The acronyms making up today’s odd title will be expanded before too long, so don’t cheat and look ahead. The title comes about courtesy of my holiday listening, as I cuddle up to kitty and space heater, nursing a few good books and a pot of Bold-Leaf Superior Golden Kenya TGFOP. Consider the following recordings:
- Busch Chamber Players: Bach Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites
- Herbert Blomstedt/San Francisco Symphony: Brahms German Requiem
- Fritz Kreisler: Beethoven Violin Concerto, 1926 recording
- Vocal recordings from Emma Eames, Nellie Melba, and John McCormack
- Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Bach and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer
- Gardiner/English Baroque Soloists: Bach Cantata #80
Save the Blomstedt recording of the German Requiem, all of these recordings bring up issues of performance practice. You’ll notice some very old-school performances (such as Emma Eames), early 20th-century masters (Busch, Kreisler), and several representatives from contemporary thinking about Baroque music (Carlos and Gardiner.)
The Busch Chamber Players performances of the Bach concertos and suites stand tall in the discography, even in the 70 years that have elapsed since their initial release. Obviously they are not historically-informed performances, or HIP. (There’s that first acronym for you.) But they are Bach lavished with exquisite musicianship, beautiful tone, and deeply-felt conviction. Compare that to the Brandenburg #3 on the Wendy Carlos “Switched-On Bach”, and you discover a world of difference.
Carlos was assembling the performance via tape recording, using an early-generation Moog synthesizer to lay down tracks, one at a time. A rigid metronomic beat was necessary, otherwise synchronization would have proven next to impossible. (No digital sequencers with their handy piano-roll displays in those days, remember.) The expressive capabilities of the Moog being sharply limited, the result is an exhilarating but robotic performance of the work, characterized by sharply-delineated edges and fast tempi.
In other words, the Carlos is bonafide HIP as it was understood in the late 1960s. Lightning tempi, metronomic rigidity, sharp edges. That isn’t the case with all current-day HIP groups by any means, as about five seconds with any performance from the Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki will reveal. But still that tendency to eschew romantic expressiveness, warm tone, vibrato, or arched phrasing remains intact among certain HIP groups.
The way Baroque or Viennese Classical music was actually performed in its own day remains a matter of speculation. We base our ideas on scattered evidence, first-hand reports, and whatever else we can scrape together in order to conjure up an acoustic representation. We can’t really know for certain, given that the sound itself is gone forever. No recordings.
But we do have abundant acoustic documentation of Romantic performance practice. Folks born as long ago as the 1830s lived into the recording era and left us samples of their art. And don’t forget that mature musicians leaving us recordings from the early electronic era (late 1920s) had been trained by teachers who went back deep into the Romantic. So when you hear a 1926 recording of the Vienna Philharmonic, you’re hearing a time capsule back into the 19th century—hell, there might have been some senior members of the orchestra who had played for Brahms. Such recordings give us just that prime documentation for Romantic performance practice that we lack for Baroque and Classical.
And what do we do about it? We ignore it, that’s what. Worse, we downright demonize it as being unacceptable. Consider some common practices encountered on those recordings:
- String and brass portamento
- Slowing down for second themes in sonata forms
- Vocal slides and portamenti
- “Breaking hands” in piano playing — i.e., not playing the hands quite together
- Adding octaves or other extra notes for sound enhancement
- “Preluding” between pieces — i.e., playing brief improvisations to connect one key to the next
All of this would be considered the norm for a performer of Brahms’s day. And yet when we hear a HIP-style recording of a Brahms symphony (such as Gardiner’s with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique), we hear none of the above. That isn’t to say that Gardiner’s performances are without merit—quite the opposite!—but they really don’t reflect historically-informed practice.
What they reflect is our biases. We are living in a distressingly unsentimental age for music-making, one in which a commodity-driven mentality frowns on anything that might cause objection from designated tastemakers. The rise of recordings bears the lion’s share of the blame—what might please heard once in a live performance may well irritate when heard for the twentieth time on a recording. However, our museum mentality, our tendency to elevate the printed page to near-sacrosanct status, also plays a significant role. We’ve put music on a pedestal, but Romantic players were presenting the music of their own time. It was their native language, so to speak, and thus they used it with a natural freedom unknown to us, we who are picking it up second- or third-hand, mostly via teachers, books, and recordings.
Thus, finally, the unravelling of my acronym-pestered title: Historically-Informed Performance is Really Historically-Aversive Performance.
Now back to Busch, and those delectable Bach performances.