Bach performed on the intended instruments.

Dear Ew,

When I attended Bach's Saint Matthew Passion in Hereford earlier this year in Hereord, I tried out a Baroque Bass bow, and if the difference is as big on a fiddle, then you are in for a shock! All those dotted rhythms are much earier with a lighter bow, though the tone is different. Not so strong, but very nice. [I knew the player and she was delighted to let me have a go after the performance. I could still play, even on a full Baroque set-up! Amazing! It was ten years since we had played in a concert together. How the time had flown].

ATB from Fredrik

Norman,

Fascinating post. However, for me Rostropovich still tops the list (though it has to be said that I haven't heard the other two). I find it so deeply emotive. Of course, one could argue there is a lot of Rostropovich in there, but it works for me. That said, I do agree with you, in a funny way, in that it's not a disc I return to too often. But when I do....

I'm also very fond of Heinrich Schiff, but I'm sure that's in part from memories of him in the concert hall (albeit in other repertoire) where he is one of the most charismatic performers I have heard.

When Poul comes along, he'll no doubt mention the very fine Morten Zeuthen recording he was kind enough to give me. I think it isn't widely available, but I can hear why he is so fond of it. It's a period instrument reading that might be worth adding to your collection if you come across it.


regards, Tam

quote:

Originally posted by Fredrik_Fiske:
I tried out a Baroque Bass bow, and if the difference is as big on a fiddle, then you are in for a shock!

Yeah, so I gather! I think Menuhin's initial response was one of shock when he first tried it - he said something about it being like riding on high springs! In the Bach Sonatas and Partitas the biggest difference is the possibility of multiple stopping - proper four note chords. It all sounds very weird and wonderful to me, but I really must give it a try! (It might be just a case of what I'm used to, but I actually rather like hearing the chords played broken - especially in the chaconne. It always sounds a tad odd to me when I hear piano transcriptions, although I would have a gut feeling harpsichordists break them too.)

I'm an Alfredo Campoli man myself......should I get me coat then?....

His Tchaikovsky vc is magnificent....he used to describe playing it as "...a bit of a boxing match....".

Graeme

On the solo Cello Suites - I have the Rostropovich set. It was one of the first classical CDs I bought, in the early days of my Britannia Music Club. It still sounds very fine, with wonderful recorded sound - but, with the benefit of many hours of listening to Bach, I can see that some people might regard it as a bit "fruity". I'm looking to get a HIP-er set and have been eyeing up Wispelwey on Channel Records (they've also released Rachel Podger's very fine Solo Violin Sonatats and Partitas).

quote:

To me, Bach's music is so transcendenory and musical beyond belief, the medium through which it is played is almost irrelevant.

I kind of agree with this - one of my posts earlier in the thread argues that the music is so transcendent, that it effectively transcends Bach himself (i.e. his intentions regarding how it should be played). It's somewhat analogous to the interpretation of Quantum Theory transcending even Einstein's own understanding of it, in spite of the fact that he was one of the theory's founding fathers.

Dear Droo,

I have been thinking about this transcending nature of the music, and I honestly cannot quite find a way of perfectly putting it into words, but here is a rough attempt.

I am sure Bach wrote a huge range of music, some of which is beyond complete comprehension. In this group of works I would put the Art Of Fugue. I love it, but it does not have any suggestion of narrative or even particularly an emtional thrust. It uplifts me in a way that comes from somthing completely subliminal.

It is music that I can listen to with pleasure when I am in a vile mood, and after an hour plus, I have been away in a better place and returned a happier soul... That is a mystery, but it is how it affects me. For years I found it a forbiding fortress, which I was outside, and not able to find the doorway into it. I cannot even define the moment when it first revealed itself to me as uplifting in the very best sense, but certainly after reading the score, and several further listens!

Of the popular pieces of course the Suites for Orchestra, and Concertos are very direct and directly appealing. In the middle come the keyboard works, including the Partitas, French and English Suites [I have both piano and harpsichord versions, though the piano ones come out almost as rarely as the blue moon] have directly communicative movements and some which are very not obvious at all, but this mix is a wonderful one where the moment stands still as every fibre in me is fixed by the music. Suddenly one travels the cosmos if one lets the music carry one.

It has been a strange thing, but in the more popular works which have a most clear emotional thrust, I find that HIP performances are often deeply captivating, but not the only way, and I have several favourite performances that hardly nod at the kind of really historically informed approach at all. Indeed I am inclined to think in these works the performers conception of the larger thrust in the music is more important than what instruments they play - JM Pires is sublime with a small modern orchestra and piano in three of the "Piano" Concertos!

But in the more indirect pieces, I find that I enjoy most naturally and directly the performances that stick closely to Baroque style in both the instrument used and performance practice. This varying approach sounds like a sort of lazy fudging of the issue, but it has been why I could not answer the point in a very short order. It is no more clear cut than anything about music from a genius like Bach.

To be fair the Goldbergs have aspects of both the popular and indirect styles of Bach, and once one seems to crack the indirect, then I think it becomes easier with a harpsichord than the piano. The Cannons [every third variation] go much better on a harpsichord, and I think are the crux of comprehending the long term structural momentum of the piece, which gives it a heart-achingly powerful emotional drive. That Bach avoids the implied last Cannon, but inserts [in the last variation] not a Cannon, but a wonderfully human and humourous Quodlibet based on popular folk songs - barely related to anything previous - we see a big sense of the siblime and the almost ridiculous all mingled in the work! I bet Bach was chuckling to himself when he did that! Yet in the context of the build up from the great French Overture variation [which is variation sisxteeen], there is a sort of binding build in tension right to the end, which is so gently and humorously dismantled before the final statement of the Aria, which comes like a realisation that life goes on regardless of moments of supreme joy or even sadness. It is the most warm hearted music I know from any composer, and yet its conception is essntially based on a tongue in cheek poke at the immense and intellectually controlled architecture that preceeds it. This is an example of Bach employing a massive intellect to build tension and then to bring about a happy emotional release by undermining it with a humorous stroke!

There are two performances I know that bring this out most cleary: Pierre Hantaii [Opus 111 records], and Helmut Walcha [EMI]. It is patly a question of the impossibilty of exagerating in the preceeding sections [on a harpsichord] that brings such a contrast to the sheer exhuberance in the Quodlibet, and the clear calm of the finale statement of the Aria at the end.

The pianist is tempted to use the variable dynamic control and long sustain of the instrument to make more of the music than was really entended in the build up, and then the releease seems just one more piece of splendour. On the harpsichord the build up is very contolled in the sense that Bach had written the dynamic and the emotional rise in temperature over the preceeding variations into the very music, and no excessively slow tempo is possible in the Adagio variation [no 25] for example because it cannot work because there are too few nots and not enough sustain in the old instrument to allow for exageration and de-contextualisation from that which surrounds it, so that the movement takes on a signifcance in proportion to its place within the structure, and not as a special case of itself. The very instrument that Bach intended brings out his point - tension and release - with an inevitability which seems to elude pianists tempted to use the apparently fuller possibilities of their instrument. Indeed if they did not take advantage of their instruments potentila then it would be compelling to suggest that they should have used a harpsichord in the first place. This is something that might be observed of the particualr style of Schnabel's piano playing in many of his recordings. They sound like an attempt to narrow the piano into a harpsichord. Interestingly Schnabel is someimes compared to Gould, but I don't see any parallel at all, even though this point is made by respected critics of piano playing.

So in some respects I do think that Bach transcends his instrument in his writing, but not in quite the sense that I suspect you are getting at. [Correct me if I am wrong in that thought]. Not many people would comment on what a nice harpsichord was used [for playing Bach] so much as what an amazing piece it is, but it still is more devasting on a harpsichord than piano because the emotional structure is built into the music such that it comes out naturally on the harpsichord, because of its very limitations, so very beautifully catered for in the very notes of the composition.

The notes are about half the story of course. All the nuance of rhythm, and drive [or dissipation of tension] in the pulse are not stated uneqvivically, and could not be adequately stated without casting the fluid flow of it in the deadweight of stone! The music is much more than the printed notes. It has to be alive, have a beating heart, and be natural. thsi can only come out in great performance, or a good reading of the score. There is a centre to it, but finding that has eluded many artists in actual performance, even by very great artists in other repertoire.

Sorry for the length of that, but it is almost the expression of ideas that have been been brewing for a very long time in me...

ATB from Fredrik

On the subject of authentic Bach, I've just done the decent thing and ordered this:



Sounds pretty special from the samples, and of course it's played by the love and light of my life, Viktoria Mullova! I'm looking forward to this...

EW

EW - definitely a disc of the year thus far. All her recordings on Onyx are quite special.

Bizarrely, there always seem to be more warmth in her recordings than when I have seen her in concert.

Dantone's recordings of the WTC on ARTS are excellent (and feature the most beautiful harpsichord sound I have ever heard).

quote:

Originally posted by Huwge:
EW - definitely a disc of the year thus far. All her recordings on Onyx are quite special.

Yes, I've got high hopes for this. The samples sounded marvelous, and you don't have to twist my arm too hard to make me listen to Vika!

Fredrik, a long overdue (it's been one of those weeks) reply to your thoughtful post on page three of this thread. Somewhat anti-climactically, I find that I have little intelligent to say in reply.

Your post is highly evocative of the wonder and mystery of Bach, and of great music, in general. I liked your description of the AoF as a forbidding fortress, since that's how it felt to me. I banged my head against the wall of that fortress for a long time until I heard a version for organ, and the music began to click into place - not that I felt that I finally understood it, mind - it was more a case of learning to enjoy, or appreciate its perplexing nature.

I also enjoyed your account of the Goldberg's structure, and especially of Bach's use of the quodlibet - the humour of it making the serious point that we must not take ourselves too seriously, and that life goes on in the midst of moments of transcendence. I can see how that structural understanding could underpin a preference for performance on the harpsichord.

Do I agree with you on that specific point? In a way, I don't think it really matters, as it was never my intention to dissuade you, or anyone else, of their hard won beliefs - God forbid that everyone should think the same way as I do! For my part, I have every intention of picking up Hantai's Goldbergs. I expect to enjoy it, but suspect that the majority of my Goldbergs will remain piano-bound, as I think it sounds "nicer" (I told you this would be anti-climactic!).

My only other thought is to extend the landscape analogy, in the light of your post. To recap, the main elements of the analogy so far are:

music = landscape
composer = explorer/pioneer
musical score = map

At the risk of overreaching, I'm now inclined to add that the musical instruments used in performance are analogous to vehicles for travelling through the musical landscape. The performer is the driver, and the audience are his or her passengers. This helps your case, as it could be argued that the musical terrain suits some vehicles (instruments) more than others. Likewise, one would not be advised to cross the Gobi desert on a skateboard (though it might be an "interesting" experience to try it).

No doubt there are problems with this analogy, but it seems worthy of further exploration. It holds out the promise of middle ground between two opposing viewpoints, neither of which are attractive to me:

1. The composer's decision (plus contemporary practice) is final when it comes to the interpretation of music - I find this position unduly restrictive.

2. Anything goes! The composer's opinions don't matter at all - This is the trap that post-modern aesthetics falls into in proclaiming "the death of the author"; I find the position intrinsically implausible, and pernicious in its tendency to put all interprtations on the same level.

As in so many other areas, it's the middle way for me on this issue!

Dear Droo!

I am thinking through the fog of an impromptu party arrived at ealier through a foot of water in the least flooded street in Worceter connecting the two halves of the city either side of the Severn! first call to get some beer, and second to first foot it!

Th Police took precisely no notice of one mad Pole and and one mad Englishman, striding purposefully towards the torrent, as others were told not to! We have returmed as un-noticed as we went, completely ignored by the Constabulary!

So I read you post with pleasure, and you are causing me to think frelshy on a subject I love, without worrying that we may or may not agree, but rather in a hope that we will enjoy the converstaion and grow in an undertanding, but which may or may not much alter our relative positions.

Sorry not to be more compst mental [compus mentus], but there are times! Zyviets, and Fosters!

ATB from Fredrik

Glad to be of service! In terms of my analysis:

quote:

PS: On one level you are absolutely right in the sense that all too many permances are still managed without, apparently, the most rudimantary understanding of what was meant by the rather precise notation of musical Graces [including Trills], and not only by Bach, though JSB was punctilious about what he did intend. He left a table of his Grace notation and their correct rendereing, though this does not vary except in small detail from tables laid down by French composers in the immediately precedeing decades- especially from the Couperins.

The Modern [inverted] Trill still had not completely superceded the Baroque conventions by the time Schubert wrote the Trout Quintet [note the Trilling in the Violin Part in the Fourth, Variation Movement], so we may well consider that an awful lot of Trilling performed nowadays is actually wrong, and demonstarably so!

and, especially, the last sentence, puts you much closer to position 1 than you are to position 2, or even the middle position (if it exists!). Or so it seems..

Dear droo,

I am sure that you are right on the surface level. I take the blueprint of what is written, and what we can define as what is meant, as the aim, before the work of the player can really start, and which is to bring out the intended living aspect of the msuic, the heart-beat, the pulse, the emotional and sublimated aspects of it.

These aspects concern the way the basic framework is nuanced, rhythmially, in terms of drive or relaxation of the pulse, eeven the ideal registration on a harpsichord or organ for example, or dynamic shading on the piano.

But ever the pragmatists, the choice of instrument is not quite an absolute for me as my earlier posts have suggested. What I see as the prefereable choice is not the only satisfactory one.

The magic exists beyond the written notation or even the actual mechanical and technical act of perfoming the written notes on the instrument, but I do see the limits of a fairly strick adherence to the correct instrument and reading of the notation as the starting point, alone. If that is all the performances does, then it is likely to be fearfully dull! I prefer a performance which retains the musical spirit, even if some of the style is not perfect, or even the wrong instrument is used! There are performances which not only get all the stylistsic aspects right, and also speak ata very humaine level, and these are the ones I would hope people will eventually discover on records and find in concert halls...

ATB from Fredrik