The Real Deal

We’ll never know for sure if Beethoven really took some of those wacky metronome markings in his later symphonies. My guess is probably not, but a guess is all I have to offer. I have no evidence, just a gut instinct that those tempos don’t usually work. Did Bach really perform the St. Matthew Passion with only one singer to a part? Again, my guess is probably not—and in this case, even if he did, I seriously doubt if he liked doing it. I have evidence that Mozart liked big orchestras (via letters to his father) but how those orchestras played is something I’ll never know exactly.

Except that musicians are musicians are musicians, and there’s a line in the sand beyond which performance practice stops to have much validity. We can trust our instincts. We can depend on our own hard-won musicianship to guide us along.

Still, we’ll never know for absolute certain.

But in the case of major 20th century composers, we’re on much stronger footing, especially in the case of those composers who were also expert performers. They could play their own works for us, and sometimes leave behind recordings of various levels of accomplishment. We need to approach those performances with all due care. Hindemith and Vaughan Williams were lousy conductors, Stravinsky was mediocre at best. Prokofiev’s performance of his own 3rd Piano Concerto is sloppy. Elgar’s superlative renderings are hobbled by inadequate audio. And so it goes: caveats piled upon provisos wrapped in cautions.

Then there’s Benjamin Britten. Not only a major 20th century composer, but quite possibly the supreme figure of the second half of the century, rivalled only (in my opinion) by Shostakovich. With the passage of time, Britten’s stature has only grown as his music has become increasingly familiar. The great operas—Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, Death in Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream—have joined his major orchestral (Sinfonia da Requiem, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) and choral works (War Requiem, A Ceremony of Carols) in the standard repertory, no longer banished to the new-music ghetto. More and more of us are absorbing the lesser-known Britten—the church parables, choral pageants like St. Nicholas and Noye’s Fludde, the string quartets and cello suites, those supreme orchestral masterworks such as the Cello Symphony and Spring Symphony, the kaleidoscopic bounty of the lieder.

Here’s the most wonderful thing: Britten was a world-class conductor and pianist, and he recorded most of his own music during audio technology’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. Decca did him up proud. Because of that extraordinary composer-label synergy, we’ve got Britten’s magisterial and definitive takes on his own operas, on the War Requiem and the Spring Symphony and all the rest, the song cycles with his life partner Peter Pears, and the chamber works played by their original artists—notably, Mstislav Rostropovich.

Thus the question will never come up: how did Britten want this to go? We know how he wanted it. Amazingly enough, that doesn’t always seem to be enough for some. Of late I’ve been exploring recordings of the Spring Symphony, and comparing the sound of the “cow horn” in the Finale as it blares out autochthonically over the maypole-dance that opens the movement. What did he mean by “cow horn”? Well, judging from his knockout 1961 recording, put down in the buttercream acoustic of London’s drafty old Kingsway Hall, he wanted something akin to an alpine horn, and he wasn’t concerned that it be absolutely, precisely on pitch. What he wanted was a raucous shofar-like summons to the veriditas of the burgeoning spring. In his 1961 recording, the thing raises goosebumps.

The Spring Symphony has been given a number of superb recordings over the years. André Previn took the London Symphony Orchestra and some stellar soloists (Janet Baker, Robert Tear) through the work in 1979, and it’s a pip of a performance. The cow horn is appropriately rustic, but it’s kinda distant and lacks the wallop of Britten’s wonderfully untamed sound. Hickox and the LSO gave it a go in 1990 with a cow horn that has a solid, ram-antler-y feel about it, but it’s a bit tame.

Then there’s John Eliot Gardiner with the Philharmonia Orchestra, in a cleanly-played, cleanly-sung, and cleanly-recorded rendition from 1997. His cow horn sounds like a slightly muted French horn, and it’s absolutely 100% right on pitch. Boring, boring, boring! And this is in a performance with some extremely fine moments—such as Catherine Robbin’s lovely rendition of “Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed” and tip-top choral singing throughout.

Not one of them gets anywhere near the primal quality of Britten’s 1961 performance with the Covent Garden orchestra and chorus. The composer wanted earthy carnality for that cow horn, and only he really got it right. His performance is the Real Deal, as it were: make it big, make it loud, make it shofar-ram’s-horn-ish. But nobody else matched him.

It’s almost as though if Bach were to pop suddenly into existence right before one of our dance-everything Baroque performance-practice mavens and shout at him: Now you listen here, Herr Schmekenbrucken!! The church is no place … for … DANCING!!!!

How much you want to bet that Herr Schmekenbrucken would continue to give us mincey, precious, “dancey” performances of the B Minor Mass? He would.

Which comes down to the Britten discography. Basically there are Ben’s own performances, and then there are everybody else’s. I know which ones I prefer.

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