David Hurwitz is often controversial, and he's being so here, but I do think what he says about HIP in his latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQVvdAtPYxQ) is refreshingly objective. Or maybe it's just that, this time, I agree with him!
The problem with Hurwitz is that he's just one critic - and that means a lack of breadth that a team of reviewers would bring to his Classics Today YouTube videos.
As Mark says, though, on HIP he's pretty much spot-on, especially the notion that, in respect of a particular composition, we must consider (a) the score (of course) and (b) what the composer might have imagined (which may have been beyond the instrumental resources of his/her day).
To give a specific example which has immediately occurred to me,the 1962 Reader's Digest recording of Auber's Crown Diamonds Overture demonstrates the lustre that a modern, fully-equipped,orchestra brings to a work that can sound anaemic when played with period instrumentation and resources.
Times change. The world progresses .
And more recently, our debate over the respective merits of the cpo and Naxos recordings of Dietrich's Symphony.
I think it depends on what we are talking about. Romanticism was accompanied by inflation of sound and more bass instruments in the woodwinds and brass as the 19th C progressed. It is only starting with Beethoven that I feel the need for more weight.There is only a limited repertoire for Romantic chamber orchestras IMO. But we should be aware that all the sforzandos were there to wring more volume from the stylistically anemic orchestras of his era. When played by modern orchestras as written it results in over emphasis.
But with Haydn and Mozart going back I feel reduced historical forces allow the music to breathe and dance better. But that is now outside this Forum.
Hurwitz's main point concerns 'what the composer imagined' as opposed to 'what the composer had available to him'. That's certainly a powerful corrective to strict HIP thinking.
Unfortunately, it's also a licence to speculate unless, of course, a composer recorded his disappointment at contemporary performances of his music. So the HIPers can speculate on his true intentions as legitimately as the likes of Hurwitz and, even where a composer clearly wished for larger forces, valved brass, vibrato etc. the HIPers will blythely disregard it. Look at another, related, movement: before he died poor old Bruckner made a list of what he regarded as the definitive versions of each of his symphonies, his final word on each. What has the Bruckner industry done? Totally ignored its idol's wishes.
Yes. Hurwitz is rightly contemptuous of the "Bruckner industry". What a shame the composer's clearly expressed wishes have been ignored.
I suspect that some sort of 'via media' is the answer to this particular conundrum. HIP has undoubtedly countered the tendency to over-inflate in mid-to-late 20th-century orchestral performances; equally, however, extreme HIP-ism has resulted in ridiculous performances that bear no relation to the tradition that has been handed down.
In Bruckner, for example, we have Celibidache at one extreme and, say, Roth at the other. I can (just about) tolerate the former's slow, mystical approach, but find the latter's far too superficial and brisk. The best performances - certainly the ones one can live with - are surely somewhere in the middle, both in terms of orchestral sonority and tempi.
In Brahms the situation is similar, but here some more moderate HIP performances have actually reconnected with the more athletic performances of pre-WW2 years, e.g. those conducted by Weingartner which are simply thrilling.
In recordings of unsung repertoire the situation is much more tricky because there is usually no performance tradition to speak of. One partial exception is Raff: Bernard Herrmann's recording of Symphony No.5 from 1970 is probably representative of mid-20th-century practice while, for example Järvi, has triumphantly (if controversially) recovered the work's essential athleticism in a manner which Raff expert Avrohom Leichtling regards as faithful to the composer.
Quote from: Gareth Vaughan on Wednesday 07 August 2024, 19:51Yes. Hurwitz is rightly contemptuous of the "Bruckner industry". What a shame the composer's clearly expressed wishes have been ignored.
I'm afraid the only remedy to that is never publishing one's works and having them burnt after demise. At best judicious scholarship and regression to the mean is about all one can do or hope for.
I found Hurwitz's video refreshing. The idea of a composer imagining his work performed in a way that was not possible in his days had not occurred to me. And I'd say we don't even have to stipulate novel instruments. I'd bet that decent amateur orchestras of nowadays make fewer errors than any orchestra available to Beethoven and I can't imagine any composer hearing his work in his mind with execution errors included.
On the other hand, while Hurwitz names a few composers with imagination of that kind there were probably others. Chopin (by no means a conservative) for example was a master at playing the piano he had at his disposal. I would expect him to have written for exactly this instrument that he knew intimately. And so it may make sense to play his music on an instrument from his time. I also think Mozart is a different case: In his operas he wrote for exactly the singers he had which is the opposite of imagining the impossible though in its own way just as imaginative. He wrote his clarinet concerto and chamber music for not just the clarinet but for Anton Stadler, very much for the instrument that Stadler happened to be playing.
Reviewing a new release of Mahler's 9th on period instruments in the September issue of Gramophone magazine, Edward Seckerson writes:
'But when the booklet notes speak of what Mahler might have been hearing in his mind's ear as he put pen to manuscript paper, I for one would imagine it was something far exceeding the sonic limitations of what he was working with at the time'.
Discuss...
Undoubtedly. I certainly agree with Seckerson.
And therefore, he was hearing our orchestras, is the logical leap that can't be made...
Maybe not, Eric, but neither does "something far exceeding the sonic limitations of what he was working with at the time" make any sort of case for using period instruments.
oh, agreed.
Re: Seckerson review of Mahler Academy Symphony 9??
I assume the Mahler Academy recording is being referenced. The Mahler Academy according to the website is 45 students augmented by additional musicians. Does anyone know what the total forces were for this performance?
I am perplexed by what is meant by "far exceeding" regarding Mahler who was composing most of his symphonies in the early 20th C. I don't have the booklet, only Seckerson's review. So can there be some clarification of what is "far exceeding" the orchestras of 1910 for the M9? In addition as Mahler himself said it is really not possible to mentally hear four part counterpoint clearly.
Like Seckerson, the principal issue I had with the Mahler Academy was the avoidance of vibrato which I don't think has much justification for 1910 but that is certainly not a result of sonic limitations. Seckerson also was unhappy with the "politeness" of the interpretation compared to Bernstein etc but that is simply interpretation. I can see Mahler frustrated with the Double Basses not being able to routinely go to low C1 and similar examples. Maybe he was frustrated by the somewhat primitive Contrabassoon. But the Boehm system was in force by 1910.
One major difference from 1910 is that homogeneous sound for orchestras is in vogue now where the orchestral sound from that era was more differentiated. This was particularly the case for French orchestras, which can be heard on older recordings. The sound of Russian orchestras was also influenced by the early 20th C French orchestras.
I think it's beyond doubt that Mahler imagined a far stronger string sound than the orchestra in this new recording can muster - and so it's in the first and last movements that Seckerson's preference for what modern orchestras can offer is most obvious. I don't think this necessarily means an undifferentiated orchestral palette - just careful overall balance on the part of the conductor. So often it is the string section which is the problem in HIP recordings these days, but good historic recordings, e.g. Weingartner in Brahms pre-WW2, demonstrate that a modern orchestra, properly balanced, is perfectly capable of avoiding the 'sludge' of some performances.
Quote from: Maury on Friday 09 August 2024, 17:31the principal issue I had with the Mahler Academy was the avoidance of vibrato
This is my biggest issue right now in romantic HIPs. This is an entire can of worms that I don't want to get into but the Mahler Academy 9th has the musicologist Clive Brown as their consultant, who is one of the main advocates of the "vibrato-less" approach to HIPs (which I personally don't subscribe to - especially in romantic music). Strings would simply sound thinner if played with minimal to no vibrato, no matter how many violinists you can hire.
The problem with vibrato-less string-playing is how to sustain a continuous musical line without seeming to 'run out of breath' between phrases which can become choppy as a result. I assume it is possible to achieve this continuity but I can't say that I've heard it done successfully, especially in mid-to-late romantic music at slow tempi.
On the other hand, it has to be conceded that the cultivation of, for example, the string-rich 'Philadelphia Sound' under such conductors as Stokowski and Ormandy or the similarly string-heavy sound of the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan has often produced recordings of a weight inappropriate to the repertoire chosen. And many of my generation who have grown up with their recordings (and the like) have to admit that getting used to something radically different is very difficult.
As ever, the answer is unlikely to lie at the extremes of this debate. Quite where the 'middle way' is to be found is likely to produce the most fruitful discussion, I think.
Thanks for the followups to my querulous post. Yes I can see the sonic limitations of the particular orchestra to getting the appropriate effects Mahler was likely seeking. But that is distinct from saying the best orchestras of 1910 had significant sonic limitations in playing Mahler which I found unlikely. As to Mr Howe's point about the middle way I think we should let the ear do the deciding period by period and artist by artist. The 20th C has had a plague of doctrinaire commandments that should be shelved. But I have no problem with even the Stokowski sound in orchestral works written between 1875 and 1925 even though I am a pronounced HIPster in Baroque music from childhood.
A few years ago I spoke with an orchestral programmer who somewhat pompously declared that for him, the "vision of the composer was the only thing driving him". Still, he oversaw performances of Schubert's Unvollendete and the orchestral Pictures at an Exhibition during the same season.
Of course that reeks of hypocrisy, but it also points to the inevitability of an important element that always gets lost in discussions such as these: the practicalities of performance traditions. Schubert would likely have been abhorred by the performance of a half-symphony of his, but what is performed and how is determined by its own, individual momentum. Dogmatists serialists to HIP fanatics have attempted to rebuild music from the ground up, and have mostly failed. That is not to say that there is nothing to be learned, but it success hinges on its integration into existing performance traditions.
Sounds sensible to me.
Also, I do think the HIP movement has brought some badly needed reconsideration of the excesses of 20th century performance practice, particularly in the interpretation of tempos and ensemble (size, composition and balance; I'm not so cynical to think that was only due to financial considerations).
However, I have no time for the claims of "authenticity". It is as disingenuous as Viollet le Duc's attempts to make French cathedrals "more medieval" or the modern re-enactment of life in Roman villages. You can make a viola da gamba sound as much like a 16th century specimen as you like, but it will still exist within a modern sound environment, heard by people whose experience is shaped very differently from those in the 16th century. And those Roman villagers usually eat pizza after a hard day of re-enactment.
Here's an example of a decidedly non-HIP performance by a full-sized symphony orchestra of a type you won't often find today. I find it intensely thrilling - what do others think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9plLIU6KoI0
One forgets - it's a wonderful performance and that majestic finale in particular is absolutely electric.
And yet, it'd (probably) be condemned by the HIP crowd...
Since Brahms died in 1897 what is historically informed performance (HIP) for ca 1900 orchestral performances? Are HvK, Bernstein, Stokowski etc doing Brahms according to HIP or is the Mahler Academy Orch. doing HIP for 1900? Am I missing something as HIP should be whatever was appropriate for the times and thus variable across the decades? We have historical recordings from the 20s performed by people some of whom were playing when Brahms was alive.
Quote from: Alan Howe on Wednesday 14 August 2024, 22:44Here's an example of a decidedly non-HIP performance by a full-sized symphony orchestra of a type you won't often find today. I find it intensely thrilling - what do others think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9plLIU6KoI0
We'll have to agree to disagree here, I'm afraid. This is just too self-indulgent for my taste (my issue with most of Karajan's performances) and I don't regret that modern performance practice has moved back to the middle somewhat. Also, the sound seems quite muddy; I can barely hear most of the percussion.
It's a live recording, of course, from London's Festival Hall back in 1988, so it was never going to be particularly hi-fi. Problem is, I grew up hearing Brahms this way - my dad had an LP with Rudolf Kempe conducting the Berlin Philharmonic - so it's hard not to hear something leaner as less desirable. No doubt all this explains why I prefer the cpo Dietrich Symphony. Oh dear, how does one escape one's past with all its prejudices...?
Again the issue of HIP should not be defined as what we like or don't like. If we are adhering to HIP then we need to research what was the actual historical performance practice of a particular time. My point was simply with late Romanticism the conductors and orchestras we have in recordings, both historical and hifi, have a pretty direct connection to the late 19th C. Since styles, tastes and fashions change, HIP should not be one unchanging set of techniques and expression. There is no obligation to prefer HIP either to some other anachronistic performance practice. This is almost directly analogous to Shakespeare performance styles through the decades and the degree of relation to Elizabethan/Jacobean stagings.
Quote from: Alan Howe on Thursday 15 August 2024, 14:24It's a live recording, of course, from London's Festival Hall back in 1988, so it was never going to be particularly hi-fi. Problem is, I grew up hearing Brahms this way - my dad had an LP with Rudolf Kempe conducting the Berlin Philharmonic - so it's hard not to hear something leaner as less desirable. No doubt all this explains why I prefer the cpo Dietrich Symphony. Oh dear, how does one escape one's past with all its prejudices...?
Oh, solid point and in fact what I was hinting at in my earlier post when I wrote about out the importance of tradition. In my case it partly works the other way around. My loathing for Celibidache's glacial tempi was mainly caused by being dragged to some of his performances with the Munich Phil in the early 1980s. Hearing those works again in a less idiosyncratic performance was truly eye-opening in many cases.
On the other hand, and to reinforce your statement, I find it difficult to even
tolerate Tchaikovsky's symphonies 4-6 in a different version from Mravinsky's DG set. Those were my first classical LPs, gifted to me by my grandparents, and I know every single note of them. I try to be open-minded, but I simply find myself unable. Having said that, I think it's important to be aware of that baggage.
Well, as Hurwitz says, in a real sense it's not HIP or non-HIP that matters, but whether a performance is any good - or not. Of course, this is rich territory for critics because this is where subjectivity comes in - and also where a living is to be made!
At 70 years of age I have some 55 years of listening experience and record/CD collecting - and a shedload of prejudices. When I began listening to music HIP was hardly thought-of, let alone established. The main repertoire was dominated in Europe by conductors such as Klemperer and Karajan with their respective full-sized orchestras - and in the USA by the conductors at the helm of the major orchestras: Bernstein in New York, Szell in Cleveland, Reiner in Chicago, Munch in Boston, Ormandy in Philadelphia, etc. There were differences between them, of course, but little dispute about what the main symphonic repertoire was supposed to sound like.
For years I knew no different. Over time, especially in the last decade, other approaches have entered the mainstream - some I like (e.g. Mackerras in Brahms), some I don't (Norrington in almost anything). In unsung repertoire my prejudices usually re-emerge (e.g. in preferring cpo over Naxos in Dietrich's Symphony), but most of the time one has no choice anyway because multiple recordings simply don't exist, and in any case conductors normally make sensible 'middle-of-the road' decisions as to the appropriate performing style.
However, I am largely the product of my listening past. I grew up with Karajan in everything from Beethoven to Verdi and Wagner - and Schoenberg! I bought his recordings on LP and again on CD. I probably have the vast majority of the ones he made (and re-made). So shoot me down (metaphorically speaking)!
Oh, and by the way: I'll take Celibidache in Bruckner, especially his 7th in Berlin, but not much else.
Talking of Celibidache, and digressing for a moment, I was sitting in the Festival Hall next to the Buffalo,New York State, High School Band. I can't remember the programme but remember how he cavorted and the snorting comment of the boy sitting next to me. "A triple encore", he muttered, and it was not said in awe!