This is what HIPP sounds like to me….

[cloughie]

It isn’t a black and white thing.

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.

I agree with most of what you say here Alps and much of what was done in the 60s by Thurston Dart, ASMF and Marriner, ECO and Leppard and others paved lightened up Baroque music paving the way for hipp - their recordings were much more enjoyable and lighter in sound early hipp from eg Collegium Aureum and VCM but that maybe down to companies having superior recording engineers!

The highlighted para about hits the nail on the head and now we have ‘extreme hipp’, too much noisy close-miked instruments, particularly percussion, and exaggerated tempi such as those in this years SCO Prom which murdered the the last three Mozart Symphonies! Entertainment possibly - Authentic Mozart? Pull the other one!

I do own up to the occasional listening of a Handel-Harty or a bit of Klemperer or Stokowski Bach.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Just been reading a book on Haydn . It’s extraordinary how small some of his original orchestras for his symphonies were - e.g. just five violins but solo woodwind. That must have meant woodwind was so much more audible in his day . Even a scaled down modern symphony orchestra won’t replicate that.
One of the weird benefits of lockdown has been the scaling down of string sections and also ( if a recent radio 3 trail is accurate ) more spot micing of instruments . I heard a BBC SO performance of the New World Symphony last week and I’ve never heard so much woodwind detail . The effort Dvorak put into the wonderful bassoon part for example - usually completely lost in the concert hall. We almost need a rethink of the modern symphony orchestra post lockdown .