We’re living in a time in which performance practice is all the rage, and has been for some time. However, the ‘practice’ isn’t as historical as a lot of people would have us believe. In fact, there’s very little that’s ‘historical’ in the ‘historically-informed-performance’ movement.
It’s really much more about us, today, and now, than it is about the past. So many HIP recordings are extremely clean, very rhythmic, almost entirely without rubato or changes whatsoever. This is the generally-approved performance practice for early music, or even for Beethoven, Berlioz, etc.
That isn’t to say that it’s *bad* stuff. In fact, a lot of the performances are wonderful. I can’t imagine a more effective “Cosi fan tutte” than the recent René Jacobs recording, for example. But whether the Jacobs is any more historically valid than, say, some big EMI recording from the 1950s is a moot point in my opinion. I suppose the instruments are closer to Mozart’s day, but I wonder about the rest.
I suppose the big question is what we would do if we could magically hear Mozart’s performance practice as it really was. The general assumption amongst most musicians is that we would immediately leap onto it and adopt it. But I’m not so sure about that. After all, we do have a nearly perfect and complete record of the performance practice of one bygone era, and that’s the late 19th century. Thanks to recordings we really do know how those folks played.
Amusingly enough, that is the one style you can’t get away with in today’s musical world. You can play Brahms almost any way except for the way that those performers of the late 19th century played. No portamento or scoopy violin playing allowed. No slides in singing. No ‘breaking of the hands’ when playing the piano (i.e., playing the two hands not quite together.) No slowing down when you reach the secondary theme of a sonata form. No constantly undulating rubato, even in orchestral music. Violinists play with constant vibrato nowadays but they didn’t in the 19th century; the constant vibrato is an early 20th century style.
So faced with a real performance practice we run madly in the other direction. No: I think the real secret here is that we will accept any historical performance practice happily, as long as it doesn’t contradict any of the ways we like to do things nowadays. In short, what we call ‘historical’ is anything but: it’s a reflection of our own time, of our own biases, and has very little to do with any real historically-informed sensitivity.