fergus wrote:Diapason wrote:All this talk of Nun Komm. I haven't listened to this in ages.
I no longer admire it the way I used to, but it'll have to do cos the little one's just gone asleep on my chest!
Is it that you do not admire the music itself or the performer; I would be curious on that point Simon.
Oh not the music! No, I admire this music more and more as time goes on, and I imagine that will never change! No it's simply a question of Herrick's playing. When I first heard these discs I was in my teens and they seemed like a breath of fresh air. Herrick was lively and fast, and it was a far cry from the dry and stodgy organ playing that I heard a lot on disc back then. Now when I listen to these recordings, some of the tempi just seem perverse, the articulation is wildly OTT quite a lot of the time (towards the staccato end of the spectrum) which leads to a kind of sameness to everything, and all told I find it lacking in depth. I still admire Herrick's clarity and spirit (not to mention the organs used and choice of registrations), and I still feel as negatively as I ever did about dry and stodgy, but over the years I've probably been exposed to much "better" (to me) ways of playing Bach that I find much more convincing and satisfying.
That said, I don't have many/any such performances on disc, so it might be time for me to look again as I could really do with a Bach set that I both admire and enjoy. As it stands I rarely listen to this music at home (despite it being some of my favourite stuff EVER) and that's a shame. I suppose the better you know the work, the harder it is to find the right recording.
