Hearing music live vs. on recordings: it’s a different experience.
Live performance includes an aspect of the visual unless one goes to specific lengths to avoid it. And vision is the enemy, not the handmaiden, of the musical message. The eye distracts, dilutes, and deceives the ear. Mencken on the subject:
Recorded music removes the performer’s visual presence from the proceedings. With any luck it removes a measure of the other senses: no eau de cologne or armpit odor or kung-pao-chicken breath from the person in the next seat; no pressure of kneecap against the seat in front; no slight jockeying for position between my elbow and that of my neighbor. When listening to a record, we can of course look around to our heart’s content, but the one thing we can’t look at are the performers themselves. (I’ve never quite understood the attraction of concert videos, by the way; I don’t want to look, especially not when the camera dictates the field of vision.)
In return, recorded music gives us an unchanging performance, forever frozen in amber as it were. Any warts in the recorded performance remain there for eternity—which explains the need for the occasional (or frequent) editorial nip ‘n’ tuck.
Certain genres suffer from inequities of balance in the concert hall, concertos in particular. Not long ago I heard a young woman whack, hammer, and blast her way through the egomaniacal cadenza that makes up the bulk of the first movement in Prokofiev’s second piano concerto. For all her effort, her heroism, her feats of finger-snapping virtuosity, the orchestra upon its entrance treated her like Magog swatting a fly. One minute she battered and bombarded, empress of the stage, and the next—once the brass ensemble strode in—she was reduced to an aphid having a fit of hysterics.
Photo: MGM
Pianos, despite their immense bulk and floor-snapping heft, remain fundamentally domestic instruments that were never meant to project clearly through the vast spaces of today’s village-capacity concert halls. A piano’s volume is nothing compared to an orchestra’s, not even when the orchestra is barely trying, much less when the great beast rouses itself and lets out a truly jungle-flattening roar. A poor piano placed against such grandeur offers little more than the bare thumps of the hammers striking the strings, with very little of the rapidly-decaying resonance that follows.
The violin is fortunate in that it has those exquisitely high notes that, like a periodontist’s sonic plaque-buster, can cut through just about anything. But in every other register, the violin is tonally identical to the bulk of the orchestra that surrounds it, and as a result is hard put to distinguish itself from the masses during a concerto performance. The ‘cello is in downright dire straits; few of its concertos actually allow the instrument any subtlety or finesse, as the performer is obliged to saw the instrument nearly to dust in an attempt to be heard at all.
The wind instruments get the best of the bargain, on the whole; some of them are quite well-suited to concerto-playing, in particular the clarinet with its quixotic blending of registers and moods. Clarinets have the cutting power, and the tonal contrast, to be heard. But the repertory is small and on the whole not of the sort aimed to wow audiences that have been trained to expect circus tricks whenever a concerto is on the menu.
Recordings come to the rescue, as they allow us to hear a piano concerto, not from the fifth row center, but from immediately on stage, perhaps with our heads tucked right into the opening between piano lid and soundboard. Under such circumstances a formerly nine-foot concert grand inflates to such size and presence that it would be unlikely to fit on a real concert stage; unnatural though this may be, the concerto is much better served. It’s possible to overdo this, naturally, as many of Jascha Heifetz’s concerto recordings will attest—we’re almost inside the violin while a pipsqueak orchestra accompanies from somewhere backstage.
Nonetheless, a work such as the Dvořák Cello Concerto has a presence on record that it rarely acquires live, as the ‘cello can be heard, fully, and not just as a series of scrapings and sawings. True, we are obliged to hear only through the microphone’s aperture, as it were, but the tradeoff seems fair enough.
And no beldame in the seat behind whispering to her neighbor, or some twit’s head weaving about, agonizingly out of tempo, in one’s field of vision.