Unfaithful to the Score?

[Gauk]

Stokowski was infamous for making changes to scores, and Gliere 3 is perhaps the most infamous case.

The most egregious case I can recall other than this was an early recording of Raff 3 that cut about half to two-thirds of the finale, totally altering the structure, and again, no mention of it on the sleeve notes.

Remember also that 40 years ago it was normal to make cuts in Rachmaninoff 2, which no-one would dream of doing today (I think).

[Ilja]

I think it's far more complicated than Thal asserts. For example, I personally can accept as valid both Chailly's and Klemperer's wildly divergent views of Beethoven 3, but can they both actually be right, objectively speaking?

Per definition, there is no objectivity in interpretation. The richness of various interpretations, in my view, is as crucial to a living music scene as a diverse repertoire.

[arpeggio]

There's infidelity to the score, and infidelity to the composer's intentions.. the two are not necessarily the same. I'm sure there are people who play the notes exactly as written, and it doesn't come out how the composer intended. I think attitudes have changed because fewer performers are composers or have an insight into the compositional process.

[Rob H]

Well, the part that he left in still contains a quote from the secondary theme of the first movement!  And, knowing the entire piece, I heatedly disagree with his assessment!

Oh absolutely! I don't have his notes readily to hand but I seem to remember him saying that he sat down at the keyboard and played through the concertos from the opening of number 1 and despairing at not finding a tune till he got to this delightful finale. When I got his double LP this was the first Scharwenka work that I'd heard. Nowadays I'm surprised that RL didn't find the grandly uber-romantic first concerto to his taste - he would have been glorious in it. Equally surprised about the second - my favourite of the lot. When will we get a decent modern recording of this piece??
Sorry to go slightly off topic.
Rob

[petershott@btinternet.com]

Ah, but it's a little more complex than that! Just think: how often do you find yourself in a discussion, and whilst you are perfectly convinced you've got hold of a good idea you're nonetheless conscious of a slight fumbling or imprecision in expressing it? Someone else listens to your attempts, and then says "So what you're really saying is.....". And you exclaim "Absolutely right" and think to yourself 'Now why didn't I express it like that...it's now so much clearer'.

Isn't it very much like that in the performance of music?

Two examples. First, I've been listening to the Chandos discs of Barry Douglas playing Brahms. I was at first reluctant to buy them because, unusually, Ballades, Intermezzi, Rhapsodies or whatever belonging to a single Opus number are not collected together but scattered either across the disc or between different discs. At first that struck me as rather stupid. But actually it works in that it forces you to concentrate on a single piece rather than as hearing it within a whole group within an Opus number.

Now the point I want to make here is that these works are altogether familiar (to me at least!). Douglas is very obviously playing exactly the same score as all those other near infinite (well, not quite infinite!) good pianists playing Brahms. But heavens, listen to it! Douglas is admittedly aided and abetted by fabulous Chandos recordings (in the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge), but his playing is utterly distinctive. I'm finding it analogous to an old familiar painting that has had the cobwebs brushed off and stands before you now clear and distinct and brimming with life. To my ears Douglas's Brahms is similar. Doubtless it is all a matter of the spaces between notes, the intensity of each note....and all the tiny minuscule details that are not apparent to the ears. And I very much doubt if Douglas himself is conscious of these things - he is simply playing Brahms in the way he thinks it should be performed. He didn't surely decide to 'interpret' Brahms in such and such a way. If you also asked him, 'Did you deliberately decide to be faithful to Brahms' intentions?' he'd also be lost for words (or might think you were being impertinent!)

Second example: different performances of the Raff symphonies by conductors such as Stadlmair, d'Avalos, Hermann, Albert, and now Jarvi (and a few others on my shelves). There's not one of them that one could pronounce 'wrong' or 'incorrect interpretation' or whatever. However Jarvi's way with 2 brings that symphony to vivid life in a way that to me isn't quite matched by others. For me it 'works' or affects me in a similar way to Douglas with Brahms. With such performances I've begun to feel that I've grasped the piece in a way that I haven't experienced before (although I have enormously enjoyed and relished the works on many previous and precious occasions).

So, what am I getting at? It is partly that terms like 'interpretation', 'fidelity to a composer's intentions' etc etc all seem somehow to be wide of the mark. If I whispered to Barry Douglas just before he emerged on stage, 'Now how are you going to interpret the Ballade in B major Op. 10 No. 4?', I'm sure the poor man wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what I was asking.

What we're talking about is simply good, or not so good, performances. Or am I just being far too simple-minded?

[Martin Eastick]

Oh absolutely! I don't have his notes readily to hand but I seem to remember him saying that he sat down at the keyboard and played through the concertos from the opening of number 1 and despairing at not finding a tune till he got to this delightful finale. When I got his double LP this was the first Scharwenka work that I'd heard. Nowadays I'm surprised that RL didn't find the grandly uber-romantic first concerto to his taste - he would have been glorious in it. Equally surprised about the second - my favourite of the lot. When will we get a decent modern recording of this piece??
Sorry to go slightly off topic.
Rob

Re Scharwenka Op56 - which I am also unashamed to admit to be my favourite - does anyone have any idea if Naxos are looking any further having done the Op82? And my apologies for going slighly off-topic here but much as I admired RL, I could never agree with his opinion here!

[Paul Barasi]

I was interested by JimL's post from yesterday on p1: the alternative ending to Reinecke's PC3:1. Maybe he was a century ahead of the game if the recent proliferation of alternative ending movies is anything to go by.  I know very little of Reinecke but suspect he's a bit of a sleeping beauty (given CPO are about to release his work of that name) and though he may lapse into the unengaging and backward-looking, he seems to be a class act poorly served by leading performers (I'm not sure Alan makes much of the Tasmanians). 

I'm much more familiar with revised works than alternative endings, e.g. preferring the original Bruckner 3 and Tchaikovsky Romeo & Juliet and especially the unsung Symphonic Poem in 2 Parts to the revised Mahler 1. But on being unfaithful to the score, it is in Horenstein's superb Mahler 1 finale, just going into the signal triumph of victory standing horns bells peel chorale motif passage at 20'26'' that the conductor rewrites briefly to pluck out a striking brass pizzicato. Of course this symphony's ending is sourced from Rott's unsung Suite in E and he in turn may just have been inspired by Handel's Hallelujah. If so, we have an unfaithful conductor improving on Handel-Rott-Mahler: following in their ever-increasing footsteps with this great theme – brave and not bad going, eh?

Of course, performers must be true to the music and can't wander off whenever they like. But what do we want: ubiquitous, monotonous conformity by ritualised purists, slaves to the fidelity of the score, or to have an occasional and carefully-chosen chance to be pleasantly surprised by creative risk-taking that enhances the music?   

Anyway, going back to alternative endings actually written by the composer, if we have someone who knows a bit about this, perhaps they'll start up a new topic on it.

[eschiss1]

Reminds me of the problem with Liszt's Dante symphony, which according to Walker has two endings that aren't alternatives exactly but are- well, the situation seems a bit confusing.

[mbhaub]

I believe firmly that it is the duty of any performer to represent the composer's wishes as well as can be done, and that means no tampering, do no damage. The magnitude of the music sins from highest to lowest:

1) Cuts. Nowadays there is NO excuse that will ever make this acceptable to me. I don't care if you are Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy or whoever: you do not cut out small parts of Scheherazade, 1812, Rachmaninoff 2, Tchaikovsky Manfred. The recorded legacy is loaded with examples of egregious cuts that still irritate when I hear them. A few weeks ago I had to suffer through a Tchaikovksy violin concerto with every single one of the Auer cuts. The treatment given to Rococco Variations is even worse. And Manfred! You could write a book on what liberties conductors have taken with that score. I should mention that omitting a repeat is generally acceptable and not a cut. Unless they ruin the structure.

2) Reorchestration. Ok, so Prokofieff wasn't the greatest orchestral writer of all time. But George Szell's tampering with the trumpet parts in the 5th symphony made it much worse. Speaking of Szell, that ridiculous cymbal crash in the Tchaikovsky 5th ruins an otherwise fine recording. He also rewrote the string parts in the New World. I know why, but Dvorak was the composing genius. And then there are the clods that mess up Scheherazade with a) an added xylophone part or b) writing one violin part up an octave. Rimsky knew his business. don't do it. But then there are a couple of times where a retouching is ok and that's Beethoven 5 and 9, where horns are added or substituted for other instruments (bassoon) where it's obvious Beethoven would have done it but he didn't have modern horns. But the last few bars of the 9th with the added trumpet scale (Stokowski) is awful.

3) Extreme tempo alterations. This is more directed at conductors that I have the misfortune to play under. But on recordings there is a tendency to make some music into Concertos for Orchestra and the music gets lost because some nut with a baton is trying to show off. Prokofieff's Classical Symphony is an example. So is the Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture. Why do some conductors (Gergiev, Solti to name only two) think they have to go so fast? Some of the HIP crowd have similarly ruined Beethoven.

4) Stupid expressions. Barbirolli right before the last note of the Franck symphony - a stupid pause. Paray in Rimsky-Korsakov Capriccio Espagnol makes similar luftpauses that disrupt the flow. Dudamel ruins the 2nd movement of Mahler 1 in the same dumb way. COnstantin Silvestri makes a mess of the fanfare that opens Tchaik 4. I can't even describe what he does - but it is so wrong.

5) And then there is the John Lanchberry Effect awarded to composers who are not very good, so in a bid for immortality add to an existing masterwork to get their name in it. Listen to his Nutcracker on EMI and you'll know it when you hear it. He takes some other Tchaik piece, orchestrates it, and adds it to the score. It's awful.

[TerraEpon]

Actually, many years ago in the fledgling days of the net, there was a site that dealt in classical MIDI files, and allowed composers to upload their own. I put up my completed stuff and a couple years later I actually got contacted by someone who wanted to play a piece I wrote for clarinet and piano in a recital.
He ended up doing it....but he cut the last few measures off in the name of it being 'better than way' (perhaps because the perpetual motion effect is stopped), and it really bummed me out because I really liked the way I ended it. He may have been a professional (I believe he was a university professor) but it just seemed wrong for him to do that and not represent what I wrote the way I wrote it.

[Gareth Vaughan]

It's really only since the mid-1900s that the score has come to be treated as some sort of sacred document.

Not entirely true. Hans von Bulow was known to respect absolutely the letter of the score - and his performances as conductor and pianist were lauded all over the world.  I would refer those interested to to Alan Walker's recent biography of Bulow (OUP, 2009)

[Gauk]

A couple of things here:

1) What about first movement repeats? These are still routinely cut, whatever the composer asked for. Now, in many cases, composers just added them because that was what 19th C audiences expected (and they are cut today because 21st C audiences find them superfluous). But in some cases, and I'm thinking first of Schubert here, the repeat is integral to the movement structure, and a routine cut loses something important.

2) There are cases, I think, where a great composer can wilfully override a composer's tempo indication and get away with it. I'm thinking here of Koussevitsky in Prokofiev 5, where he handles the return to the scherzo after the second trio by totally ignoring the accelerando and going straight in at full tilt, but gets away with it where a lesser conductor would not. Likewise some Furtwangler performances.

[bulleid_pacific]

First movement repeats - these should seldom be removed.  Removing them usually upsets the balance of the movement.  If you do it to Mendelssohn 4, a whole lead-back passage disappears in a puff of smoke...

Re-orchestrations - very occasionally.  What about all those triangle rolls in the Rott Symphony in E?  Once noticed (and it doesn't take much) they're really intrusive.

[mbhaub]

There are some first movement repeats that are almost never done, the most unknown one is the first movement of the Rachmaninoff 2nd. The only really complete recording I know of is Zinman's on Telarc, but there may be others. But anymore, I honestly prefer my Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Dvorak and most other without those long repeats. I've heard it all so often.

[semloh]

I think it's far more complicated than Thal asserts. For example, I personally can accept as valid both Chailly's and Klemperer's wildly divergent views of Beethoven 3, but can they both actually be right, objectively speaking?

For me, talk about objectivity and validity are highly problematic. They become especially difficult to sustain when a work is played on instruments other than those for which it was composed. Unlike most classical music fans (I gather), I adore Tomita's synthesizer account of Pictures at an Exhibition - it's dramatic, clever, amusing, and moving, by turns, and to me it's better than the original piano or orchestral versions.     To choose a less radical example, how can we use Vivaldi's score to develop validity criteria which would apply to Richter's recent re-working of The Four Seasons?  It's wonderful in my view, and has been widely praised, but it's light years from Vivaldi's score. So, I find the concept of a valid performance problematic indeed! For me, it's much more a case of whether I enjoy it, whether it moves me, or whether it illuminates the music, rather than its fidelity to the score. So, I think we should look for validity criteria not in the score but in the effect the performance has on listeners.

In any case, I suspect that most of us would agree that translating a score into a performance always entails interpretation, and that this can vary from occasion to occasion. Mahler's comment comes to mind ... (to paraphrase) 'this way of playing the music is right today, but tomorrow it will be a different matter '.