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Neil McGowan
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« on: March 23, 2019, 09:31:52 pm » |
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I think you've been admirably clear on the various merits of styles of collecting, Colin :-) I entirely understand and sympathise with the rationale behind your collection, although it's not been the way I've approached music appreciation myself :)
Another aspect of multiple interpretations opens up - within a particular repertoire - with questions of 'Historically Informed Performance'. I am old enough to have collected vinyl (!) back in the days when a new release from Concentus Musicus on Das Alte Werke was an immediate but necessary drain on my student funds. Of course, those sterling performances were the ne plus ultra of their day - but have since been superannuated by still finer and subtler interpretations. Reproductions of historic instruments have become objectively better over time (it's easier, ehem, to play in tune on them!), and performance practice has moved on.
I was abruptly reminded of how much progresss has been made two weeks ago, when Minkowski arrived here with his Musiciens du Louvre for an all-Rameau program (played, ehem, live in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall). Not only was the lustrous quality of intrumental timbre in full evidence - we had all the benefit of knowledge about notes inegales ('bending' the groups of quavers and semiquavers into a less 'four-square' pattern - CPE Bach discusses it at length...) I was still carrying around in my mind the well-intentioned (but horribly out-of-tune) recordings made by Jean-Claude Malgloire in the 1980s, which gave a raucous and rustic rendering to Rameau. But suddenly we had the full suavety of the Court Of Versailles, and the mismatch between baroque finery and Malgloire's bucolic antics faded away. (Of course, William Christie does an even better job on this repertoire than Minkowski - but the cost of moving Les Arts Florissants to Moscow for concerts, including ballet and singers, is prohibitive, and they've stopped coming these days).
To take up your point about non-operatic music... I could easily see a persuasive case for owning recordings of Bach's keyboard works from through the 20th century... the generation of formidable pianists who played them... then the first generation of Early Music performers (Tureck, even Dolmetsch..) in parallel with 'informed' performances on pianos by Gould and co... then on into the next generation of harpsichordists (Hogwood and his generation) in parallel with modern Bach-playing pianists like Andras Schiff... and then the super-fashionable 'new harpsichordists' like Jean Rondeau (love him or loath him).
Personally I am glad we no longer have to endure Couperin on the joanna :) But we would lose something if we jetissoned those pioneering recordings, which paved the way for Rondeau and his contemporaries to fly Couperin's flag for him :) Some evidence of a Meeting Of Minds can be seen today - Alison Balsom can be found playing Brandenburg 2 on the modern Bb trumpet, but she can play it just as well on a valveless baroque natural trumpet too - and does :)
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