Downsize This

I hereby elect musical downsizing as a pointless evil of the modern musical world. I’m sick and tired and fed up with and just plain through with modernist, HIP-infused, prissy, snippy, joyless damn shrinking down of musical works into itty bitty chamber editions, one-person-to-a-part dessications, or downright stingy and parsimonious skeletons stripped of their flesh in the interest of some mythically desirable clarity or transparency.

The HIP people are some of the worst offenders along these lines, especially those who keep insisting that Bach preferred a single singer or player to a part, thereby turning the St. Matthew Passion into the St. Matthew Madrigal, as the quip goes. Frankly I don’t really care what Bach had in Leipzig or Weimar. He was ever the serial whiner about insufficient performing resources. Besides, modern-day shrinkage stands in opposition to Bach’s fundamental nature as a testosterone-enhanced, richly flesh-and-blood musician who never lost his acute sense of making the most of the here and now. To think of Bach as establishing some once-and-for-all, uncrossable line in the sand regarding desirable performing forces is absurd; he did what he could with the material at his disposal, but he never stopped trying to improve matters. Musicians of his day typically chafed against budgetary restrictions thrown their way by small-minded town councils and tight-pursed church officials. Bach was in Leipzig, remember, and not Hamburg where there were sophisticated people, theaters and opera houses, and all the manifold accoutrements of civilized living. Leipzig was a hick town, soaked in a tiresomely bleak Protestant ethos, drained of the adventuresome spirit that made cities on the order of London, Paris, and Hamburg so interesting. Whatever adjustments Bach had to make to life in Leipzig, it is utterly absurd to assume that he was happy about it. Consider how eagerly he exploited the enhancements available to the Dresden kapelle when he wrote the B Minor Mass—all those cool extra instruments and flamboyant vocal parts, all because he knew they had nifty stuff like that over in Dresden.

The same conditions hold true for other composers. Mozart, in one of his chatty letters to his father, bubbled on about his ideal numbers of instruments—amounts that would give even a P.T. Barnum-ish impresario nightmares. Mozart wanted it big and loud. Ditto Haydn. Why on earth would anyone want to perform The Creation with chamber-sized forces when the historical record makes it abundantly clear that Haydn demanded, and got, Mahler-sized forces for the various premiere performances? Recently Paul McCreesh—a rarity amongst HIP conductors in that he doesn’t knee-jerk miniaturize, but actually consults the historical record—gave us a splendid Creation that uses precisely the town-sized ensemble that we know Haydn to have preferred. So instead of the usual HIP-y sinewy and lean Creation we get the massive, lush, opulent soundfest that Haydn had in mind. I’ve never understood how HIP-sters, who so trumpet their fidelity to the composer’s original intentions, are so quick to develop amnesia about works that were designed explicitly for football fields full of performers.

Even better, McCreesh gave us an Elijah that fills the Royal Albert Hall with mobs of singers and instrumentalists, not to mention a gigantic pipe organ that pushes enough wind to start a minor hurricane. The ending measures of that Elijah are flabbergasting: almost unbearably opulent, grand, and ear-popping. That’s the Elijah that Mendelssohn wrote, and that’s the Elijah that knocked ‘em dead at the premiere. Why perform it any other way?

But wait: there’s more, or shall I say less. Not content with sucking the sonic marrow out of Bach and Mozart and Handel, the diet brigade has attempted the same on Mahler. Yes, Mahler. As it turns out there’s a chamber version of Das Lied von der Erde, commissioned by Arnold Schoenberg for that no-compromise concert series of his, the one that was supposed to prove once and for all that the only thing standing between audiences and Schoenberg’s music was sufficiently elevated performance standards. (Audiences remained stubbornly unmoved. So much for that.) The chamber version exists only because Schoenberg’s utopian organization, while holier than thou, was poorer than a churchmouse. Those folks could no sooner mount a real Das Lied von der Erde than they could flap their oh-so-dignified arms and fly to the moon. So they commissioned a weenie chamber version. It’s like settling for a package of peanut butter crackers for dinner because you can’t afford Gary Danko.

That ratty wisp of a Das Lied would appear to exist these days in multiple recordings. Oh, yeah? Who the hell wants even one? Maybe if you’re planning on playing Das Lied in your living room and you want a reference CD, perhaps? But how many people actually do that? Has anyone ever done that? Will anyone ever do that? You want Das Lied, take my advice and pig out on the Klemperer/Philharmonia rendition with Christa Ludwig and Fritz Wunderlich, and for heaven’s sake turn up the volume. Where Das Lied is concerned, you can afford Gary Danko, each and every night. And Jardinière and Spruce and Acquerello and French Laundry to boot.

Brahms symphonies played by chamber orchestras? Would somebody just shoot them and put them all out of their itty-bitty misery? You could probably whack the whole kit ’n’ caboodle with a six-shooter. There are versions of Le Sacre du Printemps out there played by string quartet. I have a suggestion what that string quartet can do with The Rite. Sacrificial dance, anyone?

Screw them all, I say. Protest. Occupy. Stop giving those castrating bitches a pass. If you go to hear a Missa Solemnis and there aren’t enough people onstage to warrant their adopting a constitution and forming a government, storm the box office and demand your money back. Should you buy Beethoven symphonies, choose Klemperer and Karajan and Szell and Blomstedt and leave the scrawny HIP Beethoven cycles floating aimlessly about in the Amazonian Bardo. Get your Messiah via Colin Davis and the LSO, not some miserable podknocking huddle of two dozen tooters, scrapers, and hooty boy sopranos. We have enough need in this post-2008 world of ours to economize and downsize. Why add music to all that self-denying misery?

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