Sounding different - and sounding just the same as always...

Perhaps, in disguise, some responses to a recital of string quartets in Cambridge...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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31 January

Perhaps, in disguise, some responses to a recital of string quartets in Cambridge...

So, people will know mvts 1&3 well, which means that one cannot play them very differently (as with the famous one of the Chopin Mazurkas, Op. 17, or those amongst Rachmaninov's Op. 23 set) - yet is it an answer to make mvt 4 (marked Adagio) Molto adagio, and slow the Moderato ?

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A standard account or explanation of the poor reception of the first performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Brahms (in D Minor, Op. 15) is that there was insufficient familiarity with the work, probably by players and audience alike, but does one - although there are people who go to certain orchestral concerts, because they want to hear works played just the way that they know them - want to allow the fact that one knows a work to solidify how it is to sound ? (More scope to change that, perhaps, as a solo performer, or a conductor, than if, say, the members of a string quartet or trio attempt to come to 'anbsp;democratic agreement' after arguing points over ?)

The gravity and stillness of the opening section lead to an Adagio that feels paced, and restrained. The rest of the performance is fine, but, apart from added stateliness in the Menuet (from the bass), does not ‘break new ground’.

So to what end that initial impression ? https://t.co/FnW5EvvTwY

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Two theses here, then. One is that, accepted that there is an overlap between performance practice and playing a composition by Tchaikovsky in the style of Vivaldi (or vice versa), chamber musicians can easily respond to each other to avoid the familiar, and, by introducing small changes in emphasis, etc., they can bring us the piece with new ears.

The other is that one could, for example, adopt quite different approaches to the sound of the first two movements (Allegro and Molto adagio, etc., respectively) of the second of Beethoven's so-called Razumovsky quartets (Op. 59), but, if the Allegretto and Presto, in the nature of their playing, do not (or not easily) lend themselves to one's continuing in that vein, one may not meaningfully have transformed a listener's experience of the quartet as a unity.


What gives hope that music can be so, and artists give us a studied insight that shapes the whole piece, are such examples as :

* Imogen Cooper's three live double-CD performances of Schubert, where the care is in the structure of the individual programmes and in the way that she gives us a coherent reading of each work

* Likewise, when Angela Hewitt played the whole Book II (BWV 870-893) of Das wohltemperierte Klavier at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge

* When Nicholas Collon conducted a programme of Vaughan Williams, Britten and Elgar at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The Symphonies of Saint-Saëns, and so on

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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May Day

We are not confused by what Widor called Organ Symphonies¹, because we all know the Organ Symphony, made indelible (as to its last movement, at any rate) by that pop treatment in the late 70s!

If we know that it is Saint-Saëns' Symphony No. 3, we know that there must be others (though he could have destroyed them²), but they are never mentioned, and there seems no question of playing them.

So, as I dilated elsewhere, with Saint-Saëns as with Bruch, and we might, at best, hear

* Danse macabre

* The Carnival of the Animals

* One of the piano concertos³

* If operatically minded, Samson et Dalilia or one of a number of others


Well, maybe I shall try to find a CD of any of these other two or three symphonies, which might be indicative of whether conductors give them the time of day

If I find one, I might even buy it - at the right price - and waffle on about it in another posting...




End-notes

¹ Actually, he called them Symphonie pour orgue (but that amounts to the same thing) . Of course, the Toccata from No. 5 (Op. 42, No. 1) most often gets an airing, usually detached.

² It appears that he wrote four others, but withdrew the first, and that what is known as No. 3 is the last of the five that he wrote.

³ Of which (I have them on a two-CD, with, as I recall, a crazy need to change discs mid-concerto!), I think that I like No. 4 best - it may be that it is the one with the jaunty theme that I find reminiscent of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 (the so-called Emperor).

The Beethoven, at any rate, has that bouncy, Tigger theme in the last movement, which Imogen Cooper, as soloist in a live performance, convinced me could sound other than ridiculous (and said afterwards, as I recall, that playing it was a question of properly addressing the fact that it contains a hemiola).


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