Unsung Composers

I wonder what members views are concerning performances that are not 'true' to the composer's score.  From the few times I've heard different versions of the same music, I  know there can be quite a variance and I know senior members of this forum have previously compared different performances - for example noting one conductor may have chopped a significant section compared to another or significantly changed the tempi of some parts.

What I'm NOT aware of is ever finding any comment in the CD (or LP!) notes from the conductor that 'I've speeded it up' or 'added xyz players' or 'discarded certain bars' etc. that represent measurable changes to what the composer wrote, as opposed to reasonable variations in emphasis but still based on the original score.

I don't have a problem with such performances 'per se' - if they please the ear, surely that is the main thing; however, if they are based on changes to the composer's score, the honest thing would be to let us know what (and why).

Any views, anyone?

Richard

As a third rate hack pianist, I do not always obey what is written, as to me the score is a suggestion and not a direct order. I therefore do not have a problem with others that do the same. My piano teacher did not agree with my slight changes to the Liszt/Paganini La Chasse, but to me I was personalising the music and I don't think Liszt would have cared.

I think we are on "safer" ground when doing this to the romantics. I would not dare amend Beethoven.

Thal

It depends. If it destroys an important, calculated element of the piece's structure (like what Fellegi did to Medtner's sonata tragica, on Marco Polo- with no note in the program notes, either- converting the sonata into a, well, more normal-sonata-form by reinstating the recapitulation of the second theme and removing the cadenza) -then I may mind very much (I am told Toradze's recording of Mussorgsky's Pictures is in much the same bin). Liszt, anyway, seems to have had fewer such qualms regarding Beethoven, but then Beethoven was the new music of his day...

Eric,

I think you hit an important phrase in your comments "... with no note in the programme notes... ".  An arrangement of a composition by someone else is probably as old as music itself and nothing wrong with that.  It's (to my mind) the undeclared changes that are, at face value, less than honest.  (Having said that, I wonder if Beethoven himself ever performed it 'as written'!!)

Particularly when bringing an 'unsung' back to life, we are totally in the hands of the artists involved and, has been remarked before, except for those fortunate enough to have access to, and ability to read, the original manuscripts, what we hear on a CD release (plus its notes) is maybe all we'll ever know of the piece.  There may never be another recorded version for comparison - so the 'honesty' of the score preparation, recording and accompanying notes  is, I think, paramount. 

'Thal' has mentioned his own pleasure in effecting small changes.  As a non-performer myself, I'm now wondering if there ever was a tradition of playing  it 'as written' or has making such changes always been a part of performing?

Tks for your comments guys

Richard

Quote from: eschiss1 on Tuesday 12 March 2013, 12:23
It depends. If it destroys an important, calculated element of the piece's structure ...

That sounds good, Eric, but who is to say what the important calculated elements were to the composer?  If I were a concert artist,  I'm sure I'd do that for my personal satisfaction but never in a concert.......

J

While perusing the score of Reinecke's 3rd Piano Concerto yesterday, I found, to my surprise, that there is an entirely alternate ending to the first movement!  The one on the cpo CD was the original, but there is a more conventional sounding forte ending as well.

As a huge part of my listening is to pianists of a bygone era I am used to alterations to the text - usually textual, maybe doubling octaves. Based on what I've read over many years it would appear that a certain amount of liberty would often be taken with a score - Liszt is said to have added little cadenzas to works he played and even added thirds and sixths to the piano part of the Kreutzer Sonata. More recently you could look at Rakhmaninov's music - he himself admitted to cutting variations out of his Corelli variations (depending on how much the audience coughed on any evening) but more pertinent perhaps are his recordings - do we follow the tempi and dynamics that he (the composer) wrote in the score or do we follow the tempi and dynamics that he (the composer/pianist) played on recordings?

As for cutting a work - why? One can understand old recordings trimming a piece to fit onto discs but in this era of CDs and digital files what purpose can cuts serve? If alterations to the structure of a work have been made I feel that the reason should be given somewhere in the notes. In his recording of the finale of Scharwenka's second concerto Raymond Lewenthal cut a big orchestral tutti from near the end but his notes do explain that he felt that the finale was the only worthy section of the concerto and that as the tutti referred back to material of the first movement it was pointless including it.
Rob

Well, the part that he left in still contains a quote from the secondary theme of the first movement!  And, knowing the entire piece, I heatedly disagree with his assessment!

Quote from: hammyplay on Tuesday 12 March 2013, 17:43
As a huge part of my listening is to pianists of a bygone era I am used to alterations to the text -

Mine too.

I often wonder how pianists of the caliber of Rosenthal or Barere for instance would fare in a modern piano competition.

Thal

There's unfaithfulness and then there's interpretation. Discuss...

The problem is exacerbated with unsung composers works, many of which have only one recording, so that one is tempted to think that is how the work should sound. For instance, the slow introduction to Franz Lachner's Symphony No 8 in G minor is marked, "Andante", which is generally taken to mean, "at a gentle walking pace", yet the conductor, Paul Robinson, takes it at "funeral pace"!
      Of course, in many cases, unless we have access to the score, we just cannot tell what liberties the conductor or performer has taken with the music.
    Cheers,
         John.

Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 12 March 2013, 20:37
There's unfaithfulness and then there's interpretation. Discuss...

I guess unfaithfulness is changing the notes. Interpretation is playing what is written but not how it was intended.

Way above my musical level this one. A thesis could be written on this.

Thal

It's really only since the mid-1900s that the score has come to be treated as some sort of sacred document. (I blame it on the critics, who sit in hope for something to criticize about a performance or a recording that will demonstrate their great acumen and incisive musical knowledge.) Before then, you had a quite wonderful variety of interpretations by conductors like Furtwanger and Scherchen.

It was pretty common for pianists and conductors to make cuts or revisions, either with or without the blessing of the composer. Rachmaninoff did not mind the changes that Horowitz made to his 3rd piano concerto. He was apparently less thrilled with the orchestration of his piano music into orchestral works, but I'm not aware that he ever got testy about it publicly.

Stokowski was a champion of the music of Gliere, and yet, listening to his two recordings of Gliere's 3rd Symphony is shocking! He basically cut HALF of the music from one recording, and almost that much from his other recording. Yet he thought he was doing Gliere a favor by just playing the musical highlights and getting the recordings out. In fact, for a very long time, a recording of the complete symphony could not be found, as they were all chopped up.

At what point do cuts and revisions become egregious? I haven't looked at the album covers of his two Gliere 3 recordings, but I don't remember anything said about the massive cuts. Mahler made revisions to the symphonies of Schumann and even Beethoven's 9th. Recordings today make it clear when the Schumann is Mahler's edition, but I wonder if he ever said anything about his revisions before live concerts.

I think it's far more complicated than Thal asserts. For example, I personally can accept as valid both Chailly's and Klemperer's wildly divergent views of Beethoven 3, but can they both actually be right, objectively speaking?

I recall from a review of the Mahler retuchen that what he did to Beethoven and Schumann was very little different from what other contemporary conductors did to make those works sound better with their orchestras (rather than, say, with Beethoven's or Schumann's orchestra sizes, instruments and balances- the differences do matter, and the better the conductor (and conductor/composer!!) the better they can adjust a score for changing circumstances. In the interest, as it were, of bringing the musical ideas out better- being more faithful to the composer's wishes rather than less with a well-judged but necessary change. Which makes sense to me.

Stokowski was infamous for making changes to scores, and Gliere 3 is perhaps the most infamous case.

The most egregious case I can recall other than this was an early recording of Raff 3 that cut about half to two-thirds of the finale, totally altering the structure, and again, no mention of it on the sleeve notes.

Remember also that 40 years ago it was normal to make cuts in Rachmaninoff 2, which no-one would dream of doing today (I think).

Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 12 March 2013, 23:00
I think it's far more complicated than Thal asserts. For example, I personally can accept as valid both Chailly's and Klemperer's wildly divergent views of Beethoven 3, but can they both actually be right, objectively speaking?

Per definition, there is no objectivity in interpretation. The richness of various interpretations, in my view, is as crucial to a living music scene as a diverse repertoire.

There's infidelity to the score, and infidelity to the composer's intentions.. the two are not necessarily the same. I'm sure there are people who play the notes exactly as written, and it doesn't come out how the composer intended. I think attitudes have changed because fewer performers are composers or have an insight into the compositional process.

Quote from: JimL on Tuesday 12 March 2013, 17:48
Well, the part that he left in still contains a quote from the secondary theme of the first movement!  And, knowing the entire piece, I heatedly disagree with his assessment!

Oh absolutely! I don't have his notes readily to hand but I seem to remember him saying that he sat down at the keyboard and played through the concertos from the opening of number 1 and despairing at not finding a tune till he got to this delightful finale. When I got his double LP this was the first Scharwenka work that I'd heard. Nowadays I'm surprised that RL didn't find the grandly uber-romantic first concerto to his taste - he would have been glorious in it. Equally surprised about the second - my favourite of the lot. When will we get a decent modern recording of this piece??
Sorry to go slightly off topic.
Rob

Ah, but it's a little more complex than that! Just think: how often do you find yourself in a discussion, and whilst you are perfectly convinced you've got hold of a good idea you're nonetheless conscious of a slight fumbling or imprecision in expressing it? Someone else listens to your attempts, and then says "So what you're really saying is.....". And you exclaim "Absolutely right" and think to yourself 'Now why didn't I express it like that...it's now so much clearer'.

Isn't it very much like that in the performance of music?

Two examples. First, I've been listening to the Chandos discs of Barry Douglas playing Brahms. I was at first reluctant to buy them because, unusually, Ballades, Intermezzi, Rhapsodies or whatever belonging to a single Opus number are not collected together but scattered either across the disc or between different discs. At first that struck me as rather stupid. But actually it works in that it forces you to concentrate on a single piece rather than as hearing it within a whole group within an Opus number.

Now the point I want to make here is that these works are altogether familiar (to me at least!). Douglas is very obviously playing exactly the same score as all those other near infinite (well, not quite infinite!) good pianists playing Brahms. But heavens, listen to it! Douglas is admittedly aided and abetted by fabulous Chandos recordings (in the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge), but his playing is utterly distinctive. I'm finding it analogous to an old familiar painting that has had the cobwebs brushed off and stands before you now clear and distinct and brimming with life. To my ears Douglas's Brahms is similar. Doubtless it is all a matter of the spaces between notes, the intensity of each note....and all the tiny minuscule details that are not apparent to the ears. And I very much doubt if Douglas himself is conscious of these things - he is simply playing Brahms in the way he thinks it should be performed. He didn't surely decide to 'interpret' Brahms in such and such a way. If you also asked him, 'Did you deliberately decide to be faithful to Brahms' intentions?' he'd also be lost for words (or might think you were being impertinent!)

Second example: different performances of the Raff symphonies by conductors such as Stadlmair, d'Avalos, Hermann, Albert, and now Jarvi (and a few others on my shelves). There's not one of them that one could pronounce 'wrong' or 'incorrect interpretation' or whatever. However Jarvi's way with 2 brings that symphony to vivid life in a way that to me isn't quite matched by others. For me it 'works' or affects me in a similar way to Douglas with Brahms. With such performances I've begun to feel that I've grasped the piece in a way that I haven't experienced before (although I have enormously enjoyed and relished the works on many previous and precious occasions).

So, what am I getting at? It is partly that terms like 'interpretation', 'fidelity to a composer's intentions' etc etc all seem somehow to be wide of the mark. If I whispered to Barry Douglas just before he emerged on stage, 'Now how are you going to interpret the Ballade in B major Op. 10 No. 4?', I'm sure the poor man wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what I was asking.

What we're talking about is simply good, or not so good, performances. Or am I just being far too simple-minded?

QuoteOh absolutely! I don't have his notes readily to hand but I seem to remember him saying that he sat down at the keyboard and played through the concertos from the opening of number 1 and despairing at not finding a tune till he got to this delightful finale. When I got his double LP this was the first Scharwenka work that I'd heard. Nowadays I'm surprised that RL didn't find the grandly uber-romantic first concerto to his taste - he would have been glorious in it. Equally surprised about the second - my favourite of the lot. When will we get a decent modern recording of this piece??
Sorry to go slightly off topic.
Rob

Re Scharwenka Op56 - which I am also unashamed to admit to be my favourite - does anyone have any idea if Naxos are looking any further having done the Op82? And my apologies for going slighly off-topic here but much as I admired RL, I could never agree with his opinion here!

I was interested by JimL's post from yesterday on p1: the alternative ending to Reinecke's PC3:1. Maybe he was a century ahead of the game if the recent proliferation of alternative ending movies is anything to go by.  I know very little of Reinecke but suspect he's a bit of a sleeping beauty (given CPO are about to release his work of that name) and though he may lapse into the unengaging and backward-looking, he seems to be a class act poorly served by leading performers (I'm not sure Alan makes much of the Tasmanians). 

I'm much more familiar with revised works than alternative endings, e.g. preferring the original Bruckner 3 and Tchaikovsky Romeo & Juliet and especially the unsung Symphonic Poem in 2 Parts to the revised Mahler 1. But on being unfaithful to the score, it is in Horenstein's superb Mahler 1 finale, just going into the signal triumph of victory standing horns bells peel chorale motif passage at 20'26'' that the conductor rewrites briefly to pluck out a striking brass pizzicato. Of course this symphony's ending is sourced from Rott's unsung Suite in E and he in turn may just have been inspired by Handel's Hallelujah. If so, we have an unfaithful conductor improving on Handel-Rott-Mahler: following in their ever-increasing footsteps with this great theme – brave and not bad going, eh?

Of course, performers must be true to the music and can't wander off whenever they like. But what do we want: ubiquitous, monotonous conformity by ritualised purists, slaves to the fidelity of the score, or to have an occasional and carefully-chosen chance to be pleasantly surprised by creative risk-taking that enhances the music?   

Anyway, going back to alternative endings actually written by the composer, if we have someone who knows a bit about this, perhaps they'll start up a new topic on it.

Reminds me of the problem with Liszt's Dante symphony, which according to Walker has two endings that aren't alternatives exactly but are- well, the situation seems a bit confusing.

I believe firmly that it is the duty of any performer to represent the composer's wishes as well as can be done, and that means no tampering, do no damage. The magnitude of the music sins from highest to lowest:

1) Cuts. Nowadays there is NO excuse that will ever make this acceptable to me. I don't care if you are Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy or whoever: you do not cut out small parts of Scheherazade, 1812, Rachmaninoff 2, Tchaikovsky Manfred. The recorded legacy is loaded with examples of egregious cuts that still irritate when I hear them. A few weeks ago I had to suffer through a Tchaikovksy violin concerto with every single one of the Auer cuts. The treatment given to Rococco Variations is even worse. And Manfred! You could write a book on what liberties conductors have taken with that score. I should mention that omitting a repeat is generally acceptable and not a cut. Unless they ruin the structure.

2) Reorchestration. Ok, so Prokofieff wasn't the greatest orchestral writer of all time. But George Szell's tampering with the trumpet parts in the 5th symphony made it much worse. Speaking of Szell, that ridiculous cymbal crash in the Tchaikovsky 5th ruins an otherwise fine recording. He also rewrote the string parts in the New World. I know why, but Dvorak was the composing genius. And then there are the clods that mess up Scheherazade with a) an added xylophone part or b) writing one violin part up an octave. Rimsky knew his business. don't do it. But then there are a couple of times where a retouching is ok and that's Beethoven 5 and 9, where horns are added or substituted for other instruments (bassoon) where it's obvious Beethoven would have done it but he didn't have modern horns. But the last few bars of the 9th with the added trumpet scale (Stokowski) is awful.

3) Extreme tempo alterations. This is more directed at conductors that I have the misfortune to play under. But on recordings there is a tendency to make some music into Concertos for Orchestra and the music gets lost because some nut with a baton is trying to show off. Prokofieff's Classical Symphony is an example. So is the Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture. Why do some conductors (Gergiev, Solti to name only two) think they have to go so fast? Some of the HIP crowd have similarly ruined Beethoven.

4) Stupid expressions. Barbirolli right before the last note of the Franck symphony - a stupid pause. Paray in Rimsky-Korsakov Capriccio Espagnol makes similar luftpauses that disrupt the flow. Dudamel ruins the 2nd movement of Mahler 1 in the same dumb way. COnstantin Silvestri makes a mess of the fanfare that opens Tchaik 4. I can't even describe what he does - but it is so wrong.

5) And then there is the John Lanchberry Effect awarded to composers who are not very good, so in a bid for immortality add to an existing masterwork to get their name in it. Listen to his Nutcracker on EMI and you'll know it when you hear it. He takes some other Tchaik piece, orchestrates it, and adds it to the score. It's awful.

Actually, many years ago in the fledgling days of the net, there was a site that dealt in classical MIDI files, and allowed composers to upload their own. I put up my completed stuff and a couple years later I actually got contacted by someone who wanted to play a piece I wrote for clarinet and piano in a recital.
He ended up doing it....but he cut the last few measures off in the name of it being 'better than way' (perhaps because the perpetual motion effect is stopped), and it really bummed me out because I really liked the way I ended it. He may have been a professional (I believe he was a university professor) but it just seemed wrong for him to do that and not represent what I wrote the way I wrote it.

QuoteIt's really only since the mid-1900s that the score has come to be treated as some sort of sacred document.

Not entirely true. Hans von Bulow was known to respect absolutely the letter of the score - and his performances as conductor and pianist were lauded all over the world.  I would refer those interested to to Alan Walker's recent biography of Bulow (OUP, 2009)

A couple of things here:

1) What about first movement repeats? These are still routinely cut, whatever the composer asked for. Now, in many cases, composers just added them because that was what 19th C audiences expected (and they are cut today because 21st C audiences find them superfluous). But in some cases, and I'm thinking first of Schubert here, the repeat is integral to the movement structure, and a routine cut loses something important.

2) There are cases, I think, where a great composer can wilfully override a composer's tempo indication and get away with it. I'm thinking here of Koussevitsky in Prokofiev 5, where he handles the return to the scherzo after the second trio by totally ignoring the accelerando and going straight in at full tilt, but gets away with it where a lesser conductor would not. Likewise some Furtwangler performances.

First movement repeats - these should seldom be removed.  Removing them usually upsets the balance of the movement.  If you do it to Mendelssohn 4, a whole lead-back passage disappears in a puff of smoke...

Re-orchestrations - very occasionally.  What about all those triangle rolls in the Rott Symphony in E?  Once noticed (and it doesn't take much) they're really intrusive.

There are some first movement repeats that are almost never done, the most unknown one is the first movement of the Rachmaninoff 2nd. The only really complete recording I know of is Zinman's on Telarc, but there may be others. But anymore, I honestly prefer my Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Dvorak and most other without those long repeats. I've heard it all so often.

Quote from: Alan Howe on Tuesday 12 March 2013, 23:00
I think it's far more complicated than Thal asserts. For example, I personally can accept as valid both Chailly's and Klemperer's wildly divergent views of Beethoven 3, but can they both actually be right, objectively speaking?

For me, talk about objectivity and validity are highly problematic. They become especially difficult to sustain when a work is played on instruments other than those for which it was composed. Unlike most classical music fans (I gather), I adore Tomita's synthesizer account of Pictures at an Exhibition - it's dramatic, clever, amusing, and moving, by turns, and to me it's better than the original piano or orchestral versions.  :o   To choose a less radical example, how can we use Vivaldi's score to develop validity criteria which would apply to Richter's recent re-working of The Four Seasons?  It's wonderful in my view, and has been widely praised, but it's light years from Vivaldi's score. So, I find the concept of a valid performance problematic indeed! For me, it's much more a case of whether I enjoy it, whether it moves me, or whether it illuminates the music, rather than its fidelity to the score. So, I think we should look for validity criteria not in the score but in the effect the performance has on listeners.

In any case, I suspect that most of us would agree that translating a score into a performance always entails interpretation, and that this can vary from occasion to occasion. Mahler's comment comes to mind ... (to paraphrase) 'this way of playing the music is right today, but tomorrow it will be a different matter '.  ;D

All I was trying to say was that two radically different performances can't both be right - or can they?

I don't see why not, to be honest. A great composer surely produces scores which are capable of different interpretations, which say different things in different hands at different times to different people. Isn't that the essence of performance art? Isn't that why Vivaldi or Beethoven are still valid and enjoyed centuries after their deaths? I'm not saying that all interpretations are valid, of course not. And it's more difficult when a composer himself recorded a performance of his own music, such as Elgar or Richard Strauss. Then we know clearly what was in the composer's own mind and maybe we should be more discriminating about interpretations which are wildly different from that. But generally speaking, I would hate for there to be an orthodoxy of interpretation and anyway, how would we decide which/who was was the correct one?

Actually, I agree with you, Mark. Although in my own my mind I am sure that, for example, Chailly's Beethoven symphonies cycle comes much closer to Beethoven's intentions than, say, Klemperer's (especially in terms of tempi), nevertheless great music, it seems to me, permits a wide variety of interpretations - which is why I reject the current hegemony (not the existence!) of HIP-influenced performances, especially of the extreme and doctrinaire kind perpetrated by, for example, Roger Norrington.

We are, as usual, as one  ;) Although, like Colin, I too enjoy Tomita's Pictures from an Exhibition  ::)

Well, there is not only one way of staging a play by Shakespeare - thank God!  And much the same applies to a musical score. It is a statement of intention - the finished product is the performance.  However, that doesn't give one carte blanche to impose on the work all sorts of ideas of one's own which do not arise directly from the work itself.  The artist's duty, it seems to me, is to try to get as close as possible to the composer's intention as he or she understands it - and this endeavour alone allows for ample differences of interpretation in pursuit of that goal.

Quote from: semloh on Friday 22 March 2013, 06:28
For me, talk about objectivity and validity are highly problematic. They become especially difficult to sustain when a work is played on instruments other than those for which it was composed. Unlike most classical music fans (I gather), I adore Tomita's synthesizer account of Pictures at an Exhibition - it's dramatic, clever, amusing, and moving, by turns, and to me it's better than the original piano or orchestral versions.  :o   To choose a less radical example, how can we use Vivaldi's score to develop validity criteria which would apply to Richter's recent re-working of The Four Seasons?  It's wonderful in my view, and has been widely praised, but it's light years from Vivaldi's score. So, I find the concept of a valid performance problematic indeed! For me, it's much more a case of whether I enjoy it, whether it moves me, or whether it illuminates the music, rather than its fidelity to the score. So, I think we should look for validity criteria not in the score but in the effect the performance has on listeners.

There's a huge difference, however, in making an arrangement of some sort, and simply excising or adding something and still presenting it as is, as it were. If you look for a recording of Rachmaninov's 2nd, Gliere's 3rd, or Rhapsody in Blue -- or whatever -- there's no indication if there's cuts or not. Hell I got lucky there was a site with a bunch of comparisons so I could find an uncut versions of Rach's PC3 (with the version of the cadenza I wanted on top of that).
By contrast, Tomita or Richter or whoever do what they do....and leave the original alone, as it were.

QuoteThere are some first movement repeats that are almost never done, the most unknown one is the first movement of the Rachmaninoff 2nd. The only really complete recording I know of is Zinman's on Telarc, but there may be others.

The Rozhdestvensky/LSO recording also has it.  I can always hear that music twice too, so no problem there, although the work then plays for a mighty 66 minutes.  I have not encountered the Zinman.  If you leave out the repeat, one unique bar in the first time bracket goes unheard  :)

The work which has probably lengthened the most over it's recorded career is Schubert 9, which seems to have regained repeats in movements 1, 3 and 4 since the arrival of CD.  It would have been too long to fit an LP comfortably with all of them - 30 minute sides are possible of course, but only when cut at quite a low level.  Do we need all those repeats?  I certainly do!  Someone remind me who it was that spoke of its 'heavenly length'......

Oh, and is Schubert's late work classical or romantic?  And therefore can I discuss it here?  I think it's distinctly early romantic - though not at all unsung, of course!  :-[

QuoteAnd it's more difficult when a composer himself recorded a performance of his own music, such as Elgar or Richard Strauss. Then we know clearly what was in the composer's own mind and maybe we should be more discriminating about interpretations which are wildly different from that.

That's dangerous when the composers concerned were recording in the 78rpm era.  We know that carving the music up into vaguely coherent 4 minute chunks means that the tempo is frequently at the mercy of the primitive technology and may be very far from what the composers might have done in the days of magnetic tape and later.

And further back in the acoustic era, of course, we can make no assumptions at all, especially when string basses were replaced by a tuba and so on.  Elgars's first recordings were made using the acoustic process and I would be reluctant to draw any conclusions about EE's intentions from those.

However, once we reach 1950 or so these objections disappear and I would agree that composer-conducted performances from then on have a lot to tell us.  Except that they're not usually romantic nor unsung.......

Quote from: bulleid_pacific on Friday 22 March 2013, 18:27Someone remind me who it was that spoke of its 'heavenly length'......

Schumann, it was.

Quote from: bulleid_pacific on Friday 22 March 2013, 18:47
However, once we reach 1950 or so these objections disappear and I would agree that composer-conducted performances from then on have a lot to tell us.

I would be distrustful even then. You don't know what went on in the studio. Also, I tend to be distrustful of recordings made with the composer conducting altogether. A good composer is not necessarily good on the podium. And he may be too absorbed in the work to hear objectively what the orchestra is playing.

I agree, Gauk. The same can sometimes be said of instrumental performances by a composer. I once heard Malcolm Williamson give an exceedingly bad performance of his own Organ Sonata, replete with wrong notes!  (I feel this is far too often the case with poets as well - they nearly all read their own poetry very badly indeed, frequently adopting a sort "poet's chant", a melancholy monotone in which every word is so pregnant with meaning it can barely move. The result is so dull and tedious it makes me want to stop their mouths with a large custard pie! - Apologies for the aside.)

Quote from: Gareth Vaughan on Friday 22 March 2013, 20:58
(I feel this is far too often the case with poets as well - they nearly all read their own poetry very badly indeed, frequently adopting a sort "poet's chant", a melancholy monotone in which every word is so pregnant with meaning it can barely move. The result is so dull and tedious it makes me want to stop their mouths with a large custard pie! - Apologies for the aside.)

*Laughs* - that is SOOOO true!

QuoteI would be distrustful even then. You don't know what went on in the studio. Also, I tend to be distrustful of recordings made with the composer conducting altogether. A good composer is not necessarily good on the podium. And he may be too absorbed in the work to hear objectively what the orchestra is playing.

The lack of conducting skill in many composer-conductors cannot be denied.  All the same, I'd expect them to get the tempo approximately how they intended, even if niceties of balance and phrasing go awry.  And differences of tempo are the single biggest variation we find amongst recorded performances from different interpreters.  That's the aspect which 4 minute 78rpm sides could distort so badly................

I'm still very much of the opinion that there is not necessarily only one right way to perform a piece. Once it leaves the composer's desk, it is the performers' task to decide what to do with it. And that goes for all other art forms as well. The composer's own idea of tempo is not necessarily the best one.

QuoteOnce it leaves the composer's desk, it is the performers' task to decide what to do with it. And that goes for all other art forms as well.

Well, if their ideas of harmony, melody, structure and instrumentation are fixed, why not tempo and dynamics also?  After all, dynamics are recorded meticulously in almost all scores and often metronome markings are given too.  But note that I'm playing devil's advocate here, since I have multiple versions of many many works which vary enormously but which I enjoy in equal measure..... 

The joy of music over many other art forms is that it *is* open to the interpretation of the performer.  The same is true of dramatic plays, of course.  I imagine the Mona Lisa is supposed to be viewed in a particular quality and intensity of light - not sure the Louvre provides what Leonardo had in mind though.  Even so, I think the composer's view, if he has a conducting talent, should be taken account of and valued, even if ultimately ignored.

QuoteThe composer's own idea of tempo is not necessarily the best one.

...but his idea of instrumentation (for example) IS?  Perhaps you see what I'm driving at.  A musical composition is an amalgam of many elements, all of which the composer must have in his/her mind at the moment of creation.  I don't believe that Beethoven wrote the Ode to Joy without having a suitable tempo in his mind's eye.  And that being so, we have no more right to play it significantly outside the metronome marking (if there is one) than to re-score it for bagpipes and ocarinas.....

Well, tempo and dynamics are both essentially the phrasing of a performance, whereas the instrumentation is part of the text of the piece. Metronome markings are like stage directions in a play. Directors often modify a playwright's precise stage directions, but this doesn't stop it being the same play. But major directions like entrances and exits have to be observed; equally, a conductor may have their own idea about precidely how fast andante moderato should be taken, but it won't be the same as allegro vivace. Changing the scoring of a piece, though, is like giving the lines from one character in a play to a different one.

In the case of a painting, the performer is the same as the viewer. You interpret the Mona Lisa in the act of seeing it.

@Gauk:  You make some valid points and as I said before, I'm playing devil's advocate because I'd hate to live in a world where all performances were the same - that's why I have multiple recordings of many works - even unsung ones like the Raff symphonies.

Nevertheless, people *do* touch up the scoring in performances and I'm a bit uneasy about that.  I suspect that sometimes the orchestration of a particular work doesn't sound very successful to modern conductors because modern symphony orchestra instruments (especially brass) are very different indeed to their predecessors of 150 years ago... I'm not a big fan of HIP but the criticisms of Schumann's orchestration (for example) which have persisted for many years don't seem to me to carry so much weight when contemporary instruments are used.  Still, Mahler was a bit of an orchestration expert and he clearly didn't think Schumann had made the best of his material.....

Bruckner 7 - cymbal crash or not in the slow movement? I prefer not, but it is harder to bring the moment off without it.

I always feel sorry the for the poor percussionist who has to sit through all that music to play only one single note in the whole thing. One cymbal crash that is a remarkable show of chutzpah, grossly out of place, and completely disrespectful of the composer is the one Szell adds to the last movement of the Tchaikovsky 5th. If it weren't for that dumb move I would rank that recording near the top of the heap.

Bringing up Tchaikovsky "for a single moment" is an interesting case. It's VERY common for a very quiet bassoon part to be played on bass clarinet instead -- and there's no bass clarinet otherwise. I actually was at a concert where they did this, and the bass clarinetist (who happened to be my teacher, not that it matters...) did indeed sit there the whole symphony just for that one short passage.
Is playing a part on an instrument to get the dynamic right more important than keeping the instrumentation right? In this case, most people seem to believe it is.

My experience with the music of Sibelius ranges from dislike to near-hatred. Now, I try never to mention what I dislike on this or any other message board, because nobody enjoys that (including me). In this case, though, I have something specific in mind. And that is the ending to the Symphony #7 by Sibelius. While I don't like the vast majority of that work, but the very ending is incredible to me. I love it. And I recommend going to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Sibelius)#Tempo_I_.28bb._522-525.29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Sibelius)#Tempo_I_.28bb._522-525.29)

and checking out the two clips. One is the formerly-popular addition of a blaring trumpet to the end, compared to the original score of the composer.  And this - even though I don't like Sibelus - is what springs to my mind instantly upon checking out this thread. The Ormandy/Philadelphia Orchestra version is an atrocity, in my opinion. The Wikipedia caption with the excerpt says: "Eugene Ormandy decided to boost the violin melody with a trumpet in this 1962 studio recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Ormandy also adds a crescendo and a fermata to the final chord, something many conductors do in an attempt to make Sibelius's stark ending sound more conventional." Well, if Ormandy were still living and I met him, I'd have some very sharp questions to ask about this abhorrent near-destruction of the very core and value of Sibelius' actual writing here to conclude his final surviving symphony.  Who the hell did he think he was?

But once you go back earlier chronologically in compositions, it just gets worse. It gets so much worse that I won't even get into describing my feelings on it directly.  I append here my open letter to a famous conductor, lamenting what I call "Mahlerized Mozart".  Not that I'm saying Mahler had anything to do with it, just that most mid/late 20th century conductors employed orchestras that were suitable for Mahler symphonies, and used them to perform, say, a Joseph Haydn symphony.


Dear Mr. Leonard Bernstein

The way you and your orchestra just recorded that Beethoven Symphony #8... there are two possibilities:

A) Beethoven was a bad orchestrator
B) You and your modern, huge orchestra are wrong for this, and doing it wrong

Now, having heard Gardiner with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, I now am convinced Beethoven was not the bad orchestrator that all the famous conductors/orchestras of the 20th century had me convinced he was. So I'm going to go with Option B. I honestly thought, for years, based on the performances and recordings I heard of Beethoven orchestral works, that Beethoven was a BAD ORCHESTRATOR. And, if what I heard was accurate to what Beethoven wrote, and he wrote for the orchestras I was hearing, then yes, I stand by that: he would have been a bad orchestrator.

PS: Mr. Bernstein, absolutely love your Strauss disc from the Sony set of "The Royal Edition". I think you earned a spot in Heaven for that alone, so I won't curse you to the underworld for your evil destruction of J. Haydn, W.Mozart, Beethoven, &c.  But never, ever do it again.  You won't?  Well, all right then, much appreciated, we'll get along fine. Stay to the LATE 19th century, or into the 20th, and I've not so much problem with you or your large orchestras (complete with timpani with padded sticks... Beethoven would have probably changed his writing if he'd had those in mind! Especially perhaps in the 6th symphony which you butchered to the point of nearly making me vomit while employing your orchestra with 856 First Violins, 845 Second Violins, 375 oboes, 296 flutes... sorry, I'd better stop here).

What do we think about the tuba in the Largo of the New World symphony?  The tuba player has to turn up for roughly 14 ppp notes IIRC, may have nothing else to play in the entire gig, doubles the bass trombone at the octave throughout and doesn't blend well with trombone tone.  Should (s)he be dispensed with? 

No. Just make sure he's awake by ensuring that the piece is played as though it's never been heard before. Try Cambreling's performance for an idea of how this might be achieved...

Quote from: TerraEpon on Sunday 24 March 2013, 06:03
Bringing up Tchaikovsky "for a single moment" is an interesting case. It's VERY common for a very quiet bassoon part to be played on bass clarinet instead -- and there's no bass clarinet otherwise. I actually was at a concert where they did this, and the bass clarinetist (who happened to be my teacher, not that it matters...) did indeed sit there the whole symphony just for that one short passage.

Poor guy! Every time I've played that symphony and the conductor wants the bass clarinet instead of bassoon it's the 2nd clarinet player who switches to bass clarinet for that one measure. And everytime I've played the Pathetique it was as a percussionist. You sit and sit just to play cymbals or bass drum in the third movement - but what a part!

Many years ago I had a brief discussion with Lorin Maazel after he did the 6th with Cleveland and I asked him about why he used the bass clarinet. He gave the usual explanation, but was more concerned about timbre than dynamics. I argued that bassoon was the proper instrument because it gives closure to the exposition: the bassoon begins it, so it should end it. I was quite pleased to hear on his Cleveland recording on cd that came out just a few years later that he used the bassoon Not that he took my advice.

What, no mention of "Haub, Martin" in the Maazel autobiography? Shame on him!

Bernard Levin once wrote a very tongue-in-cheek article in which he suggested that the Musician's Union should take a hand and insist on equal work for all players. If Bruckner was so unkind to write one note for the triangle in 40 mins, the poor trianglist should be allowed a little cadenza every so often to give him something to do.

I've been the sole percussionist for many concerts where all I have to play is triangle. Dvorak 9th, Brahms 4th, Liszt PC 1, and others. I do feel guilty that I get paid the same as a section player, who play thousands of more notes (violins). My Grover triangle kit cost me 100 USD compared to ridiculously expensive instruments the rest of the gang plays. My triangle fit is a jacket pocket, something only the piccolo player can do. I get to leave early or come in late. I get to read lots of books. And I still get paid the same. What a scam!

Yeah but playing the triangle IS harder than it looks....so there's that.

You have more counting to do ...

On this topic, I commend Busoni's "The Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music" to forum members. Nothing is the "last word" on this topic, and the work of I.A. Richards -- later than Busoni -- is crucial, but Busoni's thoughts have stayed with me as vital expressions of something lived and experienced by a genius.

About the question of whether Beethoven was a bad orchestrator, a, or b, or...

I gather that with modern instruments, some changes still have to be made precisely because they are modern instruments. Beethoven was a rather good orchestrator (except for a few passages writing for non-existent low Cs in his double-basses, etc.)- writing for early-19th-century instruments, which were different in sufficiently important ways from ours (even enough so a century ago that Forsyth, I think, remarked on this and similar topics in his book on Orchestration several times.)

I believe that Beethoven knew exactly what he intended in his orchestration.  Substituting horns for the bassoons in the recap of the 5th Symphony (I) is grossly misrepresenting what Beethoven intended.  I don't buy the "horns would have to be re-crooked" argument for a nanosecond.  First of all, in the passage in question the key doesn't even change!  The horns have been playing in C (minor or major - it makes no difference!) for several measures already, and none of the notes they play (G, C, D, G) would be affected by any crook changes that could be made.  Also, I refer you to several passages in other works, e.g. the 4th PC where one instrument plays a tune or motive in the exposition but is replaced by another in the reprise.

"Some changes probably do have to be made" - I think this probably true - is quite consistent with "Many of the changes actually made are meretricious" - which I don't doubt.

(My main rule in these things has been "does it work?" - e.g. (very much e.g.) as I keep saying, I have no idea what Ogdon does in his performance for BBC of Medtner's Night Wind sonata that allows him to bring it in at 26 minutes- 4 minutes less than any other performance I've heard - but at the same time the performance is more compelling, exciting, and makes more sense somehow (oh, so that's what Medtner's doing right there- a sort of varied stretto?...) than any performance I've heard, so whatever it is, he's forgiven. Posthumously (well, since the pianist is dead...) applauded, even, by me.)

Now here's something I rarely see mentioned: timpanists changing the notes. In the old days, changing a pitch was time consuming and the pitches the tubs were set at had to be used throughout a work or movement. Hence, in many scores, there are "wrong" notes in the timpani; notes that are not in the prevailing key or harmony. But nothing could be done because you couldn't change pitches rapidly with any accuracy. This went on at least through Wagner. Then came pedal timpani where the player can easily change pitches very quickly - and quite accurately. So now many players fix the notes in question to be in agreement with the rest of the harmony. Bad idea? I don't think so, although honestly most listeners would never notice. I know a timpanist who incurred the wrath of a conductor for tweaking the timp parts in Overture to Rienzi. But here's a case of unfaithfulness that I wholeheartedly approve.

(And it's a real sign of how much instruments change over the years - to me - ... to have looked at a score of a now-not-that-modern-a-work (Bartok concerto pno. 2) while listening to it, back early in my college years, and - I remember being amazed that a timpanist could be asked to change pitch so quickly... ... erm. Carry on)

Out-of-tune timpani - or timpani which only seem out of tune for some reason or other (bad recording quality?... ...)- can - not hurt, exactly, my ears aren't that literally sensitive, but - well, the overtones can clash rather. (I'm assuming that Schoenberg is basically more or less right in his overtone-based physical explanation of relative harmonic consonance and dissonance.)

Quote from: mbhaub on Sunday 24 March 2013, 16:52
Many years ago I had a brief discussion with Lorin Maazel after he did the 6th with Cleveland and I asked him about why he used the bass clarinet. He gave the usual explanation, but was more concerned about timbre than dynamics. I argued that bassoon was the proper instrument because it gives closure to the exposition: the bassoon begins it, so it should end it. I was quite pleased to hear on his Cleveland recording on cd that came out just a few years later that he used the bassoon Not that he took my advice.

This is not a valid explanation. It suggests that Tchaikovsky didn't know about the bass clarinet, but he had used it several times before writing the Pathétique (eg The Nutrcracker, Manfred and Voyevoda). Therefore, the composer would have used the bass clarinet if that it what he wanted, surely.

there's a recording of the Night Wind sonata that's more to the point than the one I mentioned- one of the Berezovsky performances on YouTube (divided in 3 videos), which is rather a good and memorable performance but marred by very large - I'd say inexplicable - cuts (including the big fugato in the "finale" toward the end, among other things...

Someone forgot to mention Beecham/Goossens Messiah! As a listener I find the 1959 re-orchestration of Messiah to convey the same message as Händel's original version (or Mozart's re-orchestration, for that matter), I just find it a bit louder, updated and over-the-top, not unlike his original outdoor version of Music for the Royal Fireworks.

Is Beecham/Goossens still Händel? I mean yes, just capital letter Händel suited for post-romantic era ears.

I agree, mariusberg. After all, it certainly can't be mistaken for anything other than Handel's Messiah! I feel the same way about the big orchestral versions of the Fireworks and Water Music.... not that I don't appreciate the more 'authentic' small scale originals. 

(Interesting as this thread has become, I am not sure quite how it relates to UCs!  ;D)

Quote from: semloh on Wednesday 17 April 2013, 09:15
(Interesting as this thread has become, I am not sure quite how it relates to UCs!  ;D)

It doesn't, Colin. But the horse has bolted...

It could ... conductors might feel more justified in taking a hatched to a little-known work in ways that they would not to something mainstream. As the thread has shown, there are plenty of cases of mainstream composers getting re-orchestrated, but would Stokowski have made such cuts in Beethoven 3 as he did in Gliere 3? And witness the butchery performed on Raff 3 in that old Vox recording, which I'm still angry about.

Well, maybe the better-known a work gets, the more its fans, who don't want to settle for cut (and badly, unmusicianly-cut) versions, the more pressure to hear it complete and done well, becomes real and not just the opinions of some ignorable minority. So maybe it's the other way around. Witness the history of Boris Godunov over the years, recently with a complete recording of both versions of the opera _separately_ (as against the version most often played before that, a conflation that makes no dramatic sense, and before that... etc.)

Quote from: Gauk on Wednesday 17 April 2013, 17:54
And witness the butchery performed on Raff 3 in that old Vox recording, which I'm still angry about.

I wish I had kept a copy of a magazine that reported on the recording session for that Vox recording. But I recall the conductor Richard Kapp commenting that some of the orchestra players were angry and even hostile about having to play this "bad" music. And when he announced the big cut in the finale, some players applauded - get this dreck over with asap! They should've kept quiet: at least on record, the Recklinghausen orchestra was one of the worst sounding groups out there.

A week or so ago I downloaded (from e-music) Draeseke's Sym 3 (a NAXOS 'historical' recording).  When doing a bit of Googling to try and find out some background to this music, I found a comment that it had been severely cut compared to the original score. 

No mention of this on the NAXOS website and now I'm wondering how much I've missed compared say to the CPO recording and whether  (i) that comment was true and (ii) does it make much difference anyway?.

Does anyone have experience of the two  versions??

Ah well - C'est la Vie -  or should that be c'est la (commercial) guerre??

Cheers

Richard

Unless I've missed something, the recording is complete. Here's an investigation into it at the Felix Draeseke Webpages:
http://www.draeseke.org/discs/URLP7162.htm (http://www.draeseke.org/discs/URLP7162.htm)

Ah, Richard, for a symphony as significant as Draeseke 3 I wouldn't go mucking around with a downloaded 'historical' recording but go straight for the CPO disc. True, I haven't heard your downloaded version, but I'm sure it falls below the CPO version. The latter isn't the last word on Draeseke (but it is rather better than a rival recording on MDG) yet it is pretty good. It is crucial to have a good and clear recording to get to grips with this symphony. And may you enjoy the experience! It is enormously rewarding (and disturbing in its way).

And stand by for an authoritative view on Draeseke recordings from Alan, our indispensable Draeseke expert!

The total timing of that Draeseke 3rd is 52 minutes (that's the one I have; I might get the cpo or MDG version sometime, though. I didn't get it as a download, but on cassette tape from a friend who had the LP, if I remember, which may have been better quality, or not. Though on my iPod all cats look the same in the dark, too, I guess...)
Allmusic says that Weigle's recording is about 46 minutes, Worldcat gives the same timing for Hanson's recording on MDG. So since it's actually longer, if the Drewes recording is cut, then it's cut and slow, or not much cut. I'm guessing it's not cut.

Actually the Naxos download is an interesting historical document: whoever the conductor is - it's probably Heinz Drewes - he employs a lot of tempo changes à la Furtwängler or Mengelberg. By contrast the interpretations of Weigle (cpo) and Hanson (MDG) are much straighter and more obviously modern in feel, with Weigle's orchestra being distinctly more alert and athletic than Hanson's. In addition, they are considerably quicker overall (both come in at around 46 minutes). To my mind Weigle is definitely the best choice, and of course it can now been purchased as part of a cheap 3-CD set of all Draeseke's symphonies.

That Drewes performance (on Urania) is the version I grew up with (and still may have somewhere.)  The playing of the orchestra is not up to snuff, especially the horns in the first movement, who crack on their big 'solos' and really spoil a couple of Draeseke's most poetic inspirations.  I still expect to hear them 'clam' when those moments approach in the fine Hanson version, so save yourself a little trauma and let the historical one pass.  The Tragica deserves modern sound, anyway.

David

Thanks for the comments guys. 

Sounds like (i) I may well have misunderstood what I thought was a cut but anyway (ii) time to start saving my pennies for the cpo version. 

Incidentally (if Alan will pardon a small diversion from this thread while we're on Draeseke ) - has anyone heard any more about the orchestral version of Draeseke's violin concerto.  I picked up the violin/piano version when UC kindly made it available last spring and have been itching to hear the 'full works' ever since!

Cheers

Richard

The orchestration of Draeseke's VC is apparently still in progress - no sign of its publication yet.

I know I await happily. The reduction is promising! (*checks to see about something about the cello symphonic-andante*)

Quote from: edurban on Monday 29 April 2013, 00:05
That Drewes performance (on Urania) is the version I grew up with (and still may have somewhere.) 

Me too - in those days one was lucky to get anything at all.

The Urania recording has actually a cut in the performance: 4th movement from bar 356 to bar 377, omitting the presentation of the theme by Fagotts and Horns/Clarinetts/Flutes and Trumpets ... and proceeding directly with the String-fugato. One of the greatest passages of this movement has been maimed by this.
This cut has been reported by Frida Draeseke in a letter to Theodor Röhmeyer, but she was not sure if she had heard the symphony, conducted by Drewes, with this cut before. Frida Draeseke, besides this, agreed very much with Drewes interpretations and did especially like very much a performance of the pianoconcerto with the Pianist Hermann Drews (born 19.4.1899 in Pforzheim) - yes, actually this name! the concert was performed by Drews and Drewes.