Caliban undergoes a sea change

[Keraulophone]

Please offer a definition of that well-known cliché of music reviewing, "mannered".....?

Mannered, in this context, means labouring to create a particular effect or effects that sound artificially achieved, affected, contrived and unnatural.

For example, where someone like Schiff can hint at an effect like left-hand before right-hand, and do so sparingly to achieve interesting variety, here we have Koch making a Big Thing of using this halting technique ten times within the opening eighteen bars of D.960. It’s an almost arpeggiated effect in bar 4 beat 4 and b5 bt1, where the > is given a longish tenuto. B7 bt1-2 unmarked rallentando. B15 ugly overemphasis of bass line G, G flat, F, the F being played like a grace note exactly a semiquaver before the beat.

There may be genuine performance practice reasons for this style of playing Schubert piano music; all I’m saying is that I don’t like it.

[Serial_Apologist]

Mannered, in this context, means labouring to create a particular effect or effects that sound artificially achieved, affected, contrived and unnatural.

For example, where someone like Schiff can hint at an effect like left-hand before right-hand, and do so sparingly to achieve interesting variety, here we have Koch making a Big Thing of using this halting technique ten times within the opening eighteen bars of D.960. It’s an almost arpeggiated effect in bar 4 beat 4 and b5 bt1, where the > is given a longish tenuto. B7 bt1-2 unmarked rallentando. B15 ugly overemphasis of bass line G, G flat, F, the F being played like a grace note exactly a semiquaver before the beat.

There may be genuine performance practice reasons for this style of playing Schubert piano music; all I’m saying is that I don’t like it.

That way of playing is fine for jazz, the fractional before-or-after the beat contributing that essential sense of "swing". But, I for one don't think of Schubert as "swinging". In that sense or any other!

[Padraig]

Mannered, in this context, means labouring to create a particular effect or effects that sound artificially achieved, affected, contrived and unnatural....

...There may be genuine performance practice reasons for this style of playing Schubert piano music; all I’m saying is that I don’t like it.

That's what I call 'resting my case.'

[cloughie]

Perhaps the man 'eard the performance and didn't like it.

Well, his explanation confirms it so!

[jayne lee wilson]

Mannered, in this context, means labouring to create a particular effect or effects that sound artificially achieved, affected, contrived and unnatural.

For example, where someone like Schiff can hint at an effect like left-hand before right-hand, and do so sparingly to achieve interesting variety, here we have Koch making a Big Thing of using this halting technique ten times within the opening eighteen bars of D.960. It’s an almost arpeggiated effect in bar 4 beat 4 and b5 bt1, where the > is given a longish tenuto. B7 bt1-2 unmarked rallentando. B15 ugly overemphasis of bass line G, G flat, F, the F being played like a grace note exactly a semiquaver before the beat.

There may be genuine performance practice reasons for this style of playing Schubert piano music; all I’m saying is that I don’t like it.

By 2020, it is hard for anyone to find anything truly new to say about the most familiar, so-often-recorded classical masterpieces.
You have highlighted subtleties in Schiff's recent Schubert Brodman-fortepiano recordings which I have heard and much enjoyed myself.

But we now have an extraordinarily luxurious choice, going back almost a century, among recordings of these Schubert masterpieces, and moreover, in an era, however short- or long-lived, where live performance has become almost impossibly difficult.....so what do we do, or expect, or reflect upon? Do we need any more Schubert last-three-sonata recordings at all?

For me - yes - if they can be as adventurous and exploratory as Tobias Koch. Using one of the most beautiful Grafs I've heard (recorded with stunning immediacy and realism), he digs deep into the essential sound, the very fabric of colour, timbre, phrase and dynamic (and the very audible physical action of the piano itself), of these scores to go beyond any earlier performance I've witnessed, in its exploration of the music itself: the intensity of the expression, the range of its physical, timbral and sonic manifestation. Of the instrument itself.

His recording of the last three Schubert Sonatas now appears as an Opus Clavicembalisticum or a Transcendental Studies of the early Romantic age, an epic span of colour, shape and emotion to appear alongside - the Beethoven Diabellis, the Goldberg Variations.........
Like Mozart's last three symphonies, they can be envisioned as a trilogy - a grand threepart conception of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. They grew out of an extreme life-experience. The intimation of mortality.

I'm not surprised if responses to them are very divided. If most listeners liked them, in 2020, what would be the point? As Schoenberg said, if it is Art, it is not for all....
They are conceived to challenge and stimulate, as Koch's other tapings, including the Complete Schumann Violin/Piano Music (with Lisa-Marie Landgraf) and the Mendelssohn Piano Trios (with Alte Musik Köln)) show very vividly....this artist can only follow his own exploratory instincts.

We live in difficult times. We need reassurance, yes - we need to protect the Real and Imaginary Museum with its curated treasures, as we try to bring changed, challenging, new and relevant creations into it.
But we also need artists to say, in new and surprising ways: this matters. Whether in new musical creations or vital and radical recreations of older landmarks and pinnacles....

[Serial_Apologist]

By 2020, it is hard for anyone to find anything truly new to say about the most familiar, so-often-recorded classical masterpieces.
You have highlighted subtleties in Schiff's recent Schubert Brodman-fortepiano recordings which I have heard and much enjoyed myself.

But we now have an extraordinarily luxurious choice, going back almost a century, among recordings of these Schubert masterpieces, and moreover, in an era, however short- or long-lived, where live performance has become almost impossibly difficult.....so what do we do, or expect, or reflect upon? Do we need any more Schubert last-three-sonata recordings at all?

For me - yes - if they can be as adventurous and exploratory as Tobias Koch. Using one of the most beautiful Grafs I've heard (recorded with stunning immediacy and realism), he digs deep into the essential sound, the very fabric of colour, timbre, phrase and dynamic (and the very audible physical action of the piano itself), of these scores to go beyond any earlier performance I've witnessed, in its exploration of the music itself: the intensity of the expression, the range of its physical, timbral and sonic manifestation. Of the instrument itself.

His recording of the last three Schubert Sonatas now appears as an Opus Clavicembalisticum or a Transcendental Studies of the early Romantic age, an epic span of colour, shape and emotion to appear alongside - the Beethoven Diabellis, the Goldberg Variations.........
Like Mozart's last three symphonies, they can be envisioned as a trilogy - a grand threepart conception of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. They grew out of an extreme life-experience. The intimation of mortality.

I'm not surprised if responses to them are very divided. If most listeners liked them, in 2020, what would be the point? As Schoenberg said, if it is Art, it is not for all....
They are conceived to challenge and stimulate, as Koch's other tapings, including the Complete Schumann Violin/Piano Music (with Lisa-Marie Landgraf) and the Mendelssohn Piano Trios (with Alte Musik Köln)) show very vividly....this artist can only follow his own exploratory instincts.

We live in difficult times. We need reassurance, yes - we need to protect the Real and Imaginary Museum as we try to bring changed, challenging, new and relevant creations into it.
But we also need artists to say, in new and surprising ways: this matters. Whether in new musical creations or vital and radical recreations of older landmarks and pinnacles....

I think you could well have a strong point. I remember hearing someone criticise some performance of Mozart or Beethoven by saying, "You don't play Mozart (or Beethoven) using rubato. They are not Chopin". But do we really know that? Maybe Chopin heard some virtuoso playing Beethoven with rubato, and was inspired to compose making rubato a big part of his personal vision.

[LMcD]

I think you could well have a strong point. I remember hearing someone criticise some performance of Mozart or Beethoven by saying, "You don't play Mozart (or Beethoven) using rubato. They are not Chopin". But do we really know that? Maybe Chopin heard some virtuoso playing Beethoven with rubato, and was inspired to compose making rubato a big part of his personal vision.

'Mozart and Beethoven aren't Chopin'. Nice to have my suspicions confirmed, given the difficulty I've been experiencing in contacting the parties concerned.

[richardfinegold]

Mannered, in this context, means labouring to create a particular effect or effects that sound artificially achieved, affected, contrived and unnatural.

For example, where someone like Schiff can hint at an effect like left-hand before right-hand, and do so sparingly to achieve interesting variety, here we have Koch making a Big Thing of using this halting technique ten times within the opening eighteen bars of D.960. It’s an almost arpeggiated effect in bar 4 beat 4 and b5 bt1, where the > is given a longish tenuto. B7 bt1-2 unmarked rallentando. B15 ugly overemphasis of bass line G, G flat, F, the F being played like a grace note exactly a semiquaver before the beat.

There may be genuine performance practice reasons for this style of playing Schubert piano music; all I’m saying is that I don’t like it.

Having listened to the offending passage on Qobuz, I have to agree with Keraulophone, and the rest of the movement has some odd rubato choices as well. I get Jayne’s point about how new recordings really should have something new to say, and the instrument has a nice timbre, but term “stutter” kept coming to mind...but welcome back jlw, I’ve been listening to some of the Skollatas that you championed.

[jayne lee wilson]

At 31'37 for the first movement, one might imagine there to be a great deal more going on in this d960 than the emphasis on a few details in its first few bars...
Not least the starkly dramatic and dynamic leadback to the repeat. Or the extreme intensity of sonic remoteness in the second subject... the ethereally soft, distant una corda phrase just before the development.
This is truly Great Art and truly new. A challenge to the coming-to-terms.

Koch's reading - his playing - is an act of the deepest listening, a musical analysis on the wing, laid out, stretching out before us, to make of it what we will.
A listener familiar with the work who quickly reacts against this performance might attempt a form of mindfulness: submitting to, immersing herself in, the moment-to-moment; dwelling upon and within the intense textural and dynamic detail; inhabiting the great architectural span of this presentation, clearing the mind of its impatient, almost inescapable rush to - react, compare, criticise and dismiss. Breathing long and deeply to allow the verbal chatter to subside.

This seems to me to speak to the most profound, contemplative essences of Schubert's Piano Music. Then consider the album title: ZUKUNFTMUSIK.

If it achieved nothing else, this approach would have the considerable benefit of revealing previously favoured recordings in a new light - refreshed by the defamiliarisation. But you would need to dwell long upon the one, to reveal its impact upon the other...

[Dave2002]

Mannered, in this context, means labouring to create a particular effect or effects that sound artificially achieved, affected, contrived and unnatural.

I’m going to pick up on “unnatural”. Playing music at all is probably unnatural, and certainly using instruments such as violins and pianos is. They grow on trees you know.

I think you wanted it to mean something like “not in an accepted or approved style”, but who decides what is accepted or approved?

I haven’t heard the musical passage which seems to have triggered this comment, and you may well be right, but words like “unnatural” are not always helpful unless others share the same set of semantic associations.

[kernelbogey]

Welcome back. Jayne .

[LMcD]

At 31'37 for the first movement, one might imagine there to be a great deal more going on in this d960 than the emphasis on a few details in its first few bars...
Not least the starkly dramatic and dynamic leadback to the repeat. Or the extreme intensity of sonic remoteness in the second subject... the ethereally soft, distant una corda phrase just before the development.
This is truly Great Art and truly new. A challenge to the coming-to-terms.

Koch's reading - his playing - is an act of the deepest listening, a musical analysis on the wing, laid out, stretching out before us, to make of it what we will.
A listener familiar with the work who quickly reacts against this performance might attempt a form of mindfulness: submitting to, immersing herself in, the moment-to-moment; dwelling upon and within the intense textural and dynamic detail; inhabiting the great architectural span of this presentation, clearing the mind of its impatient, almost inescapable rush to - react, compare, criticise and dismiss. Breathing long and deeply to allow the verbal chatter to subside.

This seems to me to speak to the most profound, contemplative essences of Schubert's Piano Music. Then consider the album title: ZUKUNFTMUSIK.

If it achieved nothing else, this approach would have the considerable benefit of revealing previously favoured recordings in a new light - refreshed by the defamiliarisation. But you would need to dwell long upon the one, to reveal its impact upon the other...

'defamiliarisation'
'contemplative essences'.

I'm going to return my degree diploma and sue Southampton University on the grounds that they obviously sent out into the world with a grossly inadequate vocabulary and absolutely no feeling for music or indeed any serious subject-matter.
Perhaps I should get in touch with an administrator to discuss the possibility of changing my on-screen name to Redbrick Lowbrow.

[kernelbogey]

So the camera in the basement wasn't working that day...?

Nick, I hope you will abandon the DSCH avatar and reveal your true self....

[Keraulophone]

At 31'37 for the first movement, one might imagine there to be a great deal more going on in this d960 than the emphasis on a few details in its first few bars...

If nothing else, I'm so glad that my initial reaction to Koch's Schubert has brought forth the kind of deeply considered, passionately expounded and elegantly written responses this forum has been missing from jayne.

31'37 - seven minutes longer than Richter (studio, 1972)! Clearly, I was using just the opening bars as a brief illustration; there's certainly a lot more to discuss. I will listen some more and try to come to terms with those 'mannerisms' that worried me so much.

When I (try to) play these pieces to myself on my Bösendorfer (never intended for public consumption) it's possible to get up to all sorts of exaggerations and unstylistic japes just for the fun of it, depending on how many flat whites one has had. In fact, it's my main retirement passtime! Of course, the colours offered by that Graf are unavailable, but one can get pretty close in one's own private world to what Schubert is saying. 'The Music of the Future'? Arguably, though Clara Schumann's father applied that term to the more obvious candidates Liszt and Wagner.

[Keraulophone]

words like “unnatural” are not always helpful unless others share the same set of semantic associations.

Yes, you have alighted on the one synonym that doesn't really help here. The others mentioned are more apt IMV, eg the pianist has over-used a particular effect resulting in playing that sounds contrived.