reactions to Reactions to the Record, day 2

Spent the day sitting motionless in an auditorium seat, watching highly educated professionals on stage battle with their computers over who was going to be in charge of which slides the computer projected or what music samples it played: them or the computer. Usually the speaker eventually won out, but it was always a struggle.

Another couple of British professors, amid much other intriguing material on the history of violin playing (with actual demonstrations, thus inserting a welcome note of the genuinely practical into the proceedings), asked the interesting question: to what degree do really old recordings sound quaint because the performing style has actually changed, and to what degree is it just because they're really old recordings with really weird and sucky sound quality?

Actually, this question had already been answered earlier in the morning by an undergraduate presenter, who played a clip of Pablo Casals' first Bach recording. This was 1915, long before such habits were widely disseminated, but there's Casals playing with the firm vibrato and richness of tone that resemble how cellists normally play today. And the sound quality doesn't stand in the way of that perception at all. So when the great violinist Joseph Joachim in a recording from 1903 sounds like a nasal insect, maybe it's because he really did play like a nasal insect.

Next: theories, rather plaintively presented, on how to revive interest in classical music. Turn concerts from theme presentations back into the variety shows they were in the 19C. (Um, when was the last decade that variety shows were booming on TV?) Encourage applause between movements. (I'll go along with that one, as long as it doesn't become obligatory and hence perfunctory.) And the big one: step away from the identikit performance style and allow performers to express their individuality, the way actors do. (That may help, but not as much as you think, because the range of performing possibilities in classical music is just not that wide, and it includes "nasal insect.") Nice try, though. Proved that it helps out Scriabin a heck of a lot, at least.

Nicholas McGegan, conductor of the Philharmonia Baroque, rambled on entertainingly about the practical challenges of running a period ensemble. Among them, the strong acoustic differences among venues, which often requires re-rehearsing a performance with different parameters, like tempo, for each venue. He said they've got a church that looks like an International House of Pancakes [I call it the Concrete Tent myself] but has nice sound, another church resembling "a very elegant bathroom," and a theatre that's "as dry as James Bond's martini." Also dry: McGegan's wit.

And another one of those overenthusiastic people who wave around their artifacts of the composer's intent as if they were the holy tablets being brought down from Mount Sinai. This time the composer was Mahler, and the tablets were a score of his Fourth marked up by Willem Mengelberg with (what it said were) Mahler's instructions, and an attendant recording (made long after Mahler's time, of course). This was interesting, because I'd just gotten to the point in Robert Philip's book where he discusses how Mengelberg was his own man and didn't necessarily do exactly what Mahler wanted. Then you have to explain Bruno Walter, another conductor who worked even more closely with Mahler and carried his imprimatur, but whose performances came out quite differently. Presenter tried to square the circle by calling Walter "authorized" and Mengelberg "authentic." wtf does that distinction mean? Philip says that they both had their own styles and that Mahler, like most conducting composers, may have had his own preferences but was less interested in dictating specifics on other conductors than in ensuring that they made his music sound good, which allows for differing interpretations. That makes more sense to me.

In the evening, a concert by the Russian Chamber Orchestra, a group almost but not quite ready for prime time, flipping "period-style" Baroque performance on its head by playing two Handel concerti grosso (Opp. 6/2 and 6/10) and one Bach Brandenburg (No. 5) in the period style of the early-mid 20C. As one of the conductors whose recordings were being used as a model was Furtwängler, not surprisingly this meant: big, heavy, slow, lugubrious. Worked out pretty well, though. After Kumaran Arul played the keyboard cadenza of the Brandenburg (on a full-size modern Steinway, because that's what they used in those far-off days of the 20C, and at about a quarter of the speed that today's harpsichordists tend to buzz it off in, too), the final cadence of the movement came thundering down with a weighty inevitability like I've never heard in a Baroque performance before. The inter-movement applause after that one was spontaneous, and deserved.

reactions to Reactions to the Record, day 3

Last day. Nothing really contentious today. As on previous days, most of the time there are no more than 40 people in the room, most of them presenters. Are irontongue and I the only non-experts in the world who find this stuff fascinating?

Student presenter invents color-based notation to transcribe tempo and note-length variations in Scriabin performances. Scriabin, who had synesthesia, or liked to pretend he did, would have loved this idea. I ask the presenter if Scriabin would actually have found it useful. Probably not. This is a tool for analysis, not a prescriptive notation.

Retelling of funny story about an argument between Fred Chopin and Jake Meyerbeer over what rhythm Chopin is playing his mazurkas in. Chopin says they're 3/4; Meyerbeer says he's lengthening the first beat so much it's 2/4. Chopin keeps beating three, Meyerbeer keeps saying "two." Chopin gets hot under the collar, throws Meyerbeer out of the apartment. So what's the answer? Presenter, in a fit of sanity, says we can't really know, we can't even reconstruct how the mazurka was danced in Chopin's time (though it'd be informative if we could), the one thing we can know is that Chopin's playing was magical and not subject to "idiot-proofing" rules.

Third presenter has collected hundreds of early recordings of this Rossini coloratura aria because people keep sending him more of them. Analyzing their ornamentations, he finds that, though each singer has her own individuality, they come in national schools. Until, that is, Maria Callas records her version. After that, everybody copies her. That explains a lot about why all classical musicians sound alike these days.

Attempt to tie the theory of Schenkerian analysis to a particular performing style. I've never claimed to understand Schenkerian analysis, so this one went over my head.

Presenter who spends most of his time playing an old Mengelberg recording of Schubert's Unfinished, urging us to listen to the rubato. Hard to miss; so much of it you could get seasick. But however misjudged the quantity and intensity sounds to my ears, Mengelberg always ends it at what seems to me the exact right moment.

Two presenters talk about the "dawn of the recorded era" pianist Frederic Lamond, who is reported to have said: "Haydn is the road to Heaven, Mozart is Heaven itself, and Beethoven is the God who dwells therein." And here I always thought it was Schroeder from Peanuts who was Beethoven's biggest fan.

Evening I skip out to hear the Palo Alto Philharmonic, a local community orchestra I've heard before. They're playing at Spangenberg, the most high-schoolish of all high-school auditoriums, long since generally abandoned in favor of better venues; I haven't been there for decades, probably. But with an orchestra this large (the high school's orchestra has joined them), it doesn't matter if there are any acoustics or not: they'll blast it into oblivion. Music: VW's Tallis Fantasia. Plenty of string exposure. Gratifyingly, parts of it are excellent. A new piece, a slow movement led by its composer, asst. conductor Lee Actor. Actually very good, and pretty well judged for the orchestra's skill level. Quiet parts sound rather like Shostakovich; louder and faster parts a bit like American nationalism. And, speaking of Shostakovich, his Fifth. Music director Thomas Shoebotham says in pre-concert talk that he wants to convey the Volkov subversive interpretation of this work's meaning. Does so by conducting really slowly.