said that in the context of discussing Schoenberg's klangfarbenmelodie. However, to fail to hear how the earlier composers also used the different timbres as part of their compositional process defies belief. Those earlier composers took great interest in the technological developments in the instruments they wrote for. Sometimes they were quite specific about the stage of development of instrumental technology they were writing for. As in Brahms and the natural horn, for instance. Beethoven wrote Op 27/2 weil before his deafness had progressed too far. His use of the lower register of the pianos of his time is lost on a modern Steinway, though a pianist familiar with early pianos might be able to try to emulate it to some extent.Originally posted by visualnickmos View PostComment
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It isn’t a black and white thing.Originally posted by visualnickmos View Post
I first became interested in the HIPP concept at the age of 11 when my father arrived home from work with a recording of Handel’s Messiah labelled as “original scoring”, which seemed the right thing. I shunned thei Handel/Harty Water Music and bought an LP using the original scoring. Later, I was mightily impressed by the Basil Lamb edition of Messiah. The general belief in original purity began to break down for a number of reasons:-
Antony Hopkins compared Handel’s original version of “The People that Walked in Darkness” with Mozart’s enhanced version. I realised then that what Mozart had done was not to be dismissed. Was is so wrong for Mozart to fill in what he perceived as implied harmonies, just as a harpsichordist might do? And was it worse than soloists embellishing the perfectly good notation written down by the composer? It seemed that double standards were in operation here.
Then there was the race to the top HIPPdom, with different musicians competing to outdo one another. Who can play faster? Slow movements became faster than the quick ones, because the slow movement are heaped with hemidemisemiquavers, presumably because the composer really expected a more reasonable slower tempo. The OCD of metronome marks became an obsession for some - yes, I know that’s tautology.
Then the vibrato thing went into a spin. Although string vibrato had been around since the early 1600s, it became a Bad Thing, even though it was based on skimpy evidence. Leopoldo Mozart railed against continuous vibrato, but all that really shows is that continuous vibrato was being used in the 1760s, and he didn’t like it.
JEG seems to get things in reasonable balance. Superb singing and playing in his Bach Cantata series without giving the impression that he’s trying to prove a point in authenticity. Also I like the fact that he tries ideas that others only make excuses about, such as using natural horns in Brahms.
There’s an important place for authenticity, but too many have used it to seized the moral high ground, and sometimes this has involved attempts to rewrite history, simply to justify a musician’s preferences.Last edited by Eine Alpensinfonie; 12-10-21, 09:44.Comment
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