Old and new instruments

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I've always been puzzled by the idea that composers who had no option but to score for instruments that were difficult to play in tune actually preferred it that way. Some instruments (and voices) could play consistently in tune. Others hadn't developed to the same extent, so there was inconsistency.

I like listening to 78s, but I dearly wish Furtwangler had lived 50 years later.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I've always been puzzled by the idea that composers who had no option but to score for instruments that were difficult to play in tune actually preferred it that way.

But isn't it rather the case that the instruments "were difficult to play in tune" only for the pioneers of the HIPP "movement", coming as they were from modern instruments? With increased experience, performers on those instruments nowadays have fewer such problems (and in Live performance, cracked and missed notes are just as much an occupational hazard on modern instruments).

Is there any evidence that Mozart's Horn players in Vienna had intonation difficulties, or that they couldn't play their instruments as well "in tune" (and I won't go there for the time being!) as modern performers on reproductions of those earlier instruments?

[verismissimo]

... Is there any evidence that Mozart's Horn players in Vienna had intonation difficulties, or that they couldn't play their instruments as well "in tune" (and I won't go there for the time being!) as modern performers on reproductions of those earlier instruments?

For me, part of the attraction of, say, Haydn's trumpet concerto played on a contemporaneous instrument (or copy) is the sheer difficulty and DANGER involved. Really, edge of seat. And while listening to the same piece played on a modern instrument can be enjoyable musically, it's just not so much FUN!

[Richard Barrett]

Is there any evidence that Mozart's Horn players in Vienna had intonation difficulties, or that they couldn't play their instruments as well "in tune"

And let's not forget that a musician in Vienna in 1790 would have had a repertoire that for the most part extended maybe twenty years into the past and would all have been in more or less the same style (rather than, as nowadays, having to master a repertoire in a huge variety of styles extending over a time period at least ten times as long).

[Hornspieler]

I've just been watching a programme called "Mozart Gala" on SkyArts2.

A reduced Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Harding, in a delightful selection of Mozart arias.

In one of them, the soprano soloist was accompanied by a two-horn obligato throughout. Superb playing - and they were both using rotary valved full double Alexander horns.

I'm sure that Mozart himself would have been delighted with the result.

As I get older, I become more and more convinced, EA, that "Nostalgia is not what it used to be".


[B]HS

That Mozart Gala concert is on NOW on Skyarts2. Clarinet obligato in progress, wonderful playing and singing.

Hurry!

HS

[Hornspieler]

That Mozart Gala concert is on NOW on Skyarts2. Clarinet obligato in progress, wonderful playing and singing.

Hurry!

HS

I have just watched the VPO playing the Prague Symphony and I notice that one hornplayer was using the traditional sleeve valved Viennese horn with an F crook and the other player was playing on a rotary valved double horn.

I was not aware of any mismatch at all in tonal quality.

The fact is, (and I write as a horn player trained by the late, great, Aubrey Brain)

"...The sound that comes out of a horn is the sound that the player decides to put into it".

HS

BTW: Viewing and listening to that VPO Mozart Gala, reinforces my answer to the question "If you were sentenced only to hear the music of one composer for the rest of your life, who would it be?"
My answer then, and still now, is "... Mozart"

[Richard Barrett]

I have just watched the VPO playing the Prague Symphony and I notice that one hornplayer was using the traditional sleeve valved Viennese horn with an F crook and the other player was playing on a rotary valved double horn.

Neither of which is a natural horn of course, and the Vienna horn still doesn't have as small a bore or bell as a typical natural horn IIRC. I take your point that the player is probably the most important variable in horn playing, but this clearly isn't true of other instruments to anything like the same degree, and what we think of as intonational inconsistencies in unvalved brass instruments (or the timbral inconsistency produced by hand-stopping) weren't "problems" to composers writing for those instruments, but expressive qualities, which became lost among the changed priorities (and increasingly restricted concepts of intonation) which developed during the 19th century. As in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO4gjHu1XGA

which to me sounds a great deal more attractive and convincing than the same thing played on "modern" instruments.