Unsung Composers

I ran across this link http://intoclassics.net/news/2016-08-19-41200* featuring a re-orchestration of Schumann's Rhenish Symphony.  Of course there are the Mahler arrangements of the Schumann symphonies variously recorded - but this is a new one to me.  Does anyone know anything about this?  I don't think you could do much with the Schuman symphonies outside of re-assigning some lines to different instruments.  The recorded samples of the Tolba orchestration by an un-named Russian orchestra  are pretty dismal (circa 1961) featuring fruity brass.
Google translate makes a tossed salad of the Russian-Ukrainian text - my favorite part is - " irresistible pathos inspiration, unattainable beauty of the melodic and harmonic side works are always misunderstood by the public, the only consequence of a colorless, solid density of orchestration, persistently annoying auditory nerves very sensitive to music listener beauty ".

*Administrator's Note: My security software advises that the above link is unsafe.

I wonder if the link is unsafe because it is Russian or unsafe because it is Schumann ;D

My feeble "security" detected nothing.

Thal

It's because it's Russian. Caveat surfer!

Oh, that is interesting.

I wish people would leave Schumann's symphonies alone and just play them! There's a lot more to complain about, if one wants to, in the orchestration of some parts of the Piano Concerto but people don't go around re-orchestrating that.

Quite. Well said.

Gravo, Gareth!  8)
And hear what wonderful recordings Leoneard Bernstein has made by "just" using the origial orchestrations.
Te later "Urtext" recordings by Douglas Bostock are very good too, but nevere have this inspired aura and "played trough" impact, but that set contains also the separate Scherzo in G minor.
As far as Schumann's Piano Concerto is concerned (don't miss the Lev VinocourRCA boxed set with Schumann's complete works for piano and orchestra, which includes Henselt's and Clara Wieck's pieces), there is nothing which really disturbs me in the orchestration...

Admittedly I lack of musical sophistication--and have never felt the least unhappy about listening to anything Schumann wrote. Ignorance is bliss? Or is it bliss to hear the magnificent sounds that came from a tortured soul and be happy with them and deeply touched by them? Nor have I heard a reorchestration of Chopin's piano concertos that has meant anything more to me than the originals. I tend to listen to music that makes me feel good, not to that which is "perfect" by some impossible standard. Was it Boulez who thought he was the only one to write music perfectly (and Dutilleux was a reactionary hack)? and rarely does his music make me happy, while much of Dutilleux's does.

I love Shcumann's orchestrations -- they are full of color and....er....fullness. Maybe they were 'bad' in the mid to late 1800s but after 125 years of tons of styles of music that have been added on top of anything they knew back then, I think it's a lot easier to....accept?...the way they sound even if it might not be 'right'. I dunno if I'm explaining this well, probably not.

This as a question to the likes of Adriano and Christopher: could it be the case that Schumann's orchestration is just more problematic to upscale, due to his use of brass and percussion, to fit larger concert halls while still maintaining a decent orchestral balance? And that this gave rise to his reputation as an problematic orchestrator? People such as Gardiner reject the entire idea of Schumann's orchestral incompetence.

But it must be admitted that Schumann himself questioned his own ability to orchestrate, never felt comfortable writing for full orchestra. His "2nd" symphony had problems that he recognized and after some time re-writing and re-orchestrating eventually emerged as the 4th. He thought it needed more "color".  I emphatically do not like any conductor tampering with scores. It's Schumann's sound - as unique as any other great composer's. A careful, skilled conductor can make them work - Gardiner, Barenboim, Bernstein are three. Mahler's retouchings make for fine orchestration, but somehow Schumann's voice is lost. I've played the symphonies under hack conductors who don't know what they're doing and they can sound terrible, to be sure. And I've played them with conductors who really spend time on balance and voicing - what a difference!

"A careful, skilled conductor can make them work - Gardiner, Barenboim, Bernstein are three."

Martin, Barenboim actually used many "retouches" in his two recordings! And not discrete ones!!!  ???

And Chailly recorded the symphonies using Mahler's revisions!

Here's David Hurwitz's enthusiastic take on Chailly's recordings of Symphonies 2 and 4;

...In reality, the most remarkable thing about Mahler's scoring is how respectful it is of Schumann's original timbral canvas. All he has done is clean the painting, not so much by actual reorchestration as by a complete recalibration of dynamics and internal balances. This is very evident in the finale of the Second Symphony, the main theme of the Fourth's first movement, and the second subject of the same work's finale. The resulting texture is at once more sonorous, but also lighter, an effect obtained by carefully amended timpani parts to firm up the rhythm, and by more readily audible woodwinds. Very little of this was noticeable on previous recordings, particularly BIS's dreary set with the Bergen Philharmonic conduced by Aldo Ceccato.

Happily, Chailly and the Gewandhaus are in a different league. This conductor recorded some standard versions of Schumann symphonies a while back, also for Decca, and they weren't so interesting, but the new orchestrations evidently have given his interpretations new energy. The Second Symphony has real depth of feeling in the Adagio, wonderful string articulation in its scherzo, and plenty of bravura in the finale. The Fourth also is unusually exciting, its lively tempos matching the fresh sounds coming from the orchestra. The result is Schumann freed from what in retrospect sounds like a timbral prison.

Mind you, I have no problem with Schumann's original orchestrations in the sense that even those who claim to use them often alter them drastically (Szell is a prime example) to achieve the clarity and color that the composer obviously had in mind. Those that do not (Haitink), wind up with musical sludge. Mahler may go a bit farther in this respect than most, but in my opinion he never steps over the line. The Genoveva Overture is an attractive bonus, and perhaps inadvertently makes the symphonies' newfound vividness all the more striking. Excellent, natural sonics also help to give the music additional luster. I hope the rest of this cycle appears without delay. It's not just interesting: it's terrific Schumann.
http://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-13506/ (http://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-13506/)

QuoteThose that do not [touch up Schumann's orchestrations] (Haitink), wind up with musical sludge.

Does anyone besides myself find the Haitink/Concertgebouw/Phillips Schumann symphonies satisfactory? To my mind Haitink "gets" what Schumann meant when he stated that the orchestration of the second version of Symphony 4 was the result of a practiced hand, whereas the first version betrayed the hand of an amateur.

For some years I assumed that the thicker orchestration of the second version, with its many doublings, was an attempt to mask the Dusseldorf orchestra's limited abilities. But actually Schumann gives no hint that he had Dusseldorf in mind particularly. And bearing in mind the very different, transparent orchestration of the incidental music to Faust (overture aside), it would seem that in symphonies 3 and 4 Schumann was choosing thicker orchestral textures for their own sake. Whether or not one considers the Haitink recordings a success, Haitink certainly tried to make good on MartinH's observation that when "conductors ... really spend time on balance and voicing - what a difference!"

Oh, you may well be right. This was, after all, a Hurwitz review...

I'm quite satisfied with the Haitink recordings

That's good to hear. From the excerpts I've heard, so would I be.

Well, when "conductors ... really spend time on balance and voicing", in a way they arrange themselves with the score... and waste their time to obtain what they could more easily get by crossing useless doublings, for example.  ::)

Could you explain further, please?

There is something special going on with Schumann.  Our harmony teacher played us a passage from Schumann where a dominant seventh was resolved upward.  Horrors!  He did it with a sneer, implying there was something serious wrong with Schumann.  And the story about his "incompetent" instrumentation goes into the same direction:  Nobody can deny the extraordinary (I use this word deliberately and mean it literally) inspiration at the heart of Schumann's music.  Yet there seems to be a reluctance to see him as a fully competent composer in a technical sense.  So the approach to his music often seems to be to try and find something, anything, in the music to wrinkle one's nose at.

I can't explain this, but the phenomenon is there.

Prejudice in all spheres of life, blind and irrational though it is, has a way of passing down through the generations doesn't it? Those of us here who champion the cause of one unsung composer or another experience it every time we come across a critic or well known musician who has never heard a note of our subject's music, but nonetheless manages to have a negative opinion of its worth.

QuotePrejudice in all spheres of life, blind and irrational though it is, has a way of passing down through the generations doesn't it?

Odd that literature has critical room for so many different voices over the centuries, but for many musicians classical music does not. Or is it odd?... Suppose every time we started reading a new novel it had likely been chosen by our tutor and was being interpreted for us by that tutor. That's more or less the situation for young performers learning the repertoire. Granted something similar can happen in a classroom, but perhaps not as intensively as in periodic, frequent one-on-one encounters. Makes passing on prejudices a bit more efficient, at least.

I was more thinking about academics than performers.  Professional performing musicians often have surprisingly little knowledge about the repertoire, but the Schumann-is-a-bad-orchestrator type stories come more from critics and academics.  Another example:  The last chapter of Bea Friedlands dissertation on Louise Farrenc, the summary chapter:  Friedland goes out of her way to avoid praising any Farrenc works too much and states that Farrenc was after all only a "Kleinmeister" (do I need to translate this word?).  In other words she needs to be careful if she wants to keep her reputation as a musicologist.

BTW there are also unsung novelists, playwrights and poets (unread, unprinted...?).

I have a friend who, when he was a young up-and-coming musicologist, was very interested in the unsung German composers of the 19th century. His doctoral dissertation was about the music of two comparatively well-known examples. A few years into his career he was quietly taken to one side and advised that, highly regarded though he was, if he wanted to progress he should drop this enthusiasm and concentrate on more mainstream musicology. Reluctantly he took the advice, and is now a professor.

And yet it doesn't have to be like that. Think, for, example of Robert Pascall and his work on Wilhelm Berger...

In musicology, as elsewhere, challenges can accelerate growth. Not uncommonly the professors in a department best at critical methodologies do not specialize in the aspect of music that most interests the individual graduate student. The late Joe Kerman showed one way to handle this. He specialized in Renaissance music in grad school, then moved into 19th-century repertoire for much of his early and middle career, during which he became one of the founders of the important journal 19th-Century Music. The critical skills he learned while working with madrigals not only were transferable but they brought a fresh perspective to his (earlier, at least) work in 19th-century music. And as thread penance, Kerman was an early advocate of Schumann the symphonist, back when recordings of the symphonies were few and far between.

Forgive my ignorance, but was there really a time when Schumann symphony recordings were far and few between? It's not like he was in the company of Mahler or Bruckner. Schumann was championed by leading conductors throughout the 20th century and when Mahler symphonies truly were scarce in the record stores, there were Schumann's to be had, at least I thought. Maybe not as popular as the Beethoven 9 or the last three Tchaikovsky, or the Brahms.

In the LP days and before, maybe. Doing a bit of searching on Worldcat for earlier LPs of eg op/oeuvre 38 and while quite a few are undated (and will have to have date estimated some other way) there aren't that many turning up in the LP era between 1952 and 198something... (Well, I should modify that. Maybe 80 odd, though some of those, this being WCat are duplicates. I should seek a Schumann LP discography website...)

... Well, that's- I stand corrected. (Mitropoulos- or Alexander Brailowsky?- conducted the NY Philharmonic in sym 2 as part of a series of Office of War Information recordings? Kind of neat. I find this from ca 1939 (http://www.worldcat.org/title/civic-orchestra-series-39-program-no-59/oclc/42762791&referer=brief_results) incidentally intriguing too for people also interested in the WPA...)
(And as early(?) as 1956 Paul Kletzki recorded all 4 symphonies with the Israel Philharmonic for Trianon.)

When I began buying LPs in the very early 70s, I bought a CBS (I think) boxed set of Georg Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in the four Schumann symphonies. IIRC it was trumpeted as being ground-breaking because it was the first complete cycle of the works to be recorded.

I remember it well!

Oh yes, then followed the Kubelik DGG cycle, then the Bernstein then that boring Philips set conducted by Eliahu Inbal and the Solti DECCA. All my respect goes to the later Karajan set! Am I right with this chronology?

Sounds about right. It was Karajan that really did it for me - but his cycle is often considered overblown in these days of pygmy-HIP recordings, more's the pity. His was a huge ego, but also a huge talent.

Was the Szell recorded before 1956? I might be wrong about the Klecki I admit but...

They were done 1958-60. Not to forget the Piano Concerto with the great Leon Fleisher - and the Manfred Overture as couplings. They were also praised for the sonics. That was my first encounter with Schumann's music.

Yes, mine too.
(http://www.raff.org/otherpix/schumann.png)
LP details here (https://www.discogs.com/George-Szell-Leon-Fleisher-Schumann-4-Symphonies-Manfred-OverturePiano-Concerto/release/6087275).

Kletzki's cycle apparently dates from 1956:
https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Kletzki-Schumann-Symphonies-Philharmonic/dp/B002U59ZFY (https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Kletzki-Schumann-Symphonies-Philharmonic/dp/B002U59ZFY)
BTW Konwitschny recorded them in 1960/1:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schumann-Four-Symphonies-Overtures-Konzertst%C3%BCck/dp/B0000035O0/ref=sr_1_79?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1472768724&sr=1-79&keywords=schumann+symphonies (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schumann-Four-Symphonies-Overtures-Konzertst%C3%BCck/dp/B0000035O0/ref=sr_1_79?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1472768724&sr=1-79&keywords=schumann+symphonies)

Re Franz Konwitschny (a favorite Bruckner conductor): The notes to his early 1960s recordings of the Schumann symphonies emphasize how new the music was to him at the time he recorded it. Something of a sea change seems to have occurred around the centenary of Schumann's death. Of course, the Furtwangler Symphony 4 and the Toscanini Symphony 3 predate that centenary, but in my part of the world at that time, both recordings were hard to obtain and live performances of the works impossible to find, unlike live performances of Carnival.

QuoteThe notes to his early 1960s recordings of the Schumann symphonies emphasize how new the music was to him at the time he recorded it.

Now that is interesting. Thanks for that snippet.

In regards to Schumann not being all that well-known in earlier generations....

I have a large collection of old music books. One of them, The Victor Book of the Symphony by Charles O'Connell was published in 1941. At the end is a list of recommended recordings. Victor, of course. Schumann 1: Koussevitsky/Boston. Schumann 2: Ormandy/Philadelphia. Schumann 4: Ormandy/Minneapolis. NO Third Symphony! Of course complete cycles by Beethoven and Brahms are there, as well as significant amounts of Mozart, Sibelius(!), and Tchaikovsky. Even Gliere's 3rd. But no Schumann 3rd.

In the preface to the third edition of his book on conducting Beethoven in 1928, Felix Weingartner wrote "The necessity is also confirmed by the growing interest in Schumann's symphonies..." He was talking about his justification for making changes in orchestration in music to clarify and improve the sound.

So maybe Schumann is a Johnny-come-lately after all.

In my teens, which was the late 1960s, I vividly recall attending a concert in Barry at which a professional orchestra (might have been the the RPO - can't remember now) played Schumann's 4th and Brahms' 4th. Would it happen today, I wonder. Quite some concert. It was well attended too. I think there was also a piece by Daniel Jones.

Still remaining a big fan of Szell, Bernstein and Karajan, I thought this interesting article of 1998 by Richard Taruskin, reacting to the release of Gardiner's Schumann's Archiv/DGG cycle may be useful.

I don't completely agree with the reviewer (I like Gardiner's interpretations very much, inclduding his own introductory booklet notes), but the "Schumann question" is very well described in this article:
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DON'T look now, but Robert Schumann is being rescued again. This time the deliverers are John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, his period-instrument ensemble, performing the four numbered ''canonical'' symphonies, plus the early unfinished one in G minor (in somebody's eclectic conflation of its two extant sources); the original 1841 version of the Fourth; the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and the ''Konzertstuck'' in F for four horns and orchestra, all in a three-CD Archiv set (457 591-2).

It happens about as regularly as El Nino. Some conductor suddenly realizes that Schumann was not the hopeless bumbler we thought he was, but was rather a good composer, actually. All we have to do is trust him. In the 60's it was Leonard Bernstein. ''Mr. Bernstein has faith in the rightness of Schumann's own instrumentation,'' the jackets of the New York Philharmonic's recordings proclaimed. They gave listeners a chance -- nay, ''the unique opportunity'' -- to hear the music ''just as Schumann left it, unburdened with the usual revisions designed to 'correct' the composer's reputed deficiencies as an orchestrator.''

In the 50's it was George Szell, who promoted his Cleveland Orchestra set with an essay in these very pages announcing that ''Schumann's symphonies can be a thrilling experience to both performers and audiences if Schumann's case is stated clearly and convincingly through the proper style of interpretation.'' Szell acknowledged Schumann's ''inability to establish proper balances,'' admonishing further that ''this can and must be helped with all means known to any professional conductor who professes to be a cultured and style-conscious musician.'' Retouching, however, must be applied with ''much soul-searching and discrimination.''

Gustav Mahler (who had not yet been canonized but was about to be) took some ritual lumps. He had made ''a most unfortunate mistake'' by resorting to ''wholesale reorchestration'' of the symphonies, in perpetrating which he ''adulterates the character of these works by wrapping them in a meretricious garb of sound completely alien to their nature and, in some instances, even goes so far as to change the music itself.''

Szell's own amendments covered ''the whole range from subtle adjustment of dynamic marks to the radical surgery of reorchestrating whole stretches'' (as distinct, somehow, from ''wholesale reorchestration''), but this was not mentioned on the record jackets. Instead, in a move that anticipated by decades the claims of Early Music maestros today, the emphasis was placed on hardware. ''Listeners may note the unusually mellow trumpet sound,'' the sleeve note suggested. ''Known as 'Austrian trumpets,' the instruments used here are of wide bore and have rotary valves.''

Now come Mr. Gardiner and his band, elevating the rhetoric still higher. ''The general view is that Schumann was a gifted amateur who could not orchestrate,'' the conductor has been telling interviewers.

In the booklet, he writes about removing ''the false patina of late-Romantic orchestral sonorities which is totally alien to Schumann's esthetic and ideals,'' maintaining that any problem conductors have had with Schumann within living memory ''simply evaporates in an accomplished period performance.'' By reducing the orchestra to the size ''for which Schumann had assiduously fashioned his symphonies,'' by restoring the right ''bowing styles, phrasing and articulation, as well as the spatial deployment of the musicians (with violins and violas standing for symphonies, as was the custom then in Leipzig),'' one dispels the ''web of myth'' and reveals Schumann as he really was, ''an intuitively able and imaginative composer for the orchestra of his day.''

Stuff and nonsense, every word. By now it is easy to see what performers are really seeking when they noisily side with the composer against critics real or imagined (including ''practical critics,'' like Mahler) and presume to speak on his behalf. They are seeking authority (code name: ''authenticity'') and privilege. ''Criticize me, and you're no friend of Schumann'' is the threatening implication. L'auteur, c'est moi.

This is an old ventriloquists' ploy, and now, of course, it is especially rife among early-musickers. ''What do you think Bach would say if he were here?'' the harpsichordist Davitt Moroney asked a student at a master class in Berkeley, Calif., not long ago, immediately casting himself as Edgar Bergen to old Sebastian's Charlie McCarthy. Hand on heart, I swear and depose that the first thing Mr. Moroney's Bach puppet wanted to know was, ''What edition are you using?''

It's not always that risible, but the position is always false, and in the case of Schumann its mendacity goes right to the first assumption, that the composer needs defenders. Well over a century ago, in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the great German scholar Philipp Spitta wrote that ''Schumann's symphonies may without injustice be considered as the most important which have been written since Beethoven.'' Surely few today would disagree that they were the most important Classical-style symphonies to appear between Beethoven's and Brahms's.

Nor were Mahler's interventions the arbitrary vandalism that Szell, and now Mr. Gardiner in his booklet, have alleged. They did not amount to a whole new score, just retouchings and (in particular) textural thinnings that Mahler marked in his performance scores and had copied into the players' parts. They were never published, but the scores and parts have been available on rental from Universal Edition since Mahler's time, and have even been recorded (by Aldo Ceccato and the Bergen Philharmonic on two Bis CD's). Their lightening effect is actually quite similar to what Mr. Gardiner achieves with his period band.

So the ''general view'' Mr. Gardiner cites is his own little web of myth. If Schumann's reputation as a symphonist ever suffered an eclipse, it was during the period from the 1850's to the 1870's, when, under pressure from Liszt, Wagner and the so-called ''New Germans,'' the symphony itself briefly suffered one. It was Brahms who rescued Schumann, not Bernstein or Szell, let alone the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique.

BUT revolutionary? Romantic? Prim and perky would be more like it. The tradition that feeds Mr. Gardiner's approach to Schumann is that of 20th-century modernism and nothing earlier. If these were really ''period'' performances, they would be awash in tempo rubato, string portamento and other practices of which Mr. Gardiner, as a 20th-century musician, heartily disapproves. Not that his tempos are completely inflexible. He even lets his strings slide ever so gingerly through large slurred intervals (as in the introduction to the Overture, Scherzo and Finale). But these are grudging, chary concessions to ''performance practice,'' not the joyful recovery of forgotten lore that they might have been. And that is because the ''false patina'' Mr. Gardiner deplores was the historical reality. His attempt to scrub it away could not be more anachronistic.

This really should not bother anyone. Remaking the classics is the only way to keep them alive. The trouble is that the bright, fresh, delightfully clean and clear-textured if somewhat top-heavy sonority Mr. Gardiner elicits from his band is rarely matched by any comparable novelty in interpretation. Tempos, to begin with what is objectively testable, are almost always what we're used to, not what Schumann prescribed with his metronome. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. At least one of Schumann's metronome settings, for the finale of the Second Symphony, is generally conceded to be unplayable, and it is not attempted here. But falling back on the modern consensus hardly validates a claim to the composer's authority.

In the First Symphony, Mr. Gardiner's tempos are fully in accord with those listed two decades ago by Brian Schlotel, an English scholar, in a useful survey of midcentury recordings, including Szell's. As in most of the others, Mr. Gardiner's first movement is faster than Schumann's, his second movement slower, and the finale much faster. The speeds of the scherzo and the first trio in the third movement, unlike those Schumann notated but like most of the ones Mr. Schlotel calibrated, are in a simple proportional relationship: two beats of scherzo equal three of trio.

The Boston conductor David Epstein, in his recent book ''Shaping Time,'' claims that the pleasure we take in proportional tempos is ''natural'' and that music in repertory inevitably slips into such relationships over time, making them ''traditional.'' That sort of tradition, Mr. Epstein suggests, is what keeps repertories alive. But the period-performance movement is founded, at least in theory, on resistance to socially mediated tradition, what Mr. Gardiner so sneeringly calls the ''patina.'' (So is modernist music-making, of course, beginning with Mahler's famous battle cry equating tradition with sloppiness.) Should he not practice what he preaches, or else stop preaching?

His performances differ noticeably from traditional ones only in the niceties of timbre and balance. And nice niceties they are. But are they enough? In the ''Konzertstuck'' for four horns, they certainly are. The soloist's opening riff is hair-raising, almost worth the price of the album. Ditto the early version of the Fourth Symphony. The lightness of the orchestration contrasts all the more tellingly, in Mr. Gardiner's hands, with the dark, thickly laden version that we know, making the latter's sterner, even somewhat dingy coloration (the result of massive doubling of lines) seem less a miscalculation and more a deliberately struck, Beethovenian ''D minor'' attitude.

Mr. Gardiner's chief reason for preferring the earlier version is different, though, and symptomatic: the original audience found it baffling. To a modernist that reaction is a plus. To Schumann it was a reason to revise. The revision was successful in that it was well received. To Mr. Gardiner, however, Schumann's success smacked of compromise, ''as though he was willfully expunging some of the more audacious features of the original, replacing them with something safer but, in the process, more commonplace.'' Yet anyone listening to the original version who knows the standard one will miss the thematic recalls in the finale, which occurred to Schumann only as he was revising. They are something added, not expunged, and they are the opposite of commonplace.

In the canonical symphonies, as opposed to the novelty items, there is as much loss as gain in Mr. Gardiner's performances; and what is lost, unfortunately, has a lot to do with why the symphonies are loved (that is, why they have become canonical and familiar). Arguing against foolproofing the scores, Mr. Schlotel put it this way: ''The sense of striving for high ideals, which the symphonies communicate, is in a way echoed by the orchestra striving for effect in those passages that are difficult to bring off.''
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In other words, there is an ethical dimension, endemic to the Romantic concept of art, that is lost from the sleek sound-surface that modern performers -- and period performers, paradoxically, most of all -- have fetishized. The really crucial and compelling aspects of Romantic music are precisely what is undreamt of in their philosophy.

THE upshot, simply, is that Mr. Gardiner's ''esthetic and ideals'' are very different from Schumann's. And why not? He's entitled. And we are equally entitled to prefer his brisk Lipton-tea approach to the music if, like him, we are leery of anything stronger. His performances are full of charming details (my favorite: the articulation of the woodwind accents in the second theme from the opening movement of the First Symphony). And like many scrupulous period bands, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique is much more alert to dynamics than are most standard orchestras today, which is also a pleasure.

But to the odious claim of privilege he has alleged, Mr. Gardiner and his band are manifestly not entitled. Its dishonesty diminishes them. It taints their excellent musicianship with charlatanry. They really ought to give it up.

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So what are you thinking about all this?

Actually I rather like Gardiner's Schumann set - it has terrific Schwung. It's his more recent efforts I deplore, e.g. his dessicated, sonically compromised Mendelssohn symphonies recorded at that most ungrateful of venues - London's Barbican. Unless you can audition first, I'd avoid anything recorded there.

However, if I had to choose I'd still prefer Gardiner to arch-iconoclast Norrington. And if I could take one set, it'd probably be Karajan's - which I grew up with.

I gather Taruskin has long been an arch critic of the HIP movement, but here it seems he isn't complaining about the performances themselves but merely Gardiner's presumption in suggesting he has unique insights to offer. Although back in the 80's I was a big fan of groups like the English Concert, for some while now I've begun to suspect that the HIP movement's achievements are all in the past. I wonder what Taruskin would have made of the penultimate night of this year's BBC Proms, consisting of a rather dull performance of Verdi's Requiem given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment... How about Beethoven quartets on a consort of viols?

Well, no, but a concert comparing and contrasting the Beethoven Csharp with other (rather earlier, more Baroque than Romantic- Purcell and before, in England, others ...) examples of the string motet/fantasia could be very thought-provoking...

Re. Karajan couldn't agree more. My introduction to Schumann was the Bernstein/VPO set. It seems willful now but like the best of late Bernstein has its heart on its sleeve, something I admire. And while I understand the general criticism of Schumann's orchestration I have come to feel a sympathetic conductor can easily find a way through it. One of the my favourite sets is the Holliger/Audite cycle, which has a beautiful freshness to it. There is a HIP influence in some of the playing but Holliger does so much good work to bring out the tenderness in Schumann. And Sinopoli's Dresden set was also more than fine IMO.

The key test for me is how a conductor handles the slow movement of Symphony No.2. If the strings play without vibrato, I won't bother with the rest.