Historically informed performance on modern instruments is..

[Seán]

Historically informed performance is all well and good, argues Julian Haylock, but continuing to play on modern instruments just results in the worst of both worlds

Wednesday, 30 April 2014

We take historical performance practice so much for granted these days that it is easy to forget just how fundamental the changes were as the movement began gathering pace during the 1960s and 70s. During the immediate post-war era it became clear that our instruments, their mechanisms and setups had all changed to varying degrees, as had the kinds of sounds that resulted and the associated playing styles. There were almost invariably too many performers adopting anachronistic tempos (usually on the slow side) at the wrong pitch (around a semitone too high). Staunch traditionalists felt as though they were under musical siege – and as time went by, were fighting a losing battle.

Initially, playing standards were somewhat sketchy as musicians got to grips with the realities of new technical challenges and methods of tone production. The knock-on effect was a certain interpretative inhibition, caused jointly by what was technically possible and the tendency to be driven by what the latest research indicated you should do, rather than what your gut instinct said you must do. One can now expect a cutting-edge performance on period instruments to possess a bracing freedom – indeed, the results are at times so uncompromising as to suggest a reactionary, avant-garde movement currently operating within the periodinstrument fraternity.

The problem, it seems to me, is with historically informed performance on modern instruments. With a period instrument in your hand (or a decent copy), the basic palette of timbres is so intrinsically different from its modern counterpart that it creates its own exciting potentialities for interpretative and technical endeavour. A whole new rhetorical language has grown naturally out of this tendency. Trying to impose the outcomes on a modern band, with all the inevitable resulting compromises, strikes me as hopelessly misguided.

The point was brought home to me recently when I happened to hear three utterly contrasting recordings of the opening chorus of Bach’s (pictured) St Matthew Passion, a double-orchestra work beloved of string players. The first was in the grand manner dating from the 1960s, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Otto Klemperer. He takes nearly twelve minutes over it, entirely appropriate for the kind and number of instruments at his disposal, which had developed out of the legato cantabile tradition. Klemperer relishes every pedal-pointed suspension and encourages the strings to ‘sing’; when Bach allows the temporary sunshine of G major to break through E minor clouds, he subtly ‘magics’ the moment with a heart-rending espressivo simplicity. It might not be remotely what Bach had in mind, but the profound emotional intensity that results is written into the score for all to see and hear.

By comparison, John Eliot Gardiner’s period-instrument recording with the English Baroque Soloists, which clocks in at seven minutes, is like a breath of fresh musical air. Employing playing and singing techniques, articulation and phrasing that Bach might have encouraged (if he’d had such skilful musicians at his disposal), Gardiner achieves a moving spirituality by sustaining long musical paragraphs on waves of ear-tweaking textural interplay. The ingenuous radiance and subtle inflections of the resulting sound world create the sensation of divine purity sustained in the face of overwhelming tragedy. It may not possess the emotional or physical clout of Klemperer’s reading, yet its ecclesiastical intimacy and timbral nuancing explore expressive dimensions effectively closed to a modern band.

Hearing Riccardo Chailly’s ‘informed’ recording with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on modern instruments – which races through the chorus in under six minutes – I found myself in an interpretative no-man’s-land. Even if one can get past the sensation of this remarkable music rolling by with an almost jaunty, gigue-like skip in its tail, when Bach’s contrapuntal detailing and lacerating harmonic suspensions become subsumed in a moto perpetuo of rolling forward momentum, it is difficult not to feel emotionally short-changed. If Klemperer lives through every phrase as though it was a metaphor for life itself and Gardiner creates a touching intimacy that irresistibly draws the listener into the unfolding drama, Chailly unintentionally falls between two stools by inhibiting the natural expressive potential of modern instruments while attempting to make them behave in ways more appropriate to their ancient counterparts.

This article is published in the May issue of The Strad, out now. Subscribe to The Strad or download our digital edition as part of a 30-day free trial.

http://thestrad.com/latest/debate/histo ... -misguided

[Diapason]

The examples notwithstanding, I don't really agree with the premise here at all. Historically informed performance isn't a binary option, either on or off, and I can't imagine for one minute why the knowledge and ideas gained over the last 50 years shouldn't be used to enlighten any performance. No, I'm not buying this article. One bad performance is not reason enough to condemn an entire approach.

[Jose Echenique]

Harnoncourt has proven that it´s possible to apply HIP to modern orchestras for quite some time now, at least since he started conducting the Concertgebouw over 30 years ago.
On the other hand I think it´s quite impossible to conduct today Bach like Klemperer and Furtwängler did 60 years ago, not after Harnoncourt and Leonhardt. When we hear the Klemperer Matthew´s Passion or the Beecham´s Messiah we hear conductors totally convinced of what they were doing, there was really no other option back then, they were assertive and exuberant in their baroque romanticism, but we lost that XIX Century innocence, now we KNOW that it is wrong, no matter how much we miss the Brucknerian ponderousness (and I know some who still do).

[Diapason]

I was thinking about this more afterwards, and specifically how it might apply to me. To take the idea to its logical conclusion, it would be a waste of time my trying to play music from Bach's era (or earlier) in any kind of appropriately stylistic way on any organ in Ireland, and indeed pretty pointless anywhere that has an electric blower installed. It's a strange notion indeed.

Jose, I agree completely that the genie is out of the bottle here and you can't just put it back in. As I've said before, in my early internet days I happened across many people who HATED the whole HIP thing with a vengeance. No matter what, they considered the Klemperers of this world to be "correct" and any effort at utilising historical techniques an abomination. I could never understand that view. Surely the more we know, the more tools we have in our interpretative arsenal, the better we can be at expressing and enlightening the music on the page?

[Jose Echenique]

I also know quite a few who still think HIP a joke. They buy the Neville Marriner explanation that if Mozart had known modern plumbing he would have use it. Of course he would have use it, and would have love to play a Steinway, but the fact is that he didn´t, and compose for the music and conventions of his time.
In the 70´s they were still saying that those who performed on period instruments was because they were not good enough for modern instruments, but that was silly considering that for example, Anner Bylsma was first cello of the Concertgebouw.
It all comes down to the fact that yes, Bach and Mozart sound best when played in the instruments they knew.

[Seán]

I also know quite a few who still think HIP a joke. They buy the Neville Marriner explanation that if Mozart had known modern plumbing he would have use it. Of course he would have use it, and would have love to play a Steinway, but the fact is that he didn´t, and compose for the music and conventions of his time. .

It all comes down to the fact that yes, Bach and Mozart sound best when played in the instruments they knew.

I agree. Mozart and Bach before him wrote for the instrumentation and the small ensembles of their time. Had they had the luxury of writing for larger ensembles with modern instruments I would suggest that we might be listening to entirley differnt arrangements of their music, far more elaborate for sure.

In the 70´s they were still saying that those who performed on period instruments was because they were not good enough for modern instruments, but that was silly considering that for example, Anner Bylsma was first cello of the Concertgebouw.

There are so many wonderful ensembles playing today that demonstrate that that contention is palpably absurd.

There are people on other music boards who have a propensity to sneer at performances on period instruments, I am inclined to give them a fools pardon.

Harnoncourrt and HIP, I must return to that subject later.