@@DavesClassicalGuide Likewise. I like them both as well. Was listening to Harnoncourt's version of Dvorak's 9th just last night. As you've said, they both had personality, and both articulated a strong and potent artistic vision in their vivid interpretations.
Brüggen takes 13:01 (CD booklet) or 12:51 (Spotify), and Harnoncourt 13:33 -- not VERY different from the other HIP. They are very different, and I often like Brüggen and rarely Harnoncourt.
@@classicalemotion -- This was a year ago and I don't even remember which work was referred to. I'm definitely not going to watch the video again. All I can say is that (1) it's highly unlikely that any version has been accelerated or slowed (2) there are a few works that Brüggen recorded more than once (3) timings sometimes include the silence before and/or after the actual music, so that even reissues of the same recording can differ in timings.
Thank you for this stimulating talk. I was wondering, is it just the HIP thing which causes the speeding up of classical music? Or is it also a fenomenon of our time. People find it difficult to sit and just listen for 70 minutes to Beethoven's ninth. A modern recording of it gives you the opportunity to read 10 extra minutes of silly Facebook messages. The next challenge will be to play Brrucknerr's 8th in 45 minutes.
Great talk and very interesting to see the range. What struck me is: why would people expect Beethoven or any composer-were they able to see future developments in instrument design, acoustics, let alone recording-to say “nope! My music can only be played one way!” In other musics, this doesn’t happen. Jazz is based on varied interpretations of standard songs and new tones and sounds. Popular music abounds with imaginative covers. Dylan is renowned for never playing his songs the same way twice. Remix and sampling culture underlies hip hop and other popular music. Can you imagine Hoagy Carmichael saying “that’s not how Stardust goes!”?!? Why would a genius like Beethoven not be open to new sounds and ideas, once he got up to speed on them? And honestly, who cares if he wouldn’t like it, if we listeners do 200 years later?
It is entirely unnecessary and irrelevant to compare classical music tempi with pop. Any truly good composer knows that his music can be played in different ways. A good piece has many aspects which cannot be brought-out together in the same performance, some performances will highlight a certain aspect of the music, another performance another aspect. Instructive in this respect is a story about Brahms: recorded is the occasion that a string quartet ensemble played one of his quartets for him in Vienna. Afterwards, asked for his opinion, he said: 'Yes, that is very good, it's beautiful. Last week there was here another quartet playing the same piece and they did it very, very differently from you. And that was also very good and beautiful.' Knowing this, Brahms notated his scores with only general indications, hoping on the understanding and musicality of his performers, and knowing that different players would bring-out different aspects. That is the richness of good music: it is more than it can sound. On the other end of the scale was Mahler who filled his scores with numerous instructions and encouragements, thinking of the sloppy playing of his time. They cannot be taken seriously, because then one is exaggerating grotesquely.
…you've almost convinced me Dave... especially at the end of your talk (what a performance! Bravo !) I still need your talk about HIP guys trips to music from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. With examples! Cheers from Poland!
OK. I an surprised that the best taped performance that I have heard of Schubert's Eighth Symphony was by the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by none other than Trevor Pinnock. Trevor Pinnock? No, there are no 'vinegary strings' and no unconventional "historical touches". It is slightly swift, but he gets the sonorities of the modern orchestra well.
Orthodoxy and conformism in the arts is always lethal, as is fear to be 'academically wrong' - academics are not musicians; apart from exceptions, they mostly are the gynaecologists of music and not the lovers. And then, Beethoven has probably read the metronome numbers at the wrong side of the little block, so everything seems to be faster than he thought it should be. It was a new invention, and people were not as yet used to it. When you read that Beethoven was, physically speaking, clumsy, distracted, disordered, kicking his ink pot in the piano, forgetting to empty his chamber pot, unintentionally breaking the fragile 18C furniture in his house, why should we think that he was perfectly precise and accomplished with a new mechanical timing device? Another thing: tempo is dependent upon so many different factors that it is impossible to fix it in the score: the size and acoustics of the hall, the nature of the orchestra: the type of players, and whether the music is played in the morning or in the evening, etc. etc. Then: duration is something different from length: a piece can be played slowly but with such a continuity (which is an expressive quality) that it sounds much flowing, and it can be played much quicker but lacking this continuity and it will sound slow. Wagner also wanted to fix his tempi in the scores, but later-on he heard one of his operas played in the wrong tempo and when he spoke with the conductor he found-out that his directions had been observed very precisely. He concluded that tempo is something flexible and from that moment onwards only gave very general, expressive indications. It is a subjective art form thus it should not be subjected to attempts to objectify it. The inner life of the music is something different from clock time. - The best contribution of HIP is, to my feeling, the clarity it brought to the textures. But there was always enough clarity in the traditional, truly good recordings.
Hi there Dave. Recently I’ve been listening to Gabrieli in Venice 1615, sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, with the late much missed Sur Stephen Cleobury, conducting. One of the works on the disc, is Gabrieli’s Magnificat à 14. Such a fabulous, wondrous work. I would really like it if you could have a chat about this particular work, and how Gabrieli came to compose such a piece, in one of your Music Chats. Thank you.
Is period performance practice killing the classics? No, it's definitely not. As long as one accepts both approaches. In fact, historical performance practice is not a historical approach, but a new one, based on some historical facts. But, this new approach has opened up many alternative and interesting perspectives. I am very grateful for that. And these new perspectives in turn have inspired many other interpreters, also outside of historical performance practice.
And here's the proof that historical performance practice is not killing classical music: Historical performance practice has been around for at least 58 years (in fact much longer!). Back then, the first recording of the Brandenburg Concertos was made by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his Concentus Musicus ensemble on period instruments (published in 1963). But classical music is not dead, 58 years were not enough to kill it! On the contrary! Classical music is alive and more diverse, more interesting and more inspiring than ever!
That is not proof. 58 years ago historical performance was fresh and different. We accepted it as such. Now it's as stale as week old bread, and the question I am asking is: 58 years on, how capable is of remaining fresh? What is there about it that will still surprise us? The answer is: nothing, or damn little. Of course classical music isn't "dead." That's a figure of speech. What it is becoming, increasingly, is either boring or stupid.
Es como dijo Mahler alguna vez: "Si, después de mi muerte, algo no suena bien, cambiadlo. Tenéis no sólo el derecho sino también un deber de hacerlo". Yo creo que no hablaba solamente de sus sinfonías per se, si no que también hablaba de los trabajos de los otros compositores anteriores y posteriores a el.
I think the Beethoven Ninth is a poor choice as case in point for historically informed practice; it's pretty late in music history to be applying those principles, and the wrong piece. A much better choice would be the Mozart piano concertos. These are my favorite pieces, and all of my favorite accounts of them are either played on period instruments or by modern ensembles doing historically informed performances. And I have not found it to be true that these performances are interpretively homogenous. There's a wide range. For example, Andreas Staier interprets Mozart's Ninth Piano Concerto as a more serious-minded work by a mature artist, where Levin and especially Sofrontisky interpret it more as a free spirited adolescent piece. Or take Levin's incredible performance of the Twenty-Sixth concerto, full of improvisations that fill out Mozart's incomplete score and reveal a masterpiece, where most performances make the Twenty-Sixth sound like a second-rate Mozart concerto. There are bad HIP records but there are great ones, too. Baroque music and high Classicism make much more sense to me when played the HIP way.
Yes, but that doesn't make the Ninth an inappropriate example because it's an iconic work that these people are playing and recording and telling us they are doing it the "right" way. I have no problem with other repertoire that may not suffer from the same sort of stifling conformity, but I suspect that if you were talking about symphonies, rather than concertos, even Mozart's, the conversation would be rather different.
@@TheOssia no. 5: Levin, Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music - Cavé, Alessandrini, Divertissement nos. 6 and 8: Zitterbart, Schlierbacher Kammerorchester, Fey no. 7, Concerto for Three Pianos: Brautigam, Haydn Sinfonietta Vienna, Huss no. 9: Andsnes, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra - Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood - Staier, Concerto Köln no. 10, Concerto for Two Pianos: Immerseel, Kaneko, Anima Eterna nos. 11 - 13: Bezuidenhout, Freiburger Barockorchester - Schiff, Vegh, Camerata Academic Salzburg, on "Salzburger Mozart-Matineen," a live album no. 14: Brautigam, Die Kölner Akademie, Willens - Pires, Vienna Philharmonic, Abbado - Bilson, Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists no. 15: Levin, Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music no. 16: Levin, Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music no. 17: Staier, Concerto Koln - Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood no. 18: Barenboim, Berlin Philharmonic no. 19: Staier, Concerto Koln no. 20: Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood - Perahia, English Chamber Orchestra no. 21: Brautigam, Die Kölner Akademie, Willens no. 22: Brendel, Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Angerer no. 23: Buchbinder, Concentus Musicus Wien, Harnoncourt - Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood - Vogt, Mozartean Orchester Salzburg, Bolton no. 24: Goode, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra no. 25: Zacharias, Laussane Chamber Orchestra - Buchbinder, Concentus Musicus Wien, Harnoncourt no. 26: Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood no. 27: Staier, Freiburger Barockorchester, der Goltz - Perahia, English Chamber Orchestra
@@DavesClassicalGuide Obviously, Handel's concerti grossi and organ concerti are themselves 'iconic' works, too. I have yet to be convinced that period instruments do anything good for Mozart symphonies. Performance on modern instruments has evolved to discover great richness of sonority independent of instrument choice. This said, I have heard Chopin piano concertos played with accompaniment by a period-instrument orchestra, and that seems to have removed the infamous eccentricity of sound. It could be that Poland, or at the least the Russian-occupied section, was slow to get the modern instruments that we usually take for granted. Chopin made his piano concertos fit his idea of what an orchestra of his time and place sounded like. The piano is modern and the orchestra isn't. It seemed to work.
I think you are preaching to the choir on this one. More experienced listeners will be inclined to agree with you. What passes for “personality” nowadays is usually someone trying to be “radical” or overtly different for the sake of being different. That is nothing more than low hanging fruit. Playing the Mozart Symphonies with a piano quintet and using a zither as a continuo (I hate to put ideas in someone’s head) is not “radical”, it’s novelty. It certainly is not “personality” or “imagination”. HIP can be a nice change of pace-now and then. Unfortunately, it often takes itself far too seriously and becomes cold, clinical and cloned. While there are exceptions, it is becoming a bit tedious. It starts to take on an assembly line feel. More than once, I have test streamed more than one performance only to drop my head in defeatist fashion thinking, “Oh, dear. Here we go again.” The younger or newer listeners, for the most part, have not developed their aural paletes enough to know better or care. But what I really think is injuring the classical music scene is how it is one of the few music genres left where the listener desires hard media copies of what they like and it is getting more and more difficult to obtain any of it. Why are the labels holding onto this stuff? They certainly aren’t raking in the cash from streaming services. COVID has really put a dent into live show attendance. As I have noted before, they have made their money back tenfold on many of the older recordings and instead of pricing the stuff to sell and marketing things to entice younger listeners to give it a go and older collectors a chance to hoard their wares, they sit on it. Why? With such a practice, what is the future of these recordings and the industry? Will they all just fall into obscurity or drown in the ocean of options on streaming services? I have never been convinced the labels care about their listeners, especially when they drop a new set of Beethoven Sonatas at $50-60 bucks on a format which has lost a lot of interest among the general populace but still maintains loyalty among the classical music listening community. If they really believe otherwise, those new sets would be a lot cheaper. But they price them as such because we are desperate and dumb enough to pay such prices. Seriously, many of us are still willing to buy another set of Mozart’s Symphonies-to go along with the 4 or 5 we already have. Aside from Jazz (which is really in the tank), no other genre has that type of devotion among their customers and, oddly, the industry still can’t exploit it in a way to profit from it. I think it’s because they have an overinflated sense of self-worth and are also a bit lazy. Personally, I would be dropping the Heifetz, Gould and Rubenstien recordings in cardboard gatefold sleeves with the original Lp cover art at $3.99-4.99 a pop. The same with Szell’s Beethoven, Bernstein’s Mahler cycle and the like. There is no way I would release another box set of classical standards for more than $30. I just purchased the latest set of Buchbinder’s Beethoven Sonata cycle on DG for $22. No matter how much I may end up enjoying it, anything more $22 is like wiping before you poop, it doesn’t make any sense. Not when I already have Schnabel’s, Jando’s, Kovacevich’s, Buchbinder’s first set and others. Igor Levit’s much lauded set will run me $40 and I have no interest. I can just stream it until Sony comes to their senses. Obviously, my disinterest isn’t an indictment of his performance, it’s just I don’t think with what I already have-$40 just doesn’t seem to be a practical purchase. For about the same price, I can get the Kovacevich and the RCA Buchbinder cycles and I have a feeling, I will be pretty satisfied. Entice people to feel as if they have nothing to lose. As a matter of fact, CDs are getting some renewed interest. It seems like the Lp craze has died down a bit and the younger people are looking for old CDs and cassettes. Odd-but true. Now would be a good time for the labels to inject some life into their CD sales and generate some interest in the classics. Maybe I am all wet. But I also have a previous history of being able to sell customers $150-200 worth of classical CDs every time they walked into the Broders I worked at here in redneck Oklahoma City. I wasn’t able to do so because I didn’t know what they wanted. But I didn’t write this to toot my own horn. Bragging about my classical music sales ability in 2022 is like bragging about being the smartest fry cook at McDonalds. Nobody really cares. But when the industry shows no interest in developing a new legacy of collectors by broadening their customer base to appeal to a younger generation and far too many great recordings are collecting dust in their vaults for no real reasons other than stupidity or greed, I do have a genuine concern how within another 3 or 4 years, I won’t be able to get my hands on much and the demand for classical on streaming services will dwindle to a point where these services will just “trim the fat” and drop many great recordings. It's already happening.
You are spot-on about how awful so many “original instrument” recordings sound-as you rightly point out, instrument makers changed the way they made instruments for a reason. I don’t agree that adherence to metronome markings is intrinsic only to “period performances” (it makes sense that if a composer bothered to indicate a tempo, we ought to at least give it serious consideration); what flabbergasts me is why pieces of Baroque Classical music that don’t have any metronome markings have all gotten faster and faster over the past few decades, as if someone discovered a hitherto-unknown manuscript source that said, “Whatever tempo you’ve been playing this music at, it should go much faster.” (Although I must also confess that I vastly prefer Gardiner’s tempo for the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth over Bernstein’s first NYPhil recording, which sounds grossly bloated and sluggish by comparison.) My bigger complaint with the period performance crowd is that they have made Baroque music the sole property of “specialists,” a niche attraction. For many decades, symphony concerts would open with a selection by Bach or Handel or Vivaldi, played by the full orchestra, and all concertgoers heard at least portions of that repertoire regularly. Now if you want to hear their music, you have to go to a concert by an “original instruments” ensemble. Conductor James Conlon once told me that he had given up programming any Baroque music because of the backlash from the authenticity fanatics, and said, “When they talk about music, it’s like they’re quoting scripture.” As far back as a July 1979 article in High Fidelity, musicologist Paul Henry Lang anticipated your remarks when he wrote, “the dissemination of scholarly theories and doctrines, salutary and enlarging in itself, now threatens artistic freedom. What was first a discovery and then an exuberance is now becoming a deadening orthodoxy.” That was 45 years ago, and he was right.
But do we REALLY need more recordings of the 9th? Hundreds of recordings of this work exist, many of them stupendously wonderful. What more could possibly be done to make this music seem fresh and new, imbue upon it some alluring interpretive twist that makes it even more important to the history of music than it already is? My view of events is that conductors are grasping at straws, albeit in a calculated way, to attempt to do exactly this - to breathe new life into something that has already been done to death. Clearly with mixed results. Nothing wrong with the 9th, it's magnificent music. I just think all this effort would be better spent exploring other music, old and new.
As a composer and musician I think that the musicians goal should be to breathe life into the music not trying to be different. To make a connection with the audience and experience and enjoy the music together. Originality comes while playing: the score, the room and mood will guide the musicians to an interpretation of that moment. The next evening might be different. I use software for composing but I don't expect musicians to play like a computer, their interpretations might surprise me and reveal things I did not realise myself. Somehow I get the feeling that many scholars and interpreters are drifting away from the music into an abstract realm of empty discussion only to prove their point. Then it is about ego and not the music. The score is important and a guideline for the musicians but the terms are indicators and one tempo indication should relate to the other movements. Like David said, an adagio is still an adagio and should not be faster than a scherzo, that is not how they relate to each other. e.g. when it says: adagio molto e cantabile, how can you sing while you are racing through the score, why ignore the word Molto? If the adagio is taken as a reference for the other tempi, how fast should the molto vivace and presto be, it stops being and music and just trying to reproduce notes. There is one question I like to raise: we all agree that the level of playing nowadays is much better than in the 19th century, the instruments were less sonorous so how can it be defended that music should be played faster? Lesser players tend to play slower not faster, less sonorous instruments take more time to create a tone. Well, just my two euro cents... let's keep on listening and keep our clothes on on camera :)
People keep making new recordings of the Beethoven symphonies to make money off them. We don't NEED new recordings (even though we should have frequent concert performances of them).
The Adagio of the 9th consists of 157 measures, 121 of which are in 4/4 @60 beats per second, 36 of which are in 3/4 @63 bps - a distinction without a difference. Which means that if you were to perform the movement rigidly in tempo per the metronome marks, the movement would last about 10 minutes. Even ole Roger Norrington/LCP needs about 11. So much for unquestioning reliance on LvB's metronome markings.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Actually, to be more exact: the music switches to 12/8 for the later variations, but since it's marked L'istesso tempo, the dotted quarter presumably maintains the initial pulse of 4 beats per measure @60. I agree that the metronome marks often pose problems, such as the trio of the scherzo and the tenor solo in this symphony. But I don't think they should be discounted either at least as guidelines. Michael Steinberg in his book on the Symphony notes that often conductors used to take the adagio at about quarter=40, and he defends q=60 on the grounds that the piece will flow more effectively if thought of as 2 beats per measure (i.e., half=30) rather than four. I like it a bit on the faster side myself, but when I checked Harnoncourt/COE (not a set I much like on the whole, especially his sludgy Pastorale) where the adagio of The Ninth is one of my favorite things he does for its seamless flow, I found it clocked in at 13:34!
This is outside the scope of your piece, but I have a particular gripe about excessive speeds in the Brandenburgs. The earlier English Concert discs under Pinnock might have had slightly scratchy playing at times but the tempi were wonderful: enough zip to keep it moving but sufficiently steady to allow the harmonic and contrapuntal movement to come through. Newer recordings play these works way way too fast, sometimes so fast that that players can't actually keep up. And this destroys that hamonic movement and lovely bounce, all the tension and release and interplay are ruined when it's just head down and get to the end as quickly as possible. It's so unmusical (and inauthentic, surely) just to go super fast because it's more or less possible.
@@paulcaswell2813 Okay, that was an off-the-cuff comment about the playing standards in the relatively early days of the period performance movement. Reviews of the later Pinnock version make reference to the playing on his earlier set. I love the earlier set, I love period performances where they're musical, I have nothing against the principle or practice of period performance. I just don't like excessive tempos in the Brandengburgs.
It absolutely does my head in listening to thin sounds that don't have any quality, but (as you said) end up being played very fast to try to get around these horrors. Every now and then a really good chamber orchestra carries it off, but regrettably the general standard is dreadful. There is a very obvious reason why orchestras changed - because they improved by updating their instruments and technique. Modern playing is fine for older music: really, it is!
Concerning Beecham's "Messiah", the following has been said: - Beecham's 1959 Messiah for RCA Victor - his third recording of the piece in 30 years - has proved virtually impervious to the onslaught of authentic instrument and period performing-style recordings of the piece that have overwhelmed the available field of recordings in the decades since, even though it breaks all of the "rules" that have been handed down by Baroque scholars. Beecham commissioned a new edition of the 18th century piece by Leon Goossens, which updated the scoring and added harps and other instruments never indicated in the composer's score, and had the temerity, in his notes for the recording, to address this issue of authenticity. He was forthright in explaining why it was necessary to make adjustments for modern ears and audiences, in part by explaining how alterations were made in the 200 years leading up to his recording. In his 1947 recording, he sought to strip the piece of many of its Victorian embellishments, but had found, for logical reasons, that it was impossible to perform a "Messiah" that was both historically correct and suited to modern concert halls and modern listeners' sensibilities. He did attempt to restore some balance and some sense of logic to the modernizations, however, and, in the bargain, also engaged the singer Jon Vickers at the very outset of his career. The album, since reissued as a triple CD, has proved perennially popular and remains in print more than four decades later, and was the culmination of his service in the popularization of Handel's music.
Thanks for the interest insights as always David. I assume that the implication of your theory is that these 'cooker-cutter' period performances tend to defeat serious musical criticism, where it attempts to differentiate one performance from another? Bad news for critics, I guess, seeking to provide a report on the interpretative nuances that they find in recording A when compared against recording B. It would also be interesting to hear the opposing point of view.
i remember in the 60- 70 years ,when i start to listen music,some major label put the ninth on one lp ( cluytens fricsay etc ).....with slow movement cut in two....so when you returning the lp you have a ''pause'' of may be 20-30 second....i wonder what beethoven tell if he know that.....of course some orther label put ninth on two lp generaly with the symphonies no 8....so the cd resolve anything....!ouf...!
Dave. I am very fond of the leinsdorf ninth with the Boston symphony not only because as a college student in Boston at the time of the recording but as an usher at symphony hall leinsdorf invited me to attend the recording sessions. What an impression that made upon me. But setting that aside I really think it is a great performance without personal pregiduce. For proof I recently had a car radio experience where this performance was being played and I had to wait to hear who the performance was by. You guessed it. It was leinsdorf. BTW the Boston symphony hall acoustics contributed!
I have Haydn complete symphonies by Dorati and Fischer which I consider traditional. I have also been collecting the new Haydn 2032 project by Antonini which is more period. I like all of these for different reasons. I never paid attention to timings, I will have to start doing that! The new Antonini's sound more lively to me, perhaps it is the timings? hmmmm...
Could I offer a unique and personal take on the different ways of handling the third movement of Beethoven 9? I would like to copy and paste some of my comments on one of Lebrecht's Beethoven 9 blog posts from 2020. I would like to make the point that the movement shares a family likeness with its counterpart in the Pathetique sonata. There are leads to guide and shape the performance of the Ninth slow movement. "In the slow third movement, we are used to hearing conductors draw it out in making it more meditative. The main theme of this movement is a common-time Adagio, and Beethoven sets the speed at 60 crotchets, which is much faster than we are used to hearing it. In this movement, it might be good if we remember the slow movement of the Pathetique sonata. Its main theme is akin to the main theme of the slow movement [an Adagio cantabile in 2/4 time].. It would be good if the slow movement of the Choral could go at a similar speed. Though this is a common time movement, most of the melody notes are in minims. This gives us the clue to beat the bar in two here. The metronome speed can now be 30 minims and you need not feel rushed when you are counting the tactus in larger units." Honeck, Harnoncourt and Chailly proved this point eloquently in their recordings of the symphony. I'll add a few more things to my comment. The movement is in theme and variation structure. In most recordings, the successive variations get slower and slower. However, in the period practice versions, the variations are taken at the same tempi as the original theme, except when conductors broaden the tempi slightly for the 12/8 variation. Also, each variation has "Stesso tempo" over their first bar. In this approach, the variations can be like ornamentations to the theme.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Many of today's conductors, and ensembles, adhering to a bogus historical "orthodoxy," have resulted in performances without character, without the distinctive profiles of the great conductors of previous generations. The thrust of your talk explains why many of us record collectors tend to steer clear of the latest recordings of standard orchestral repertoire, preferring the "big names" of the past. THe joy of comparative listening requires makred differences of approach to that repertoire. Klemperer and Walter were of the same generation, both disciples of Mahler, but how different are their respective Beethoven cycles. You'd never confuse one with the either, or either with, say, Toscanini or Scherchen. And the trend to interpretive conformism also explains why some collectors delight in hearing recordings in antiquated sonics, with inferior ensembles, if the conductor (or soloist) has a unique point of view like no other. Yes, as you have pointed out many times, one really needs tight ensemble playing and modern sonics to fully appreciate a great orchestral work. Granted. Why, then, would I take one of Toscanini's Beethoven cycles ot the proverbial desert island over Chailly or Gielen, fine conductors though they are? I wonder, though if your point applies to trends among contemporary instrumentalists. We do live in an age of truly great pieanists, and they do have distinctive interpetive profiles.
Regarding soloists, I agree. We have some amazing artists out there, and the personal approach is alive and well. Perhaps that is why, as another commentator mentioned, concerto recordings on period instruments tend to be more satisfying.
Off topic: I would love to hear Gardiner and his band doing any Bach Cantata anywhere near to me! Which of course doesn't say anything about his Beethoven. But as people in East Germany use to say: "Not everything was bad alltogether" ;-)
Beethoven's metronome markings (or anybody's, really) are just a guidepost. In the end, musical time is not absolutely quantifiable. A performance that lasts 15 minutes and is exciting may seem faster than one that lasts 12 minutes but does not connect with the listener. To me, it's not so much about freedom of interpretation or imagination. It's about being tuned in to the actual sounds that one hears and ensuring that the sounds connect to each other in a convincing, compelling way. It will not - cannot - be the same every time, because every note depends on every note that proceeds it. Years ago, I bought the Peters Edition of Schoenberg's 5 Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. The score had a loose-leaf insert with metronome markings for the various sections of the 5 pieces as indicated in various sources and published editions. The interesting thing is how wildly the tempo markings varied between the autograph (1909), the 1st edition, the 2nd edition (1922, I think), and various subsequent editions including a revised, reduced orchestration (1949). The lesson I learned from this is that tempo is extremely hard to nail down.
I think that Beethoven's metronome indications (like all other things in the scores) reflect the composer's will. What else? Who among us has the right to judge what is subjective or relative in Beethoven's scores and what is not? Then one is also allowed to rearrange and shorten movements, change the instrumentation, adjust the dynamics, etc.
@@ralphschwarz4919 I have the right to do so, and so do you. If you choose to abdicate responsibility for using aesthetic judgement as an interpreter or performer on some or all issues of performance, that is certainly also your right.
Just make a pool from fresh young new coming classical listeners (but already exposed to both traditional and HIP approaches) and see which they prefer. From my observation the majority prefer HIP approach. The trend is that the interpretation range get narrower and different with time, this happen not only with symphonic work (the 9) but also with violinists, pianists as well. You might prefer the old time, but that is NOT necessary a right argument for old-is-better. I'm not convinced.
They're works of art, thus ideally suited to freedom of expression and interpretation, not scientific experiences carried inside a particle collider. The more you narrow down the interpretative scope and make people adhere ideologically to rigid and arbitrary principles, the less freedom you get. In point of fact, you get the very society we live in now. Some people believe this is better, I don't. You should read Paul Eluard. "J'écris ton nom... LIBERTE"
I probably qualify as a younger listener (late 30s) by the standards of classical music listeners, but count me as someone who thinks more moderate tempi and bigger orchestral sounds usually work better for Beethoven.
Good reason exists to listen to old recordings. Even if one is convinced of more modern performance techniques it is good to know what preceded those. Guess what? Reiner, Szell, Klemperer, and Bohm are still worthy of attention even if they were born in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Maybe the period cultists would do some service if they tried to be as individual as the old-timers of the pre-digital stereo or even monaural (Toscanini) world.
I don't think the question is a matter of old vs. new. Old performances can be dull or dreadful as much as new ones, HIP ones, can be fantastic, insightful, and great. I'm not surprised that many new listeners enjoy and prefer the HIP approach, it matches much of contemporary taste - sharp, clean, fast, short. The question is about whether this is better because it's more authentic. One might not like Klemperer's approach, which is fine, but to claim one dislikes it, or that it's not good, because it's less authentic is a problem. I think the current HIP approach isn't really about historical accuracy at all: it's become a style of interpretation, and I think it could help itself by letting go of the need to justify itself by recourse to what's supposed to be historical evidence. I really don't care whether a performance is "historically" accurate. I want to hear inspired music-making, and I think that's what Mr. Hurwitz's channel is all about. Unfortunately, and I think this is much of his point, when I see that something is HIP inspired, I hesitate, but listen out of curiosity, and often (not always) find the same old same old. Performances of the past can certainly be this way also.
@@stanleymurashige7766 But DH theory is that HIP Beethoven is killing interpretation freedom. I beg to differ. There are no less variety. One should not look at the tempo only, but the orchestral colors, accents, rhythmic variation, and I think there is equal room for interpretation in HIP than in the past traditional big band Beethoven. Some great conductors also change their way of playing Beethoven, from traditional to HIP influence approach: Blomstedt, Haitink, Chailly, Abbado. Why they are doing that if HIP influence is a dead end as David pretend to be?
Haha ... I pulled out the last , precious, ALDI Christmas dessert leftover before settling in to watch this one. Love a man with a real opinion to air. Edit: I almost dropped my dessert at the end
There are some original instrument conductors, such as Trevor Pinnock, who I have a lot of respect for. He, I think is brilliant. There are others, like Marc Minkowski, who I think is just a joke. And others in between, and some who are good at times, and at other times not so good - in other words they're inconsistent. As far as tempo, there are some conductors in the original instrument group that take EVERYTHING way too fast, regardless of what is marked in the score. They think everything is marked "Molto prestissimo con fuoco." It just ruins things.
I find academia a double-edged sward, generally. On the one hand, it facilitates education, which is obviously a good thing; on the other, it often becomes self-serving and elitist. And I guess that's also true in the realm of music scholarship.
"Do we really want to talk about authenticity any more? I had hoped that a consensus was forming that to use the word in connection with the performance of music, and especially to define a style, manner or philosophy of performance, is neither description nor critique but COMMERCIAL PROPAGANDA." Totally agree.
Well, I didn't see that coming. :) Anyway, that totalitarian approach to music while cancelling and putting down differing opinions somehow fits our modern society. A few weeks ago I watched an excerpt of Mariss Jansons rehearsing the Eroica with the Bavarian SO combined with interviews of the players, and one of them said "Well, of course nowadays you have to play it a little bit faster than we were used to a few years ago". That is a very sad statement, because that "Zeitgeist" argument should never be a valid legitimation to follow a cult without putting any thought into the musicmaking transcending the technical side of it. Something else that's perhaps an interesting factor: The metronome marking fetish is not only popular with the period instrument movement, but also in contemporary music. Artistic liberty and interpretative choice is just not very popular at the moment except for aleatoric music and free jazz. With New Music of the European tradition (since the serialists) you usually have very complicated scores with detailed instructions and indications down to every millisecond. It's not about interpreting music, it's about reproducing a certain sound as exactly as possible. So it's no wonder that people like Scherchen, Leibowitz and Gielen jumped the metronome fetish wagon just as eagerly as Gardiner and Norrington.
I like what you said. I am distrustful of all zeitgeist arguments. As far as I am concerned, zeitgeist is generated in the marketing departments of multinational corporations. It is harder to market performances which stray from an orthodoxy. It doesn't matter if that orthodoxy is genuine or well founded.
Pungent and provocative criticism enlivens a debate. This is why I enjoy David Hurwitz. Orthodoxy can be a tyrant. I am inspired to revisit Beethoven ninth and experience a range of interpretations. Delightful choice for the listener, and will make for lively debate among my friends who share an abiding interest in classical music. Astute listening. Open minds. Living apart from a deafening orthodoxy-and not only in the realm of music.
Decades ago, it was impossible to mistake one major orchestra and their conductors for another. The Beethoven or Brahms of Mengelberg's ACO, Furtwangler's VPO, Stokowski's Philadelphians, Toscanini's NBC or NYP, Beecham's LPO, Koussevitzsky's Bostonians were all vastly different and timings were only one part of it. Wasn't just the orchestras because when they guest conducted each other's ensembles they could even in a few rehearsals, change the character and sound of the band they were leading. You are right, there is simply no scope for such vastly different performances among the HIPsters today. That may have died with Harnoncourt.
It was emphasized in my music masters program that Historically-Informed Practice is very much a modernist phenomenon; that is, HIP is not really HIP, despite being very hip.
One mistake provokes the next: You can't play slowly with this wrong aesthetics. The strings would just sound wrong or even out of tune. But you must try to achieve some sort of reasonable relation between the movements. So, things are getting faster and faster. The main problem is that traditional conductors tried to make good performances, but the period people try to make correct performances. Just a few of them understand the difference and become good musicians again - as Harnoncourt. But most of them think to have the one and only truth - not in interpreting a work but in reading the notes. They seem to me as if one would not read Melville or Dostoevski but to spell them letter for letter, without sense, but very fast.
Worth noting that whilst New York Philharmonic Music Director, Mahler created a Bach/Mahler suite, where he interposed movements from the second suite into the third. He played the harpichord continuo. He also reorchestrated Schumann's symphonies and Beethoven's Ninth of course. Not for him, adherence to the score if he felt he could achieve a better experience for his audience. Let's have a recording of the Bach/Mmahler suite to show the period instrument orthodoxy.
@@DavesClassicalGuide David, Thanks I will look it out. It can go on the shelf nest to his arrangement of the Death and the Maiden Quartet for string orchetra. Any other obscure Mahler arrangements we should know about There is Die Drei Pintos of course.
the karajan 84' 9th adagio is possibly my all time favourite piece of music (as silly as such categorisations are), i wonder what you think of that version the fast adagios always drove me absolutely mad so this video is quite nice to hear
Where's the trigger warning for Male Frontal Nudity [24:51]? Regardless, another insightful, humorous, and passionate critique from a true go-to musical thinker.
And away we go with another curmudgeonly rant by the internet's most knowledgeable crank! And i say that with the deepest respect. And maybe a pinch of agreement.
David I love your channel and have been listening with huge enjoyment since 2020. However, on this one I think you have it wrong. For example, if you have listened to the Jordi savall recording you held up you'll know that it sounds like Beethoven rose from the dead and conducted it himself; the recording is absolutely blazing with life and, for me at any rate, knocks every other recording, traditional or HIP into a cocked hat. Carry on!
Hey, whatever floats your boat, but I do find comments such as this pretty silly. I get the enthusiasm, but musically speaking they are pretty meaningless.
For real conformity look at some of the countries now churning out classical musicians in large numbers: Japan, South Korea, and China. Do you see much room for rebelliousness in adult life there? That said, do classical musicians seem like rebels in any part of the world? Symphonic performance seems to be getting more egalitarian between cities. I can remember when a recording in North America outside of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago was suspect. Maybe Pittsburgh, maybe St. Louis. Aside from St. Louis there were no really good orchestra west of the Mississippi in the USA, and nothing really good in Canada. With all the fine orchestral players being churned out now (contrast the situation 120 years ago when Mahler despised the shabby play of orchestras of his time... musical training was not as good, and careers were shorter because about everyone was dying in his 50's). Better training with longer careers? I think we can hear the difference. Classical music is less elitist for music lovers than it once was, if only because people have recordings from which they can learn something about the music. I have my suspicion that the Berlin Philharmonic was one of the finest orchestras in the world around 1900. By current standards it was far short of the standard that one would expect of a 'minor orchestra.
Click-track music and dance beats have made classical musicians scared to say music was ever anything other than beat-beat-beat. People nowadays want to see the lineage backwards from contemporary ethics to a more primitive system; to demonstrate history's tread as a progression. So much music doesn't breathe at all these days, completely belying the composers' skill.
about the 9th...what blew me away about Toscanini's 1939 9th (apart from the utterly insane energy) was the fact that the first 3 movements took almost exactly the same time: 12.22/12.31/12.47 (Adagio!!!)... and I felt this really strongly. Quite an extraordinary performance.
I agree that conforming to a consensus in terms of tempi has made me wary of trying new recordings of many works, especially with Beethoven’s slow movements. My first purchased version of THE NINTH was Norrington’s, and ever since, I have enjoyed slower versions of the third movement. The exception to that for me is Järvi, who I think does the faster tempi with elan and style. On that note, though, I was encouraged to hear Simone Young’s Brahms recordings, which were more broad, intense and slower than sped up Brahms. She seems to be at least one conductor willing to buck a trend.
Jarvi has a fantastic chamber orchestra who bought into the vision, play with acuracy gusto and mastery of their instruents (unlike norrington), and still have a true sense of legato, shaping, phrasing, and line. If the approach was musicality first, ratherthan a replica of what the musicologists say these pieces sounded like at their first performances, it wouldn't be as grandiose of a problem. But alas it is.
Anything that stifles reasonable creativity and imagination in the interpretation of a piece of music seems abhorrent to me. That shocking final reveal will live with me for sometime. I'm going to seek counseling I so readily need now😆
One must absolutely try to find all available sources and clues from Beethovens own hand and from his circle. Regarding every aspect of performance practice. Not only finding them and reading them, but to truly understand them. Metronome markings included. When you have done that and if you for some reason don’t like the results, then do as you please. The anti HIP reasoning can turn out to be something of a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Is Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 best accompanied by a Steinway grand, because it sounds better? Because Monteverdi himself would absolutely have preferred that? Or should we rather perform all music using synthesis nowadays, because it represents the evolution of sound and is therefore inherently better? And yes, Savall’s Adagio comes of as a bit hurried, it certainly does.
It's not a slippery slope if musicians are musical, rather than witless academics, but in general I agree with you. The issue, always, comes down to a combination of intelligence, talent, and taste, doesn't it?
@@DavesClassicalGuide Well, to some extent definitely. But the general tendency in western art music is that composers write more and more explicit instructions in their scores, from say the early common practice period to our times. That is certainly true for marking tempos. 250 years ago they did some of that, but also took for granted that performers knew how to read between the lines. Customs and manners, all that. If you ignore that part of perfoming it gets,… poor somehow. That’s why you need a bit of academia from time to time. And reading period sources is very rewarding, hilarious at times.
@@harmoniaartificiosa Again, I don't disagree at all, but you have to read them correctly, without an agenda. Heaven knows I'm not opposed to scholarship, only bad scholarship, and so much of the kind I have read about performance practice is scandalously bad.
I imagine Mozart and Beethoven, if they could have conducted their work, might have played slow or fast depending on their mood of the day, and any metronome markings, in the case of Beethoven, be damned. Didn't Mahler say somewhere you could conduct his symphonies any way you liked?
This video makes me respect Daniel Barenboim even more as a conductor. 3rd movement from his Staatskapelle Berlin recording from 2000: 18:01. Live performance on Decca with the E-W Divan orchestra at the Proms in 2012: 16:43. Both are beautiful, lyrical, well shaped, and mean more than every single one of these cookie cutter HIP recordings.
This tendency has been catching on since the early 90s of the last century. But, what would I point out is not the suitability of this music approach to read the whole repertoire. Instead, the danger is to create a sort of "cancel culture" which affects the evaluation process of the public and music students as well ending up in a lack of conscious knowledge.
Can't believe no Bernard Michael O'Hanlon in the comments yet. 😢 😆 Surely your thesis is right. It's now decided there's a particular "right way" to perform these things, regimented with a long set of prescriptions, so it's become more homogenized and the range of interpretation is narrowed. And if someone doesn't play it the "right way" then they are Historically Uninformed and everyone gets to laugh at them and call them a philistine. Seems like the saturation of recordings of all the popular major works is part of the problem though. I mean really, if nobody recorded another Beethoven cycle, would it even matter very much? Live performance is another matter, of course, but there's already so many great recordings of these things in so many different styles, that the average listener doesn't really need a "new cycle" much. It's a problem for classical recording in general. All the most popular stuff is recorded to death already. And if someone like Currentzis tries to be "different" with this stuff, then Dave and others crap on them and call them a pretentious twat.😄 With all the recording saturation of the major works, it must be really hard to be different than what already exists and not also be bad.
It is hard to be "different" and not be bad, but then, who said it was supposed to be easy? The issue, of course, is whether or not the "difference" is there for its own sake or tells us something new and exciting about the work in question--whether it's merely a petulant manifestation of the performer's ego or the result of a personal recreative vision of the work. To say that I crap all over Currentzis is only half the story, for there are also versions that I will describe positively. The key is trying to explain the difference between the great and the garbage.
A few months ago I attended a subscription concert of the Minnesota Orchestra that included Beethoven's Ninth. The conductor Juraj Valcuha is not well known, but given it was Beethoven's Ninth I looked forward to the concert. Instead I heard the type of cookie cutter performance Mr. Hurwitz describes in this piece. A speedy underpowered first movement, and a quick moving relatively emotionless slow movement. I'm guessing that Mr. Valcuha felt he could not stray from what is now apparently the "only" way to conduct the piece. All in all it was a very unmemorable performance. I don't doubt that the historically informed type of performance can be memorable--the problem is as Mr. Hurwitz describes--they are all too predictable. Why should I purchase Jordi Savall's Beethoven when it will sound pretty much like Frans Bruggen's, John Gardiner's, etc? They may all have their strong points, but one is enough in my book.
One dingbat critic from one of the Vancouver newspapers stridently insisted that the Beethoven #9 third movement must be metronomic, and that it was not allowed to take any more than 11 minutes. What an insufferable butthead opinion...^^
Thanks so much for that, David! I wish I could give you NINE likes for that! I truly hope that the historically authentic Mafia will lose its grip on the musical world some day.
@@DavesClassicalGuide David, you get much more than levity from me. You get much appreciation for your critical analyses, recommendations and, yes, your sense of humor and entertaining ways.
It's such a shame that the world of classical music seems to be full of lukewarm conformists instead of genuinely interesting individual artists with their conspicuous style. Why is it that a well organized minority always gets to define what the rest of us should enjoy? First the Darmstadt people and now the so called historically informed performance movement. And there's no end in sight. Just a few months ago the Finnish Baroque Orchestra gave a performance of Sibelius's Lemminkäinen Suite, with gut strings and other period instruments. I don't know if they used vibrato, probably not. What next? Zippy Bruckner with gut strings, seashell horns, and clay flutes? Perhaps I shouldn't give anyone any ideas.
@@DavesClassicalGuide No I haven't. I'm aware of his recording of Bruckner's 5th with Tapiola Sinfonietta. Tapiola Sinfonietta is a splendid orchestra as such, and I go to their concerts on a somewhat regular basis, but I don't think the name of that orchestra should be used in a same sentence with Bruckner. Good to know that I shouldn't bother with rest of Venzago's Bruckner performances either.
That was a really thought-provoking video. It helped me think about folks like Currentzis, and also Adam Fischer in his recent Beethoven survey. You've spoken before of conductors trying so hard, often egotistically, to be different, even if it makes little musical sense. If one is constrained by a belief that authenticity demands adherence to some authoritative historical prescription, then one has to look elsewhere to express one's creative impulse. You'll try to find hitherto unheard nuances of dynamics, rhythm, sonority, etc. How can you be special, different, creative? If Beethoven's metronome marks tell you what the tempo must be, then what do you play around with? The irony of this is that an academic, purist adherence to the score then can produce sounds, phrasing, etc. that are not in the score, but you'll have to be able to justify your approach by some evidence-based argument. When thinking about the classical music tradition, I have come to bring some things I've learned from my study of pre-modern Chinese painting (I'm sorry, here I go, if you'll indulge me). In pre-modern Chinese aesthetics, fine art painting was much like a performance art. There were prescribed techiniques, developing traditions, schools of practice, etc. But ideally it was always understood that traditions and techniques were not absolute rules. They developed as a creative way to express a link between the past and present, and designed to be interpreted. Yes, you trained often by copying the past, but the point of painting was not to copy, but was to inhabit the rhythms of the past in yourself - a life-long task. As you grew, the tradition would live on in your painting, but not as a duplication of the past, but as a creative renewal of the past in the life of the present. The whole point was to make the tradition fully alive in you and in your present (and different) circumstances. There was a fundamental recognition that things always changed, that your present circumstances would be different. Writers on painting practice, repeatedly emphasized that if you simply did your best to follow the tradition and turn it into a set of rules to follow, then you painted something dead. And like art anywhere, much of the art was indeed dead. Tradition tended to become a tyrannical adherence to past masters, and traditions turned into absolute rules. So in the history of Chinese painting, there are far more dead, dull, boring paintings than there are great and inspiring ones, just as there can be in classical music performances. I see a parallel in what you're getting at in the classical music recording/performance world. Scholarship of the past is becoming a set of authoritative prescriptions, rather than rich food for inspiration (which is what it can be). To be truly "traditional" in Chinese painting ideally (not always in reality) was not to follow a bunch of rules, but to breathe life into painting during one's own time and community. It made no sense to try to recreate something that was long gone.
Interesting, your comparison with Chinese painting. I immediately think of icon painting (actually called icon writing) in the Christian Orthodox tradition. Strict adherence to rules, yet at the same time 'flexible response' to time and circimstances' of the moment the icon is being written.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Actually, thank YOU! Your talks are always inspiring (and great fun! Your grand finale in this video was a real shocker!). By the way, I really like your discussions of musical form - I'm a form junkie, too, but in art history. I'd be called a "formalist" in the field. Sadly, it's out of fashion for the most part these days.
Markevitch conducts it in 16:19. His interpretations of Beethoven's symphonies still sound as mint fresh and thoroughly engaging as they did when they were originally released, if not even more so. To be totally honest, all of them gave me more than a few jolts when I first heard them. Periody-historically informed versions, not so much. Markevitch gave us "Beethoven, A Musical Odyssey", with Beethoven playing the part of the alien force driving humanity towards creative, poetic, musical, philosophical and emotional progress. Periody folks gave us "Ears Wide Shut". You're right, they're zippier, but are they effective in conveying the sheer intensity and the expressive depth of Beethoven's major artistic statements? Not to me they aren't, in any case. Thank heavens dead conductors keep the classics alive!
Basically I agree although I think the generally low quality of string sound available from old type instruments is a problem. Indeed I suspect that faster playing is actually designed to hide lower quality string sound. There's also the question of greed and sharing out proceeds between fewer performers.
I’m only half joking when I say there needs to be a counterrevolutionary HUP (historically uninformed performance) movement to counter this stuff. Just once, I’d like to hear Beethoven, Mozart, or Haydn played with Mahlerian-sized forces. Quadrupled woodwinds, lots of brass, some added percussion, timings generous enough to soak in and luxuriate in every bar, metronome markings be damned. It would be a welcome antidote and rebuttal to prevailing trends favoring blinding speeds on inadequate instruments with an inadequate number of musicians.
@@AlexMadorsky I think it doesn't even qualify as historical or informed. I don't know what it qualifies as. Maybe as Deformed through Vileness Performance (aka as DVP, the genius detergent). Listen to the finale (if you can stream it), I think you'll agree.
I have to imagine that, if you could somehow transport Beethoven to the present and have him listen to Szell, Wand, Fricsay, etc. play his symphonies, he would say, "That's not what I thought it would sound like when I composed it, but boy, does it sound a lot better."
@@vjekop932 The Darmstadt School was the name given a group of radical advant-gardist which arose in Classical music following World War II. Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen were the original members although others became nominal members later.
Bruggen and Harnoncourt were somewhat different: They can surprise you in unexpected tempos and ideas, even when they conducted period ensambles.
Very true. That is why I like them both. They had personality.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Likewise. I like them both as well. Was listening to Harnoncourt's version of Dvorak's 9th just last night. As you've said, they both had personality, and both articulated a strong and potent artistic vision in their vivid interpretations.
Brüggen takes 13:01 (CD booklet) or 12:51 (Spotify), and Harnoncourt 13:33 -- not VERY different from the other HIP. They are very different, and I often like Brüggen and rarely Harnoncourt.
@@amirkessner8184does it means that the Spotify version it's accelerated? 😮 Or is the difference between the studio and the live recording?
@@classicalemotion -- This was a year ago and I don't even remember which work was referred to. I'm definitely not going to watch the video again. All I can say is that (1) it's highly unlikely that any version has been accelerated or slowed (2) there are a few works that Brüggen recorded more than once (3) timings sometimes include the silence before and/or after the actual music, so that even reissues of the same recording can differ in timings.
24:48 n
Not gonna unsee that anytime soon
HILARIOUS and needed to be said. Thank you, David!
You’re videos are so informative. And they are so much fun. I’m glad I discovered this channel recently. Thank you! JJ
Glad you like them!
Thank you for this stimulating talk. I was wondering, is it just the HIP thing which causes the speeding up of classical music? Or is it also a fenomenon of our time. People find it difficult to sit and just listen for 70 minutes to Beethoven's ninth. A modern recording of it gives you the opportunity to read 10 extra minutes of silly Facebook messages. The next challenge will be to play Brrucknerr's 8th in 45 minutes.
Great talk and very interesting to see the range. What struck me is: why would people expect Beethoven or any composer-were they able to see future developments in instrument design, acoustics, let alone recording-to say “nope! My music can only be played one way!” In other musics, this doesn’t happen. Jazz is based on varied interpretations of standard songs and new tones and sounds. Popular music abounds with imaginative covers. Dylan is renowned for never playing his songs the same way twice. Remix and sampling culture underlies hip hop and other popular music. Can you imagine Hoagy Carmichael saying “that’s not how Stardust goes!”?!? Why would a genius like Beethoven not be open to new sounds and ideas, once he got up to speed on them? And honestly, who cares if he wouldn’t like it, if we listeners do 200 years later?
It is entirely unnecessary and irrelevant to compare classical music tempi with pop. Any truly good composer knows that his music can be played in different ways. A good piece has many aspects which cannot be brought-out together in the same performance, some performances will highlight a certain aspect of the music, another performance another aspect. Instructive in this respect is a story about Brahms: recorded is the occasion that a string quartet ensemble played one of his quartets for him in Vienna. Afterwards, asked for his opinion, he said: 'Yes, that is very good, it's beautiful. Last week there was here another quartet playing the same piece and they did it very, very differently from you. And that was also very good and beautiful.' Knowing this, Brahms notated his scores with only general indications, hoping on the understanding and musicality of his performers, and knowing that different players would bring-out different aspects. That is the richness of good music: it is more than it can sound. On the other end of the scale was Mahler who filled his scores with numerous instructions and encouragements, thinking of the sloppy playing of his time. They cannot be taken seriously, because then one is exaggerating grotesquely.
@@johnborstlap5497 I think we were making the same point. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for being irrelevant.
…you've almost convinced me Dave... especially at the end of your talk (what a performance! Bravo !) I still need your talk about HIP guys trips to music from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. With examples! Cheers from Poland!
OK. I an surprised that the best taped performance that I have heard of Schubert's Eighth Symphony was by the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by none other than Trevor Pinnock. Trevor Pinnock? No, there are no 'vinegary strings' and no unconventional "historical touches". It is slightly swift, but he gets the sonorities of the modern orchestra well.
Orthodoxy and conformism in the arts is always lethal, as is fear to be 'academically wrong' - academics are not musicians; apart from exceptions, they mostly are the gynaecologists of music and not the lovers. And then, Beethoven has probably read the metronome numbers at the wrong side of the little block, so everything seems to be faster than he thought it should be. It was a new invention, and people were not as yet used to it. When you read that Beethoven was, physically speaking, clumsy, distracted, disordered, kicking his ink pot in the piano, forgetting to empty his chamber pot, unintentionally breaking the fragile 18C furniture in his house, why should we think that he was perfectly precise and accomplished with a new mechanical timing device? Another thing: tempo is dependent upon so many different factors that it is impossible to fix it in the score: the size and acoustics of the hall, the nature of the orchestra: the type of players, and whether the music is played in the morning or in the evening, etc. etc. Then: duration is something different from length: a piece can be played slowly but with such a continuity (which is an expressive quality) that it sounds much flowing, and it can be played much quicker but lacking this continuity and it will sound slow. Wagner also wanted to fix his tempi in the scores, but later-on he heard one of his operas played in the wrong tempo and when he spoke with the conductor he found-out that his directions had been observed very precisely. He concluded that tempo is something flexible and from that moment onwards only gave very general, expressive indications. It is a subjective art form thus it should not be subjected to attempts to objectify it. The inner life of the music is something different from clock time. - The best contribution of HIP is, to my feeling, the clarity it brought to the textures. But there was always enough clarity in the traditional, truly good recordings.
Furtwängler '42: 20,27
Furtwängler '37: 20,05
Furtwängler '51: 19,07
Furtwängler '51 Bayreuth: 19,32
Munch '58: 14,19
Fricsay: 18,00
Mengelberg: 16,07
Immerseel: 12,26
Hi there Dave. Recently I’ve been listening to Gabrieli in Venice 1615, sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, with the late much missed Sur Stephen Cleobury, conducting. One of the works on the disc, is Gabrieli’s Magnificat à 14. Such a fabulous, wondrous work. I would really like it if you could have a chat about this particular work, and how Gabrieli came to compose such a piece, in one of your Music Chats. Thank you.
Is period performance practice killing the classics? No, it's definitely not. As long as one accepts both approaches.
In fact, historical performance practice is not a historical approach, but a new one, based on some historical facts. But, this new approach has opened up many alternative and interesting perspectives. I am very grateful for that. And these new perspectives in turn have inspired many other interpreters, also outside of historical performance practice.
And here's the proof that historical performance practice is not killing classical music: Historical performance practice has been around for at least 58 years (in fact much longer!). Back then, the first recording of the Brandenburg Concertos was made by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his Concentus Musicus ensemble on period instruments (published in 1963). But classical music is not dead, 58 years were not enough to kill it! On the contrary! Classical music is alive and more diverse, more interesting and more inspiring than ever!
That is not proof. 58 years ago historical performance was fresh and different. We accepted it as such. Now it's as stale as week old bread, and the question I am asking is: 58 years on, how capable is of remaining fresh? What is there about it that will still surprise us? The answer is: nothing, or damn little. Of course classical music isn't "dead." That's a figure of speech. What it is becoming, increasingly, is either boring or stupid.
Es como dijo Mahler alguna vez:
"Si, después de mi muerte, algo no suena bien, cambiadlo. Tenéis no sólo el derecho sino también un deber de hacerlo".
Yo creo que no hablaba solamente de sus sinfonías per se, si no que también hablaba de los trabajos de los otros compositores anteriores y posteriores a el.
I think the Beethoven Ninth is a poor choice as case in point for historically informed practice; it's pretty late in music history to be applying those principles, and the wrong piece. A much better choice would be the Mozart piano concertos. These are my favorite pieces, and all of my favorite accounts of them are either played on period instruments or by modern ensembles doing historically informed performances. And I have not found it to be true that these performances are interpretively homogenous. There's a wide range. For example, Andreas Staier interprets Mozart's Ninth Piano Concerto as a more serious-minded work by a mature artist, where Levin and especially Sofrontisky interpret it more as a free spirited adolescent piece. Or take Levin's incredible performance of the Twenty-Sixth concerto, full of improvisations that fill out Mozart's incomplete score and reveal a masterpiece, where most performances make the Twenty-Sixth sound like a second-rate Mozart concerto. There are bad HIP records but there are great ones, too. Baroque music and high Classicism make much more sense to me when played the HIP way.
Yes, but that doesn't make the Ninth an inappropriate example because it's an iconic work that these people are playing and recording and telling us they are doing it the "right" way. I have no problem with other repertoire that may not suffer from the same sort of stifling conformity, but I suspect that if you were talking about symphonies, rather than concertos, even Mozart's, the conversation would be rather different.
@@DavesClassicalGuide I will agree, then, that the Beethoven Ninth is an ideal choice of repertoire as case in point for bad HIP recordings.
@@james.t.herman - Thank you for your comment. Who are your favorite recordings of the Mozart piano concertos?
@@TheOssia
no. 5: Levin, Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music - Cavé, Alessandrini, Divertissement
nos. 6 and 8: Zitterbart, Schlierbacher Kammerorchester, Fey
no. 7, Concerto for Three Pianos: Brautigam, Haydn Sinfonietta Vienna, Huss
no. 9: Andsnes, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra - Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood - Staier, Concerto Köln
no. 10, Concerto for Two Pianos: Immerseel, Kaneko, Anima Eterna
nos. 11 - 13: Bezuidenhout, Freiburger Barockorchester - Schiff, Vegh, Camerata Academic Salzburg, on "Salzburger Mozart-Matineen," a live album
no. 14: Brautigam, Die Kölner Akademie, Willens - Pires, Vienna Philharmonic, Abbado - Bilson, Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists
no. 15: Levin, Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music
no. 16: Levin, Hogwood, Academy of Ancient Music
no. 17: Staier, Concerto Koln - Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood
no. 18: Barenboim, Berlin Philharmonic
no. 19: Staier, Concerto Koln
no. 20: Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood - Perahia, English Chamber Orchestra
no. 21: Brautigam, Die Kölner Akademie, Willens
no. 22: Brendel, Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Angerer
no. 23: Buchbinder, Concentus Musicus Wien, Harnoncourt - Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood - Vogt, Mozartean Orchester Salzburg, Bolton
no. 24: Goode, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
no. 25: Zacharias, Laussane Chamber Orchestra - Buchbinder, Concentus Musicus Wien, Harnoncourt
no. 26: Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood
no. 27: Staier, Freiburger Barockorchester, der Goltz - Perahia, English Chamber Orchestra
@@DavesClassicalGuide Obviously, Handel's concerti grossi and organ concerti are themselves 'iconic' works, too.
I have yet to be convinced that period instruments do anything good for Mozart symphonies. Performance on modern instruments has evolved to discover great richness of sonority independent of instrument choice.
This said, I have heard Chopin piano concertos played with accompaniment by a period-instrument orchestra, and that seems to have removed the infamous eccentricity of sound. It could be that Poland, or at the least the Russian-occupied section, was slow to get the modern instruments that we usually take for granted. Chopin made his piano concertos fit his idea of what an orchestra of his time and place sounded like. The piano is modern and the orchestra isn't. It seemed to work.
I think you are preaching to the choir on this one. More experienced listeners will be inclined to agree with you. What passes for “personality” nowadays is usually someone trying to be “radical” or overtly different for the sake of being different. That is nothing more than low hanging fruit. Playing the Mozart Symphonies with a piano quintet and using a zither as a continuo (I hate to put ideas in someone’s head) is not “radical”, it’s novelty. It certainly is not “personality” or “imagination”. HIP can be a nice change of pace-now and then. Unfortunately, it often takes itself far too seriously and becomes cold, clinical and cloned. While there are exceptions, it is becoming a bit tedious. It starts to take on an assembly line feel. More than once, I have test streamed more than one performance only to drop my head in defeatist fashion thinking, “Oh, dear. Here we go again.” The younger or newer listeners, for the most part, have not developed their aural paletes enough to know better or care.
But what I really think is injuring the classical music scene is how it is one of the few music genres left where the listener desires hard media copies of what they like and it is getting more and more difficult to obtain any of it. Why are the labels holding onto this stuff? They certainly aren’t raking in the cash from streaming services. COVID has really put a dent into live show attendance. As I have noted before, they have made their money back tenfold on many of the older recordings and instead of pricing the stuff to sell and marketing things to entice younger listeners to give it a go and older collectors a chance to hoard their wares, they sit on it. Why? With such a practice, what is the future of these recordings and the industry? Will they all just fall into obscurity or drown in the ocean of options on streaming services?
I have never been convinced the labels care about their listeners, especially when they drop a new set of Beethoven Sonatas at $50-60 bucks on a format which has lost a lot of interest among the general populace but still maintains loyalty among the classical music listening community. If they really believe otherwise, those new sets would be a lot cheaper. But they price them as such because we are desperate and dumb enough to pay such prices. Seriously, many of us are still willing to buy another set of Mozart’s Symphonies-to go along with the 4 or 5 we already have. Aside from Jazz (which is really in the tank), no other genre has that type of devotion among their customers and, oddly, the industry still can’t exploit it in a way to profit from it. I think it’s because they have an overinflated sense of self-worth and are also a bit lazy.
Personally, I would be dropping the Heifetz, Gould and Rubenstien recordings in cardboard gatefold sleeves with the original Lp cover art at $3.99-4.99 a pop. The same with Szell’s Beethoven, Bernstein’s Mahler cycle and the like. There is no way I would release another box set of classical standards for more than $30. I just purchased the latest set of Buchbinder’s Beethoven Sonata cycle on DG for $22. No matter how much I may end up enjoying it, anything more $22 is like wiping before you poop, it doesn’t make any sense. Not when I already have Schnabel’s, Jando’s, Kovacevich’s, Buchbinder’s first set and others. Igor Levit’s much lauded set will run me $40 and I have no interest. I can just stream it until Sony comes to their senses. Obviously, my disinterest isn’t an indictment of his performance, it’s just I don’t think with what I already have-$40 just doesn’t seem to be a practical purchase. For about the same price, I can get the Kovacevich and the RCA Buchbinder cycles and I have a feeling, I will be pretty satisfied.
Entice people to feel as if they have nothing to lose. As a matter of fact, CDs are getting some renewed interest. It seems like the Lp craze has died down a bit and the younger people are looking for old CDs and cassettes. Odd-but true. Now would be a good time for the labels to inject some life into their CD sales and generate some interest in the classics.
Maybe I am all wet. But I also have a previous history of being able to sell customers $150-200 worth of classical CDs every time they walked into the Broders I worked at here in redneck Oklahoma City. I wasn’t able to do so because I didn’t know what they wanted. But I didn’t write this to toot my own horn. Bragging about my classical music sales ability in 2022 is like bragging about being the smartest fry cook at McDonalds. Nobody really cares.
But when the industry shows no interest in developing a new legacy of collectors by broadening their customer base to appeal to a younger generation and far too many great recordings are collecting dust in their vaults for no real reasons other than stupidity or greed, I do have a genuine concern how within another 3 or 4 years, I won’t be able to get my hands on much and the demand for classical on streaming services will dwindle to a point where these services will just “trim the fat” and drop many great recordings. It's already happening.
You are spot-on about how awful so many “original instrument” recordings sound-as you rightly point out, instrument makers changed the way they made instruments for a reason. I don’t agree that adherence to metronome markings is intrinsic only to “period performances” (it makes sense that if a composer bothered to indicate a tempo, we ought to at least give it serious consideration); what flabbergasts me is why pieces of Baroque Classical music that don’t have any metronome markings have all gotten faster and faster over the past few decades, as if someone discovered a hitherto-unknown manuscript source that said, “Whatever tempo you’ve been playing this music at, it should go much faster.” (Although I must also confess that I vastly prefer Gardiner’s tempo for the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth over Bernstein’s first NYPhil recording, which sounds grossly bloated and sluggish by comparison.)
My bigger complaint with the period performance crowd is that they have made Baroque music the sole property of “specialists,” a niche attraction. For many decades, symphony concerts would open with a selection by Bach or Handel or Vivaldi, played by the full orchestra, and all concertgoers heard at least portions of that repertoire regularly. Now if you want to hear their music, you have to go to a concert by an “original instruments” ensemble. Conductor James Conlon once told me that he had given up programming any Baroque music because of the backlash from the authenticity fanatics, and said, “When they talk about music, it’s like they’re quoting scripture.” As far back as a July 1979 article in High Fidelity, musicologist Paul Henry Lang anticipated your remarks when he wrote, “the dissemination of scholarly theories and doctrines, salutary and enlarging in itself, now threatens artistic freedom. What was first a discovery and then an exuberance is now becoming a deadening orthodoxy.” That was 45 years ago, and he was right.
But do we REALLY need more recordings of the 9th? Hundreds of recordings of this work exist, many of them stupendously wonderful. What more could possibly be done to make this music seem fresh and new, imbue upon it some alluring interpretive twist that makes it even more important to the history of music than it already is? My view of events is that conductors are grasping at straws, albeit in a calculated way, to attempt to do exactly this - to breathe new life into something that has already been done to death. Clearly with mixed results. Nothing wrong with the 9th, it's magnificent music. I just think all this effort would be better spent exploring other music, old and new.
You never know what can be done until someone does it, and that is my point. Which method gives you a better chance of hearing something fresh?
As a composer and musician I think that the musicians goal should be to breathe life into the music not trying to be different. To make a connection with the audience and experience and enjoy the music together. Originality comes while playing: the score, the room and mood will guide the musicians to an interpretation of that moment. The next evening might be different. I use software for composing but I don't expect musicians to play like a computer, their interpretations might surprise me and reveal things I did not realise myself. Somehow I get the feeling that many scholars and interpreters are drifting away from the music into an abstract realm of empty discussion only to prove their point. Then it is about ego and not the music. The score is important and a guideline for the musicians but the terms are indicators and one tempo indication should relate to the other movements. Like David said, an adagio is still an adagio and should not be faster than a scherzo, that is not how they relate to each other. e.g. when it says: adagio molto e cantabile, how can you sing while you are racing through the score, why ignore the word Molto? If the adagio is taken as a reference for the other tempi, how fast should the molto vivace and presto be, it stops being and music and just trying to reproduce notes. There is one question I like to raise: we all agree that the level of playing nowadays is much better than in the 19th century, the instruments were less sonorous so how can it be defended that music should be played faster? Lesser players tend to play slower not faster, less sonorous instruments take more time to create a tone. Well, just my two euro cents... let's keep on listening and keep our clothes on on camera :)
People keep making new recordings of the Beethoven symphonies to make money off them. We don't NEED new recordings (even though we should have frequent concert performances of them).
Three favorites that I have quite well cover the timing range: Karajan (1962) 16:25, Vanska 14:08, and Zinman 11:31.
I really love Vanska in this movement. I find Zinman to be faceless in Beethoven (and Schumann).
The Adagio of the 9th consists of 157 measures, 121 of which are in 4/4 @60 beats per second, 36 of which are in 3/4 @63 bps - a distinction without a difference. Which means that if you were to perform the movement rigidly in tempo per the metronome marks, the movement would last about 10 minutes. Even ole Roger Norrington/LCP needs about 11. So much for unquestioning reliance on LvB's metronome markings.
Good point!
@@DavesClassicalGuide Actually, to be more exact: the music switches to 12/8 for the later variations, but since it's marked L'istesso tempo, the dotted quarter presumably maintains the initial pulse of 4 beats per measure @60. I agree that the metronome marks often pose problems, such as the trio of the scherzo and the tenor solo in this symphony. But I don't think they should be discounted either at least as guidelines. Michael Steinberg in his book on the Symphony notes that often conductors used to take the adagio at about quarter=40, and he defends q=60 on the grounds that the piece will flow more effectively if thought of as 2 beats per measure (i.e., half=30) rather than four. I like it a bit on the faster side myself, but when I checked Harnoncourt/COE (not a set I much like on the whole, especially his sludgy Pastorale) where the adagio of The Ninth is one of my favorite things he does for its seamless flow, I found it clocked in at 13:34!
This is outside the scope of your piece, but I have a particular gripe about excessive speeds in the Brandenburgs. The earlier English Concert discs under Pinnock might have had slightly scratchy playing at times but the tempi were wonderful: enough zip to keep it moving but sufficiently steady to allow the harmonic and contrapuntal movement to come through. Newer recordings play these works way way too fast, sometimes so fast that that players can't actually keep up. And this destroys that hamonic movement and lovely bounce, all the tension and release and interplay are ruined when it's just head down and get to the end as quickly as possible. It's so unmusical (and inauthentic, surely) just to go super fast because it's more or less possible.
Do you mean the newer recording by Pinnock or other recordings by other artist of the Brandenburgs?
@@jverheij97 Other artists. I've not heard the later Pinnock, but I'd hope/trust that he's still as musical as he was in the 80s.
@@paulcaswell2813 Okay, that was an off-the-cuff comment about the playing standards in the relatively early days of the period performance movement. Reviews of the later Pinnock version make reference to the playing on his earlier set. I love the earlier set, I love period performances where they're musical, I have nothing against the principle or practice of period performance. I just don't like excessive tempos in the Brandengburgs.
It absolutely does my head in listening to thin sounds that don't have any quality, but (as you said) end up being played very fast to try to get around these horrors. Every now and then a really good chamber orchestra carries it off, but regrettably the general standard is dreadful. There is a very obvious reason why orchestras changed - because they improved by updating their instruments and technique. Modern playing is fine for older music: really, it is!
Concerning Beecham's "Messiah", the following has been said:
- Beecham's 1959 Messiah for RCA Victor - his third recording of the piece in 30 years - has proved virtually impervious to the onslaught of authentic instrument and period performing-style recordings of the piece that have overwhelmed the available field of recordings in the decades since, even though it breaks all of the "rules" that have been handed down by Baroque scholars. Beecham commissioned a new edition of the 18th century piece by Leon Goossens, which updated the scoring and added harps and other instruments never indicated in the composer's score, and had the temerity, in his notes for the recording, to address this issue of authenticity. He was forthright in explaining why it was necessary to make adjustments for modern ears and audiences, in part by explaining how alterations were made in the 200 years leading up to his recording. In his 1947 recording, he sought to strip the piece of many of its Victorian embellishments, but had found, for logical reasons, that it was impossible to perform a "Messiah" that was both historically correct and suited to modern concert halls and modern listeners' sensibilities. He did attempt to restore some balance and some sense of logic to the modernizations, however, and, in the bargain, also engaged the singer Jon Vickers at the very outset of his career. The album, since reissued as a triple CD, has proved perennially popular and remains in print more than four decades later, and was the culmination of his service in the popularization of Handel's music.
Thanks for the interest insights as always David. I assume that the implication of your theory is that these 'cooker-cutter' period performances tend to defeat serious musical criticism, where it attempts to differentiate one performance from another? Bad news for critics, I guess, seeking to provide a report on the interpretative nuances that they find in recording A when compared against recording B. It would also be interesting to hear the opposing point of view.
I've heard of "dressed to the nines", but "undressed to the ninth" is a new one on me.
LOL!
Brilliant!
Yes, bravo!
Absolutely right!
i remember in the 60- 70 years ,when i start to listen music,some major label put the ninth on one lp ( cluytens fricsay etc ).....with slow movement cut in two....so when you returning the lp you have a ''pause'' of may be 20-30 second....i wonder what beethoven tell if he know that.....of course some orther label put ninth on two lp generaly with the symphonies no 8....so the cd resolve anything....!ouf...!
Hogwood with the Academy of Ancient Music - 10 minutes and 40 seconds! It sounds almost like a waltz!
Dave. I am very fond of the leinsdorf ninth with the Boston symphony not only because as a college student in Boston at the time of the recording but as an usher at symphony hall leinsdorf invited me to attend the recording sessions. What an impression that made upon me. But setting that aside I really think it is a great performance without personal pregiduce. For proof I recently had a car radio experience where this performance was being played and I had to wait to hear who the performance was by. You guessed it. It was leinsdorf. BTW the Boston symphony hall acoustics contributed!
It's an excellent performance, I agree.
I have Haydn complete symphonies by Dorati and Fischer which I consider traditional. I have also been collecting the new Haydn 2032 project by Antonini which is more period. I like all of these for different reasons. I never paid attention to timings, I will have to start doing that! The new Antonini's sound more lively to me, perhaps it is the timings? hmmmm...
Tonight, after I brush my teeth, I will have to brush my eyeballs.
Try rinsing first.
Could I offer a unique and personal take on the different ways of handling the third movement of Beethoven 9? I would like to copy and paste some of my comments on one of Lebrecht's Beethoven 9 blog posts from 2020.
I would like to make the point that the movement shares a family likeness with its counterpart in the Pathetique sonata. There are leads to guide and shape the performance of the Ninth slow movement.
"In the slow third movement, we are used to hearing conductors draw it out in making it more meditative. The main theme of this movement is a common-time Adagio, and Beethoven sets the speed at 60 crotchets, which is much faster than we are used to hearing it. In this movement, it might be good if we remember the slow movement of the Pathetique sonata. Its main theme is akin to the main theme of the slow movement [an Adagio cantabile in 2/4 time].. It would be good if the slow movement of the Choral could go at a similar speed. Though this is a common time movement, most of the melody notes are in minims. This gives us the clue to beat the bar in two here. The metronome speed can now be 30 minims and you need not feel rushed when you are counting the tactus in larger units."
Honeck, Harnoncourt and Chailly proved this point eloquently in their recordings of the symphony.
I'll add a few more things to my comment.
The movement is in theme and variation structure. In most recordings, the successive variations get slower and slower. However, in the period practice versions, the variations are taken at the same tempi as the original theme, except when conductors broaden the tempi slightly for the 12/8 variation. Also, each variation has "Stesso tempo" over their first bar. In this approach, the variations can be like ornamentations to the theme.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Many of today's conductors, and ensembles, adhering to a bogus historical "orthodoxy," have resulted in performances without character, without the distinctive profiles of the great conductors of previous generations. The thrust of your talk explains why many of us record collectors tend to steer clear of the latest recordings of standard orchestral repertoire, preferring the "big names" of the past. THe joy of comparative listening requires makred differences of approach to that repertoire. Klemperer and Walter were of the same generation, both disciples of Mahler, but how different are their respective Beethoven cycles. You'd never confuse one with the either, or either with, say, Toscanini or Scherchen. And the trend to interpretive conformism also explains why some collectors delight in hearing recordings in antiquated sonics, with inferior ensembles, if the conductor (or soloist) has a unique point of view like no other. Yes, as you have pointed out many times, one really needs tight ensemble playing and modern sonics to fully appreciate a great orchestral work. Granted. Why, then, would I take one of Toscanini's Beethoven cycles ot the proverbial desert island over Chailly or Gielen, fine conductors though they are? I wonder, though if your point applies to trends among contemporary instrumentalists. We do live in an age of truly great pieanists, and they do have distinctive interpetive profiles.
Regarding soloists, I agree. We have some amazing artists out there, and the personal approach is alive and well. Perhaps that is why, as another commentator mentioned, concerto recordings on period instruments tend to be more satisfying.
Off topic: I would love to hear Gardiner and his band doing any Bach Cantata anywhere near to me! Which of course doesn't say anything about his Beethoven. But as people in East Germany use to say: "Not everything was bad alltogether" ;-)
Beethoven's metronome markings (or anybody's, really) are just a guidepost. In the end, musical time is not absolutely quantifiable.
A performance that lasts 15 minutes and is exciting may seem faster than one that lasts 12 minutes but does not connect with the listener.
To me, it's not so much about freedom of interpretation or imagination. It's about being tuned in to the actual sounds that one hears and ensuring that the sounds connect to each other in a convincing, compelling way. It will not - cannot - be the same every time, because every note depends on every note that proceeds it.
Years ago, I bought the Peters Edition of Schoenberg's 5 Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. The score had a loose-leaf insert with metronome markings for the various sections of the 5 pieces as indicated in various sources and published editions. The interesting thing is how wildly the tempo markings varied between the autograph (1909), the 1st edition, the 2nd edition (1922, I think), and various subsequent editions including a revised, reduced orchestration (1949). The lesson I learned from this is that tempo is extremely hard to nail down.
I think that Beethoven's metronome indications (like all other things in the scores) reflect the composer's will. What else? Who among us has the right to judge what is subjective or relative in Beethoven's scores and what is not? Then one is also allowed to rearrange and shorten movements, change the instrumentation, adjust the dynamics, etc.
@@ralphschwarz4919 I have the right to do so, and so do you. If you choose to abdicate responsibility for using aesthetic judgement as an interpreter or performer on some or all issues of performance, that is certainly also your right.
@@marknewkirk4322 So are so right!
Just make a pool from fresh young new coming classical listeners (but already exposed to both traditional and HIP approaches) and see which they prefer. From my observation the majority prefer HIP approach. The trend is that the interpretation range get narrower and different with time, this happen not only with symphonic work (the 9) but also with violinists, pianists as well. You might prefer the old time, but that is NOT necessary a right argument for old-is-better. I'm not convinced.
They're works of art, thus ideally suited to freedom of expression and interpretation, not scientific experiences carried inside a particle collider. The more you narrow down the interpretative scope and make people adhere ideologically to rigid and arbitrary principles, the less freedom you get. In point of fact, you get the very society we live in now. Some people believe this is better, I don't. You should read Paul Eluard. "J'écris ton nom... LIBERTE"
I probably qualify as a younger listener (late 30s) by the standards of classical music listeners, but count me as someone who thinks more moderate tempi and bigger orchestral sounds usually work better for Beethoven.
Good reason exists to listen to old recordings. Even if one is convinced of more modern performance techniques it is good to know what preceded those. Guess what? Reiner, Szell, Klemperer, and Bohm are still worthy of attention even if they were born in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Maybe the period cultists would do some service if they tried to be as individual as the old-timers of the pre-digital stereo or even monaural (Toscanini) world.
I don't think the question is a matter of old vs. new. Old performances can be dull or dreadful as much as new ones, HIP ones, can be fantastic, insightful, and great. I'm not surprised that many new listeners enjoy and prefer the HIP approach, it matches much of contemporary taste - sharp, clean, fast, short. The question is about whether this is better because it's more authentic. One might not like Klemperer's approach, which is fine, but to claim one dislikes it, or that it's not good, because it's less authentic is a problem. I think the current HIP approach isn't really about historical accuracy at all: it's become a style of interpretation, and I think it could help itself by letting go of the need to justify itself by recourse to what's supposed to be historical evidence. I really don't care whether a performance is "historically" accurate. I want to hear inspired music-making, and I think that's what Mr. Hurwitz's channel is all about. Unfortunately, and I think this is much of his point, when I see that something is HIP inspired, I hesitate, but listen out of curiosity, and often (not always) find the same old same old. Performances of the past can certainly be this way also.
@@stanleymurashige7766 But DH theory is that HIP Beethoven is killing interpretation freedom. I beg to differ. There are no less variety. One should not look at the tempo only, but the orchestral colors, accents, rhythmic variation, and I think there is equal room for interpretation in HIP than in the past traditional big band Beethoven. Some great conductors also change their way of playing Beethoven, from traditional to HIP influence approach: Blomstedt, Haitink, Chailly, Abbado. Why they are doing that if HIP influence is a dead end as David pretend to be?
Some very thought provoking questions you pose. Can I hire you to ask certain conductors I've had to work with these questions?
Haha ... I pulled out the last , precious, ALDI Christmas dessert leftover before settling in to watch this one. Love a man with a real opinion to air.
Edit: I almost dropped my dessert at the end
There are some original instrument conductors, such as Trevor Pinnock, who I have a lot of respect for. He, I think is brilliant. There are others, like Marc Minkowski, who I think is just a joke. And others in between, and some who are good at times, and at other times not so good - in other words they're inconsistent. As far as tempo, there are some conductors in the original instrument group that take EVERYTHING way too fast, regardless of what is marked in the score. They think everything is marked "Molto prestissimo con fuoco." It just ruins things.
So right. Thank you!
Is there a parallel here with the orthodoxy seen in most other areas of cultural life now?
Read the comments. There are some excellent points about just that topic. I love you folks!
David, have you ever come across the Authentic Sound CZcams channel, with its "double beat theory" of tempo? Be interesting to hear your reaction.
Finger in mouth to induce vomiting.
@@DavesClassicalGuide 🤣 Ah, so you have. By interesting I of course meant entertaining.
Or as Szell's First trumpet in the Cleveland Orchestra reportedly told some students: "Fellas, Don't bore the audience..."
I find academia a double-edged sward, generally. On the one hand, it facilitates education, which is obviously a good thing; on the other, it often becomes self-serving and elitist. And I guess that's also true in the realm of music scholarship.
Dead on! And when they're completely wrong that can develop into something which is far worst than lack of education: blind conformity to error...
@@davidbo8400 Absolutely.
"Do we really want to talk about authenticity any more? I had hoped that a consensus was forming that to use the word in connection with the performance of music, and especially to define a style, manner or philosophy of performance, is neither description nor critique but COMMERCIAL PROPAGANDA." Totally agree.
Great talk, David.
Well, I didn't see that coming. :)
Anyway, that totalitarian approach to music while cancelling and putting down differing opinions somehow fits our modern society. A few weeks ago I watched an excerpt of Mariss Jansons rehearsing the Eroica with the Bavarian SO combined with interviews of the players, and one of them said "Well, of course nowadays you have to play it a little bit faster than we were used to a few years ago". That is a very sad statement, because that "Zeitgeist" argument should never be a valid legitimation to follow a cult without putting any thought into the musicmaking transcending the technical side of it.
Something else that's perhaps an interesting factor: The metronome marking fetish is not only popular with the period instrument movement, but also in contemporary music. Artistic liberty and interpretative choice is just not very popular at the moment except for aleatoric music and free jazz. With New Music of the European tradition (since the serialists) you usually have very complicated scores with detailed instructions and indications down to every millisecond. It's not about interpreting music, it's about reproducing a certain sound as exactly as possible. So it's no wonder that people like Scherchen, Leibowitz and Gielen jumped the metronome fetish wagon just as eagerly as Gardiner and Norrington.
I like what you said. I am distrustful of all zeitgeist arguments. As far as I am concerned, zeitgeist is generated in the marketing departments of multinational corporations. It is harder to market performances which stray from an orthodoxy. It doesn't matter if that orthodoxy is genuine or well founded.
Pungent and provocative criticism enlivens a debate. This is why I enjoy David Hurwitz. Orthodoxy can be a tyrant. I am inspired to revisit Beethoven ninth and experience a range of interpretations. Delightful choice for the listener, and will make for lively debate among my friends who share an abiding interest in classical music. Astute listening. Open minds. Living apart from a deafening orthodoxy-and not only in the realm of music.
I have been thinking the same thing for years now...
Decades ago, it was impossible to mistake one major orchestra and their conductors for another. The Beethoven or Brahms of Mengelberg's ACO, Furtwangler's VPO, Stokowski's Philadelphians, Toscanini's NBC or NYP, Beecham's LPO, Koussevitzsky's Bostonians were all vastly different and timings were only one part of it. Wasn't just the orchestras because when they guest conducted each other's ensembles they could even in a few rehearsals, change the character and sound of the band they were leading. You are right, there is simply no scope for such vastly different performances among the HIPsters today. That may have died with Harnoncourt.
So you must have loved currentzis' Rameau album?
It was emphasized in my music masters program that Historically-Informed Practice is very much a modernist phenomenon; that is, HIP is not really HIP, despite being very hip.
Of course. That is an old argument first advanced (in academia) by Richard Taruskin. The rest of us knew it long before.
Indeed (I’m relatively young, so I’m still learning/relearning/unlearning a fair amount)
Testify Brother!!!
Very, very true.
One mistake provokes the next: You can't play slowly with this wrong aesthetics. The strings would just sound wrong or even out of tune. But you must try to achieve some sort of reasonable relation between the movements. So, things are getting faster and faster.
The main problem is that traditional conductors tried to make good performances, but the period people try to make correct performances. Just a few of them understand the difference and become good musicians again - as Harnoncourt. But most of them think to have the one and only truth - not in interpreting a work but in reading the notes.
They seem to me as if one would not read Melville or Dostoevski but to spell them letter for letter, without sense, but very fast.
Worth noting that whilst New York Philharmonic Music Director, Mahler created a Bach/Mahler suite, where he interposed movements from the second suite into the third. He played the harpichord continuo. He also reorchestrated Schumann's symphonies and Beethoven's Ninth of course. Not for him, adherence to the score if he felt he could achieve a better experience for his audience. Let's have a recording of the Bach/Mmahler suite to show the period instrument orthodoxy.
It has been recorded several times. Chailly did it beautifully.
@@DavesClassicalGuide David, Thanks I will look it out. It can go on the shelf nest to his arrangement of the Death and the Maiden Quartet for string orchetra. Any other obscure Mahler arrangements we should know about There is Die Drei Pintos of course.
Actually I already have it in the Cailly Symphony Edition. I hadn't got round to it yet. However, that situation is about to change this evening.
the karajan 84' 9th adagio is possibly my all time favourite piece of music (as silly as such categorisations are), i wonder what you think of that version
the fast adagios always drove me absolutely mad so this video is quite nice to hear
It's very beautiful, although I'm not always a fan of everything he does elsewhere
Laughed out loud. Great visual aids.
Hahaha, David, that was really a nice one! 😄😄😄
Where's the trigger warning for Male Frontal Nudity [24:51]? Regardless, another insightful, humorous, and passionate critique from a true go-to musical thinker.
As a fun fact - Maximianno Cobra takes 21 minutes for same Adagio molto e cantabile. Classified under "hysterically informed performance"
I'm surprised that it doesn't take any longer than that. The total duration of that abysmal recording must be like two and a half weeks.
My God ! Dave
And away we go with another curmudgeonly rant by the internet's most knowledgeable crank! And i say that with the deepest respect. And maybe a pinch of agreement.
Awwww shucks!
David I love your channel and have been listening with huge enjoyment since 2020. However, on this one I think you have it wrong. For example, if you have listened to the Jordi savall recording you held up you'll know that it sounds like Beethoven rose from the dead and conducted it himself; the recording is absolutely blazing with life and, for me at any rate, knocks every other recording, traditional or HIP into a cocked hat.
Carry on!
Hey, whatever floats your boat, but I do find comments such as this pretty silly. I get the enthusiasm, but musically speaking they are pretty meaningless.
I love period preformance and instruments but I do agree that the slow movements are a lot quicker when they easily can be played at normal tempo.
You're right. What else can I say?
Great talk. Would be interesting to explore whether this is related to a general surge in conformity/egalitarianism in Western cultures.
For real conformity look at some of the countries now churning out classical musicians in large numbers: Japan, South Korea, and China. Do you see much room for rebelliousness in adult life there? That said, do classical musicians seem like rebels in any part of the world?
Symphonic performance seems to be getting more egalitarian between cities. I can remember when a recording in North America outside of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago was suspect. Maybe Pittsburgh, maybe St. Louis. Aside from St. Louis there were no really good orchestra west of the Mississippi in the USA, and nothing really good in Canada. With all the fine orchestral players being churned out now (contrast the situation 120 years ago when Mahler despised the shabby play of orchestras of his time... musical training was not as good, and careers were shorter because about everyone was dying in his 50's). Better training with longer careers? I think we can hear the difference.
Classical music is less elitist for music lovers than it once was, if only because people have recordings from which they can learn something about the music.
I have my suspicion that the Berlin Philharmonic was one of the finest orchestras in the world around 1900. By current standards it was far short of the standard that one would expect of a 'minor
orchestra.
This could also explain the recent lousy versions of the Finale of Sibelius 2… so fast, no character, no majesty. And actually awkward to perform….
How I so agree Dave. Conformity equals crap. Enough said.
Click-track music and dance beats have made classical musicians scared to say music was ever anything other than beat-beat-beat. People nowadays want to see the lineage backwards from contemporary ethics to a more primitive system; to demonstrate history's tread as a progression. So much music doesn't breathe at all these days, completely belying the composers' skill.
well then ... I agree with so much of what you say David... I always tried not to be a CC, and will continue to do so.
about the 9th...what blew me away about Toscanini's 1939 9th (apart from the utterly insane energy) was the fact that the first 3 movements took almost exactly the same time: 12.22/12.31/12.47 (Adagio!!!)... and I felt this really strongly. Quite an extraordinary performance.
That's it. Save those cookies for the kids!
I agree that conforming to a consensus in terms of tempi has made me wary of trying new recordings of many works, especially with Beethoven’s slow movements. My first purchased version of THE NINTH was Norrington’s, and ever since, I have enjoyed slower versions of the third movement. The exception to that for me is Järvi, who I think does the faster tempi with elan and style. On that note, though, I was encouraged to hear Simone Young’s Brahms recordings, which were more broad, intense and slower than sped up Brahms. She seems to be at least one conductor willing to buck a trend.
Jarvi has a fantastic chamber orchestra who bought into the vision, play with acuracy gusto and mastery of their instruents (unlike norrington), and still have a true sense of legato, shaping, phrasing, and line. If the approach was musicality first, ratherthan a replica of what the musicologists say these pieces sounded like at their first performances, it wouldn't be as grandiose of a problem. But alas it is.
Great video as always!! 👍🎼
Anything that stifles reasonable creativity and imagination in the interpretation of a piece of music seems abhorrent to me.
That shocking final reveal will live with me for sometime. I'm going to seek counseling I so readily need now😆
I know. The horror! Good luck with your recovery.
One must absolutely try to find all available sources and clues from Beethovens own hand and from his circle. Regarding every aspect of performance practice. Not only finding them and reading them, but to truly understand them. Metronome markings included. When you have done that and if you for some reason don’t like the results, then do as you please.
The anti HIP reasoning can turn out to be something of a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? Is Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 best accompanied by a Steinway grand, because it sounds better? Because Monteverdi himself would absolutely have preferred that? Or should we rather perform all music using synthesis nowadays, because it represents the evolution of sound and is therefore inherently better?
And yes, Savall’s Adagio comes of as a bit hurried, it certainly does.
It's not a slippery slope if musicians are musical, rather than witless academics, but in general I agree with you. The issue, always, comes down to a combination of intelligence, talent, and taste, doesn't it?
@@DavesClassicalGuide Well, to some extent definitely. But the general tendency in western art music is that composers write more and more explicit instructions in their scores, from say the early common practice period to our times. That is certainly true for marking tempos. 250 years ago they did some of that, but also took for granted that performers knew how to read between the lines. Customs and manners, all that. If you ignore that part of perfoming it gets,… poor somehow. That’s why you need a bit of academia from time to time. And reading period sources is very rewarding, hilarious at times.
@@harmoniaartificiosa Again, I don't disagree at all, but you have to read them correctly, without an agenda. Heaven knows I'm not opposed to scholarship, only bad scholarship, and so much of the kind I have read about performance practice is scandalously bad.
The naked truth!
Whether we wanted it or not. Ignorance was bliss.
I imagine Mozart and Beethoven, if they could have conducted their work, might have played slow or fast depending on their mood of the day, and any metronome markings, in the case of Beethoven, be damned. Didn't Mahler say somewhere you could conduct his symphonies any way you liked?
Basically.
Good to hear there are still people who think freedom and freedom of interpretation are to be cherished and preserved!
A fearless HIP -- "Hurwitz Informed Performance."
LMAO THE END,
Great video btw
Thanks 😅
This video makes me respect Daniel Barenboim even more as a conductor. 3rd movement from his Staatskapelle Berlin recording from 2000: 18:01. Live performance on Decca with the E-W Divan orchestra at the Proms in 2012: 16:43. Both are beautiful, lyrical, well shaped, and mean more than every single one of these cookie cutter HIP recordings.
This tendency has been catching on since the early 90s of the last century. But, what would I point out is not the suitability of this music approach to read the whole repertoire. Instead, the danger is to create a sort of "cancel culture" which affects the evaluation process of the public and music students as well ending up in a lack of conscious knowledge.
Can't believe no Bernard Michael O'Hanlon in the comments yet. 😢 😆
Surely your thesis is right. It's now decided there's a particular "right way" to perform these things, regimented with a long set of prescriptions, so it's become more homogenized and the range of interpretation is narrowed. And if someone doesn't play it the "right way" then they are Historically Uninformed and everyone gets to laugh at them and call them a philistine.
Seems like the saturation of recordings of all the popular major works is part of the problem though. I mean really, if nobody recorded another Beethoven cycle, would it even matter very much? Live performance is another matter, of course, but there's already so many great recordings of these things in so many different styles, that the average listener doesn't really need a "new cycle" much. It's a problem for classical recording in general. All the most popular stuff is recorded to death already. And if someone like Currentzis tries to be "different" with this stuff, then Dave and others crap on them and call them a pretentious twat.😄 With all the recording saturation of the major works, it must be really hard to be different than what already exists and not also be bad.
It is hard to be "different" and not be bad, but then, who said it was supposed to be easy? The issue, of course, is whether or not the "difference" is there for its own sake or tells us something new and exciting about the work in question--whether it's merely a petulant manifestation of the performer's ego or the result of a personal recreative vision of the work. To say that I crap all over Currentzis is only half the story, for there are also versions that I will describe positively. The key is trying to explain the difference between the great and the garbage.
A few months ago I attended a subscription concert of the Minnesota Orchestra that included Beethoven's Ninth. The conductor Juraj Valcuha is not well known, but given it was Beethoven's Ninth I looked forward to the concert. Instead I heard the type of cookie cutter performance Mr. Hurwitz describes in this piece. A speedy underpowered first movement, and a quick moving relatively emotionless slow movement. I'm guessing that Mr. Valcuha felt he could not stray from what is now apparently the "only" way to conduct the piece. All in all it was a very unmemorable performance. I don't doubt that the historically informed type of performance can be memorable--the problem is as Mr. Hurwitz describes--they are all too predictable. Why should I purchase Jordi Savall's Beethoven when it will sound pretty much like Frans Bruggen's, John Gardiner's, etc? They may all have their strong points, but one is enough in my book.
I feel your pain.
One dingbat critic from one of the Vancouver newspapers stridently insisted that the Beethoven #9 third movement must be metronomic, and that it was not allowed to take any more than 11 minutes. What an insufferable butthead opinion...^^
God bless this man. May his video mark a moment in time where we begin to see a pushback and return to beauty.
Exactly!
Thanks so much for that, David! I wish I could give you NINE likes for that!
I truly hope that the historically authentic Mafia will lose its grip on the musical world some day.
I think I just went blind!
That wasn't me. You've got to stop playing with yourself.
@@DavesClassicalGuide No, it was you. Just a little levity.
@@carlconnor5173 I know--I enjoyed it. Back atcha, that's all! Believe me, if levity is all I get, I'm grateful.
@@DavesClassicalGuide David, you get much more than levity from me. You get much appreciation for your critical analyses, recommendations and, yes, your sense of humor and entertaining ways.
@@carlconnor5173 Thank you, but believe me, I very much value the levity. There isn't enough in this business.
It's such a shame that the world of classical music seems to be full of lukewarm conformists instead of genuinely interesting individual artists with their conspicuous style. Why is it that a well organized minority always gets to define what the rest of us should enjoy? First the Darmstadt people and now the so called historically informed performance movement. And there's no end in sight. Just a few months ago the Finnish Baroque Orchestra gave a performance of Sibelius's Lemminkäinen Suite, with gut strings and other period instruments. I don't know if they used vibrato, probably not. What next? Zippy Bruckner with gut strings, seashell horns, and clay flutes? Perhaps I shouldn't give anyone any ideas.
Have your heard Venzago's Bruckner cycle? It's your worst fears confirmed.
@@DavesClassicalGuide No I haven't. I'm aware of his recording of Bruckner's 5th with Tapiola Sinfonietta. Tapiola Sinfonietta is a splendid orchestra as such, and I go to their concerts on a somewhat regular basis, but I don't think the name of that orchestra should be used in a same sentence with Bruckner. Good to know that I shouldn't bother with rest of Venzago's Bruckner performances either.
That was a really thought-provoking video. It helped me think about folks like Currentzis, and also Adam Fischer in his recent Beethoven survey. You've spoken before of conductors trying so hard, often egotistically, to be different, even if it makes little musical sense. If one is constrained by a belief that authenticity demands adherence to some authoritative historical prescription, then one has to look elsewhere to express one's creative impulse. You'll try to find hitherto unheard nuances of dynamics, rhythm, sonority, etc. How can you be special, different, creative? If Beethoven's metronome marks tell you what the tempo must be, then what do you play around with? The irony of this is that an academic, purist adherence to the score then can produce sounds, phrasing, etc. that are not in the score, but you'll have to be able to justify your approach by some evidence-based argument.
When thinking about the classical music tradition, I have come to bring some things I've learned from my study of pre-modern Chinese painting (I'm sorry, here I go, if you'll indulge me). In pre-modern Chinese aesthetics, fine art painting was much like a performance art. There were prescribed techiniques, developing traditions, schools of practice, etc. But ideally it was always understood that traditions and techniques were not absolute rules. They developed as a creative way to express a link between the past and present, and designed to be interpreted. Yes, you trained often by copying the past, but the point of painting was not to copy, but was to inhabit the rhythms of the past in yourself - a life-long task. As you grew, the tradition would live on in your painting, but not as a duplication of the past, but as a creative renewal of the past in the life of the present. The whole point was to make the tradition fully alive in you and in your present (and different) circumstances. There was a fundamental recognition that things always changed, that your present circumstances would be different. Writers on painting practice, repeatedly emphasized that if you simply did your best to follow the tradition and turn it into a set of rules to follow, then you painted something dead. And like art anywhere, much of the art was indeed dead. Tradition tended to become a tyrannical adherence to past masters, and traditions turned into absolute rules. So in the history of Chinese painting, there are far more dead, dull, boring paintings than there are great and inspiring ones, just as there can be in classical music performances.
I see a parallel in what you're getting at in the classical music recording/performance world. Scholarship of the past is becoming a set of authoritative prescriptions, rather than rich food for inspiration (which is what it can be). To be truly "traditional" in Chinese painting ideally (not always in reality) was not to follow a bunch of rules, but to breathe life into painting during one's own time and community. It made no sense to try to recreate something that was long gone.
Interesting, your comparison with Chinese painting. I immediately think of icon painting (actually called icon writing) in the Christian Orthodox tradition. Strict adherence to rules, yet at the same time 'flexible response' to time and circimstances' of the moment the icon is being written.
Thank you for that lovely explanation!
@@ewmbr1164 Makes sense to me. If you strictly followed the rules and that's all you did, then, I think, the icon wouldn't have any power.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Actually, thank YOU! Your talks are always inspiring (and great fun! Your grand finale in this video was a real shocker!). By the way, I really like your discussions of musical form - I'm a form junkie, too, but in art history. I'd be called a "formalist" in the field. Sadly, it's out of fashion for the most part these days.
@@stanleymurashige7766 Fashion! Phooey!
Markevitch conducts it in 16:19. His interpretations of Beethoven's symphonies still sound as mint fresh and thoroughly engaging as they did when they were originally released, if not even more so. To be totally honest, all of them gave me more than a few jolts when I first heard them. Periody-historically informed versions, not so much. Markevitch gave us "Beethoven, A Musical Odyssey", with Beethoven playing the part of the alien force driving humanity towards creative, poetic, musical, philosophical and emotional progress. Periody folks gave us "Ears Wide Shut". You're right, they're zippier, but are they effective in conveying the sheer intensity and the expressive depth of Beethoven's major artistic statements? Not to me they aren't, in any case. Thank heavens dead conductors keep the classics alive!
Basically I agree although I think the generally low quality of string sound available from old type instruments is a problem. Indeed I suspect that faster playing is actually designed to hide lower quality string sound.
There's also the question of greed and sharing out proceeds between fewer performers.
Something else we can do is to say HIP in full substituting 'hysterically' for 'historically'.
I’m only half joking when I say there needs to be a counterrevolutionary HUP (historically uninformed performance) movement to counter this stuff. Just once, I’d like to hear Beethoven, Mozart, or Haydn played with Mahlerian-sized forces. Quadrupled woodwinds, lots of brass, some added percussion, timings generous enough to soak in and luxuriate in every bar, metronome markings be damned. It would be a welcome antidote and rebuttal to prevailing trends favoring blinding speeds on inadequate instruments with an inadequate number of musicians.
Not a fan of Schoonderwoerd's (obn) anemic version of the Eroica, then?
@@davidbo8400 I’ve not heard it, but I rather doubt I would be.
@@AlexMadorsky It's awful and pointless and dumb. 1 instrument per part. First violins are just 1 violin!
@@davidbo8400 I vaguely recall reading about it. HIP taken to its logical and silliest conclusion.
@@AlexMadorsky I think it doesn't even qualify as historical or informed. I don't know what it qualifies as. Maybe as Deformed through Vileness Performance (aka as DVP, the genius detergent). Listen to the finale (if you can stream it), I think you'll agree.
I have to imagine that, if you could somehow transport Beethoven to the present and have him listen to Szell, Wand, Fricsay, etc. play his symphonies, he would say, "That's not what I thought it would sound like when I composed it, but boy, does it sound a lot better."
Music survived the Darmstadt hubris; I believe this period performance orthodoxy will vanish with time as well...
I agree. It's a phase.
What's that Darmstadt thing? Others mentioned it but I don't know what it is.
@@vjekop932 The Darmstadt School was the name given a group of radical advant-gardist which arose in Classical music following World War II. Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen were the original members although others became nominal members later.
@@christophermacintyre5890 thanks!