Meddling conductors

[mbhaub]

I've been having a lively discussion with some fellow orchestra players about which is the "best" Scheherazade out there. (I know, get a life.) But one player just insists that the Ormandy (Sony) is the one. Not for me, I informed him. He takes a big cut in the 3rd movement, and tampers with the endings of I and IV, and retouches the string bowings. Then there are those who loved the Spano (Telarc), but no, I insisted: he damages the score by taking the violin part up an octave right after the climax of III. He's not alone: lots of them do it. I patiently explain that for me, I want a conductor to respect the composer and the score, and to make changes like this is like putting grafitti on the Mona Lisa. With a lot of music there are common practices of making changes, like in Beethoven 5, Tchaikovsky 6, Schumann 1-4 and so on. How does anyone else feel about this? How sacred is the score? The conductor may have the right to make changes, but should he? There is some music that I've never heard altered, like Elgar I or II, Brahms 1-4 etc. By the way, I left the conversation adamant that the best Scheherazades remain Kondrashin, Reiner, Monteux, and Beecham, and that my no. 1 choice is still the Mackerras on Telarc with the LSO.

[Alan Howe]

One could argue that all conductors are meddlers in different ways. My personal hate-figure is Roger Norrington and the vibrato-less string playing of the orchestras he conductors. I think I'd actually rather have someone meddle with the score (provided I knew about it - so reviewers need to wake up!) than listen to Norrington's ghastly meddlings with string sound.

Of course, I'd rather that the score was left alone...

[TerraEpon]

I much prefer that things are done as the composer intended, especially in regards to cutting. One time someone found a piece of mine online and actually preformed it at a recital....he ended up cutting off the last few bars because he thought it made more sense. I /hated/ that.
Things like slight range changes or dropping/adding in instruments to help balance or even help facility/sound, however, I can certainly accept as often making things better. Using a bass clarinet in Tchaikovsky's 6th for instance makes sense. Doubling winds in Beethoven symphonies to help balance them better? Why not?

(And incidentally, todoy I got one of the best Sheheazades I've heard....and it was done on piano duet. Goldstone & Clemmow, FAR FAR superior to the Linn recording from a few years ago)

[chill319]

I've actually felt sorry for string section members in orchestras like SWR Radio Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, listening to them labor to do Norrington's bidding.

Regarding score touch-ups, the devil is always in the details. I knew a musician who happened to be a professional oboe player and copyist. While he was extracting parts from a new Copland score, he called the composer to let him know that a particular passage was not playable on the oboe as written. Copland responded angrily, citing Beethoven as an example of a composer who challenged instrumentalists and instrument makers to do better. Is it any wonder, then, that the black ink in some scores must be taken as an indication of general intention rather than as meaningful Urtext?

It's hard to imagine Scheherazade as one of those scores, though. Rimsky was such a craftsman. More likely some influential conductor -- Stokowski, say -- requested the tessitura shift ninety years ago and it caught on, as did Stokowski's grouping of first and second violins together on the left. A plusher sound, to be sure, but a loss of the antiphonal effect some composers may have had in mind.

This problem will not go away. I saw a Cistercian document from 850 years ago that criticized monks who were partaking of specific herbal beverages to alter their voices and make very high, ornamented chanting easier.

[Delicious Manager]

One could argue that all conductors are meddlers in different ways. My personal hate-figure is Roger Norrington and the vibrato-less string playing of the orchestras he conductors. I think I'd actually rather have someone meddle with the score (provided I knew about it - so reviewers need to wake up!) than listen to Norrington's ghastly meddlings with string sound.

Of course, I'd rather that the score was left alone...

What Norrington is actually doing is going back to the sound that would have been expected when the music was written. One could argue that it's EVERYBODY ELSE that has been meddling, with their new-fangled vibrato-obsessed string techniques. There are even some extant recordings from the beginning of the 20th century that show quite clearly that vibrato has not always been de riguer among string players; it being a relatively recent phenomenon.

[Alan Howe]

What Norrington is actually doing is going back to the sound that would have been expected when the music was written. One could argue that it's EVERYBODY ELSE that has been meddling, with their new-fangled vibrato-obsessed string techniques. There are even some extant recordings from the beginning of the 20th century that show quite clearly that vibrato has not always been de riguer among string players; it being a relatively recent phenomenon.

There may be some truth in that, but it's a contested view at best and just plain silly at worst. 'Authentic' doesn't have to mean as extreme a result as Norrington produces. Take Mackerras' Brahms, for example: so much more musical than Norrington's.

This, it seems to me, is an appropriate repost to Norrington's silliness:

<<Equally, we can reject the speculation of Sir Roger Norrington, who tells us that the continuous vibrato was first established in modern times, not even the result of a slow evolution, but a mere fad. Norrington writes,

"What was new in the 20th century was the idea of a continuous vibrato, used on every note, however short".

Upon reading further, we are most astonished (and heartily amused) to learn that "the great Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler seems to have started the fashion, drawing on the style of cafe musicians and Hungarian and Gypsy fiddlers."(!)

As it turns out, Norrington's statement about Kreisler is lifted (without acknowledgement) straight from Carl Flesch's The Art of Violin Playing [12], but the part about the Gypsies is just pure baloney. None of it makes any sense. To begin with, it is not possible to achieve vibrato on "every note, no matter how short" (one is truly surprised to learn that a major conductor would be unaware of this simple technical fact.) But that Fritz Kreisler transmitted his "continuous" vibrato to us from Hungarian and Gypsy fiddlers is the very height of unwashed speculation.

Kreisler studied with Hellmesberger at the Vienna Conservatory and with Massart at the Paris Conservatory. His technique was clearly formed when he made his début at the age of nine, possibly before he ever entered a Hungarian café and decidedly before his mama would have allowed him to spend much time with the Gypsies. And apart from an inappropriate ethnic fantasy, how could Norrington "know" that Gypsies and Hungarians of the late 19th century used "continuous vibrato" in violin playing? After a hard day polishing their earrings and telling each other's fortunes, did they then also drink too much wine and dance the night away behind their wagons?>>
http://www.soundpostonline.com/archive/fall2003/page4.htm

[JimL]

IIRC, I believe it was Henryk Wieniawski who first taught the technique of using continuous vibrato in violin playing in a pedagogical context.  However, to claim that it was utterly unknown or unused before him is somewhat suspect...

[khorovod]

What Norrington is actually doing is going back to the sound that would have been expected when the music was written. One could argue that it's EVERYBODY ELSE that has been meddling, with their new-fangled vibrato-obsessed string techniques. There are even some extant recordings from the beginning of the 20th century that show quite clearly that vibrato has not always been de riguer among string players; it being a relatively recent phenomenon.

There may be some truth in that, but it's a contested view at best and just plain silly at worst. 'Authentic' doesn't have to mean as extreme a result as Norrington produces. Take Mackerras' Brahms, for example: so much more musical than Norrington's.

I really enjoyed Norrington's Brahms cycle (and still do) though I would not say it is the only or the last word. I'd hope on a forum for "open-minded" music lovers that there could be just as much tolerance for differing interpretations of music as well as for unsung composers, it's not like anyone is forced to buy or listen to Norrington in this repertoire and, yes okay, he splits the critics/listeners down the middle but the flip side of that is that many people, professionals as well as simple "amateur" listeners find his point of view musical and satisfying. It saddens me to see a respected and talented musician dismissed as silly just because he doesn't conform to one (or more) person's view of how something should be played and it saddens me to see a rather facetiously toned and not especially well written article invoked as some sort of evidence or justification for the dismissal of him as a conductor. I'm not sure why he causes such very strong feelings when the repertoire he records is hardly unsung and plenty of alternative versions of the works are available elsewhere for those who don't like his style, (musical) life would be very dull indeed if we had to subscribe to one particular style of playing and one that is far from accepted as authentic by many artists and musicologists.

It is this type of dismissive response to diverse or dissenting opinions that put me off joining the site even though I read it regularly for several years before I did sign up. I'm sad to see it happening again. I'm off now to tune up my ears so I can try to pick up teh sense of string players "laboring" under Norrington's baton which is a level of sophisticated listening I have never come across before.

[Alan Howe]

We must understand that Norrington is an iconoclast - unfortunately, his sort of musical iconoclasm tends to rubbish much good, historically sound practice in attempting to make its case for wholesale reform.

Mind you, he can be very exciting in the classical/early-Romantic repertoire. Just don't ask me to listen to his Bruckner or Mahler where the strings just cannot sustain a line without all manner of swellings and gaps.

A conductor such as Abbado has it about right. He has clearly re-thought the earlier repertoire along Norrington-esque lines, but just as clearly knows how Mahler ought to go. Try the new Blu-ray of him in Mahler 9 with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and then listen to Norrington. I think I know which Mahler himself would have preferred...

And don't get me wrong: I'm all for different interpretive approaches. The issue with Norrington, though, is: is he right? Because it is on the historical case that he has made that his approach stands or falls...

[Delicious Manager]

What Norrington is actually doing is going back to the sound that would have been expected when the music was written. One could argue that it's EVERYBODY ELSE that has been meddling, with their new-fangled vibrato-obsessed string techniques. There are even some extant recordings from the beginning of the 20th century that show quite clearly that vibrato has not always been de riguer among string players; it being a relatively recent phenomenon.

There may be some truth in that, but it's a contested view at best and just plain silly at worst. 'Authentic' doesn't have to mean as extreme a result as Norrington produces. Take Mackerras' Brahms, for example: so much more musical than Norrington's.

I really enjoyed Norrington's Brahms cycle (and still do) though I would not say it is the only or the last word. I'd hope on a forum for "open-minded" music lovers that there could be just as much tolerance for differing interpretations of music as well as for unsung composers, it's not like anyone is forced to buy or listen to Norrington in this repertoire and, yes okay, he splits the critics/listeners down the middle but the flip side of that is that many people, professionals as well as simple "amateur" listeners find his point of view musical and satisfying. It saddens me to see a respected and talented musician dismissed as silly just because he doesn't conform to one (or more) person's view of how something should be played and it saddens me to see a rather facetiously toned and not especially well written article invoked as some sort of evidence or justification for the dismissal of him as a conductor. I'm not sure why he causes such very strong feelings when the repertoire he records is hardly unsung and plenty of alternative versions of the works are available elsewhere for those who don't like his style, (musical) life would be very dull indeed if we had to subscribe to one particular style of playing and one that is far from accepted as authentic by many artists and musicologists.

It is this type of dismissive response to diverse or dissenting opinions that put me off joining the site even though I read it regularly for several years before I did sign up. I'm sad to see it happening again. I'm off now to tune up my ears so I can try to pick up teh sense of string players "laboring" under Norrington's baton which is a level of sophisticated listening I have never come across before.

Absolutely agreed! Some of the responses seem, on the face of it, quite reactionary.

[Alan Howe]

OK, let's agree to disagree on whether we actually like Norrington or not. Let's concentrate, if we are going to pursue this topic further, on the evidence for his approach. Facts, friends, facts!