Where everyone ignores the score

[Ferretfancy]

My pet hate is the slowing down in the scherzo of Beethoven's 7th - 'poco meno presto' i.e 'A little less fast' Nearly all conductors slow down to a funeral pace at this point, ruining the whole lift of the movement. I'm not a mad Toscanini fan, but he's one of the few who not do this, how has it become the standard ?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

My pet hate is the slowing down in the scherzo of Beethoven's 7th - 'poco meno presto' i.e 'A little less fast' Nearly all conductors slow down to a funeral pace at this point, ruining the whole lift of the movement. I'm not a mad Toscanini fan, but he's one of the few who not do this, how has it become the standard ?

Less so nowadays (HIPP-hip- hurray!) - it was a mannerism from the same conductors who "understood" the second Movement marking Allegretto to be a misprint for "Adagio molto"! - the myth that Symphonies has to have a "Slow Movement" has led to some of the most gross misrepresentations of scores that have ever been.

[ahinton]

A piece that's often mis-performed is Elgar's P & C No. 1. It's because of the nearly ubiquitous singing, of course. When the big tune comes for the last time, in D major, Elgar alters its rhythm at the climax from the familiar syncopated minim-quaver-crotchet-quaver, to minim-quaver-quaver-crotchet. It's very effective, but is always lost if people sing, because audiences insist on their own version(s). I've even seen performing sets where the bar has been changed back to "the version everyone knows".

Of course it's Elgar's own fault for putting words to the tune in the first place, but naively expecting people will sing only the song version.

Elgar ought to have had more sense than to listen to King Edward VII, whose suggestion it was to force the words of Benson upon that tune in his Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1 which, of course, works perfectly well in its own terms without it. I wonder what Elgar would have thought of the sheer paucity of opportunities to listen to it without those penny-dreadful sentiments being bellowed out? It's not quite as embarrassingly crass as the doggerel that interrupts the flow of the finale of Alan Bush's otherwise magnificent (and magnificently ambitious) piano concerto (not least because P&C1 can be performed without Land of Pope and Tory whereas the Swingler Singers' nonsense is integral to the Bush), but it runs it pretty close, I think; that said, if only Bush's piano concerto had even one performance to every ten of P&C1...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Less so nowadays (HIPP-hip- hurray!) - it was a mannerism from the same conductors who "understood" the second Movement marking Allegretto to be a misprint for "Adagio molto"! - the myth that Symphonies has to have a "Slow Movement" has led to some of the most gross misrepresentations of scores that have ever been.

Karajan's last recording of the second movement is one one of the briskest.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

A good friend of mine gave up trying to get his choir and congregation not to sing a-en-gels in "O come all ye faithful" , he even tried having a rehearsal for everyone in a effort to get them to sing what is written. BUT , things evolve , i'm sure musicologists of the future will find much to think about.

The distortion of hymns is rife, and not helped by arrangers such as Edmund Walters, who absorbs the errors, which can make it more difficult for everyone else by doing so.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Karajan's last recording of the second movement is one one of the briskest.

Quite so (but terribly unfocussed sound) - it was in the very first batch of CDs I ever bought back in 1985. It was a recorded conversation with Richard Osborne on Record Review in 1977 that first alerted me to the discrepency between what had become the "traditional" view of the Tempo and Beethoven's marking: RO started to sing the opening of the Movement and Karajan snarled gleefully "But that isn't 'Allegretto'!" That 1977 Seventh (glad I didn't have to say that!) remains my favourite of the Big Band/Modern instrument recordings of the work - a real force of Nature!

[Gordon]

No. 4'30" is a new, reduced Classic FM version.

Redacted you mean, to smo-o-o-o-o-th out that raucous coda

[Gordon]

Tradition as it that one slows down for the second subject in the New World first movement. One of the few that don't is Klemperer of all people. His version is not a prime BAL choice but it is very fine. When challenged about his tempo for the Pastoral he just replied "you'll get used to it!! So much for musicologists.

[ardcarp]

Sorry to bang on about Valse Triste again, but I've just found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t0FBQ3xeVA

....clearly a huge ego trip. None of that stuff is found in the score. Attempts to micro-manage (usually shorter) pieces as different as the Barber Adagio and the Cantique de Jean Racine just wreck the composers' intentions. Sometimes music works better when it is allowed to speak for itself. In bigger works (such as a Beethoven symphony or piano sonata) the performances I admire most are where the 'grand design' is understood by the conductor/performer and not de-railed by fiddling with excessive nuance. I like Beecham's Mozart and John Lill's Beethoven for those reasons....not to mention Angela Hewitt's Bach.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Quite so (but terribly unfocussed sound) - it was in the very first batch of CDs I ever bought back in 1985.

SOme of Karajan's early digital recordings suffer from this deficiency, though HvK himself loved it. Perhaps the worst is his Vienna Turandot.

[Petrushka]

Some time ago (it may even have been on the old BBC boards), a poster lamented that the finale of the Brahms 4th Symphony is marked Allegro energico e passionato which would imply some movement but absolutely no-one plays it like that. The fastest among those in my collection at the time was the 92 year old Leopold Stokowski with the LSO.

Does anyone play it as marked?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Some time ago (it may even have been on the old BBC boards), a poster lamented that the finale of the Brahms 4th Symphony is marked Allegro energico e passionato which would imply some movement but absolutely no-one plays it like that. The fastest among those in my collection at the time was the 92 year old Leopold Stokowski with the LSO.

Does anyone play it as marked?

Loughran and the Hallé seem right - and this is one of the few recordings that play the last bar as written: a dotted minim tied to a crotchet and two crotchet rests, exactly in time - no Rall or fermata. Cold and brusque - and magnificent.

Sibelius calls for something similar at the end of the second movement of the Second Symphony: everybody is supposed to come off at the same time as the crotchet string pizzicato, and yet the number of recordings and performances where this happens can be counted on the fingers of one foot. The brass and winds hold on their chord in the last bar as if they've got semibreves written. It's so much more effective the way the composer wrote it!

[Petrushka]

Loughran and the Hallé seem right - and this is one of the few recordings that play the last bar as written: a dotted minim tied to a crotchet and two crotchet rests, exactly in time - no Rall or fermata. Cold and brusque - and magnificent.

Sibelius calls for something similar at the end of the second movement of the Second Symphony: everybody is supposed to come off at the same time as the crotchet string pizzicato, and yet the number of recordings and performances where this happens can be counted on the fingers of one foot. The brass and winds hold on their chord in the last bar as if they've got semibreves written. It's so much more effective the way the composer wrote it!

I have Loughran's Brahms on LP but never did get the CD's and I did hear him do the 3rd live circa 1975. Must try and get those CD's!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

On the BBC messageboards, I remember discussion on the Sanctus fortis section of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius.. The tenor soloist often adapts the rhythm here, substituting a minim with a crotchet rest followed by a crotchet.