Reviews
December 10, 2002
SYMPHONY
Rich Viola Goodness
By Michelle Dulak
San Francisco Symphony
Geraldine Walther
Edwin Outwater
(12/4/02)
RECITAL
A New All-Style Virtuoso
By Heuwell Tircuit
Gilles Vonsattel
(12/4/02)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Making the Most Of the Highly Imaginative
By Jules Langert
Empyrean Ensemble
(12/3/02)
RECITAL
As Through a Glass, Darkly, Distantly
By Stephanie Friedman
Anonymous 4
(12/6/02)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Accessible, Not Pandering; Lovely, Not Derivative
By Benjamin Frandzel
Parallèle Ensemble
(12/6/02)
EARLY MUSIC
Reticent, Austere Medieval Christmas
By Kip Cranna
Lionheart
(12/7/02)
CHORAL MUSIC
Across Eastern Europe By Seven-League Ears
By Frederic Lieberman
Kitka
(12/8/02)
CHAMBER MUSIC
An Abridged Spectrum
By Nikki Buechler
American Quartet
Richard Stoltzman
(12/8/02)
MUSIC NEWS
SF Opera Goes Nuclear
By Janos Gereben
***
Robert Commanday, Senior Editor
Playing Eighteenth-Century Music: "Right" Ways, "Wrong" Ways, Fun Ways
The Christmas season seems as good a time as any to address the still-fractious relations between "period" and "modern" musicians. This is the time, after all, when the "period" lion lies down with the "modern" lamb, and we all perform Messiah together. (Or at least it seems that way; you can barely cross the street in the Bay Area in mid-December without stumbling on a performance of Messiah, and I know few musicians of either stripe who aren't doing at least one.)
But the rest of the year things are stranger, and more strained. To put it colloquially, the lamb is running scared, and the lion is staring after it wondering, "what did I say?"
Back when "historical performance" looked like it was on a quest for world domination, in the mid-80s, it was hard to know where the thing would stop. Today we're in a position to know just where it has stopped. It's somewhere early in the nineteenth century — which happens to be just about where it had gotten to in the mid-80s, when it looked like a juggernaut. "Period" performances of Beethoven and Schubert, even Schumann and Mendelssohn, are pretty common, but not much beyond that.
Meanwhile, "modern" musicians have gone on merrily playing early 19th-century music. They don't feel threatened by the odd "period" performance of the same music; why should they? But things look different if you look at the eighteenth century, and more so the further you go back.
Even in the late-18th-c. repertoire you see signs of trepidation. Orchestras shy away from Mozart and (more) Haydn, and when they do play them, it's with string sections cut down to chamber-orchestra dimensions. (Which in late Haydn is not just silly, but ahistorical.) But it's in the earlier eighteenth century that things fall apart utterly.
There was a time, not too long ago, when "modern-instrument" players could tackle Baroque music unselfconsciously, just as "music." That seems to be getting harder to do. People are positioning themselves with regard to "period" performances — either taking up period instruments, or dabbling in them, or trying to mimic them, or defiantly rejecting them. What makes it strange is that the period-instrument folks themselves aren't interested in confrontations anymore. (Why criticize other people's music-making? That's so, well, 80s.)
On the historical-performance side things could hardly be healthier. You have there a community of players listening and learning from one another; there's some friction between groups with very different interpretive ideas (how could there not be?), but in general people seem to be doing what they want to do, without a lot of backbiting, and with good musical results to boot.
On the "modern" side things are less happy. Hardly anyone seems comfortable just playing (say) Bach any more; everything has to be either in conformity with some idea of "Baroque practice," or doggedly set against it, or blandified to the point of interpretive oblivion so as to avoid the whole question. Musicians with ordinarily sound musical instincts will do the most ridiculous things to prove that they are on the Right Side of this particular issue. Anyone who heard Joshua Bell tear through the Bach E-major Concerto a month or so ago knows what I'm talking about. It wasn't musical; it wasn't reasonable; it made sense only if Bell were trying somehow to conform himself to a sort of "period style" already long dead, where everything is played as fast as possible, vibrato is kept to an absolute minimum, legato is verboten. It was a sad and perplexing spectacle.
"Modern" Baroque performance is a bizarre patchwork of frantic efforts like Bell's, defiantly "retro" performances like Pinchas Zukerman's, and a large middle ground of players who want only a firm style to play in, and would make good (even interesting) music if they had a strong, confident manner to hand that they could draw on, but in its absence just retreat into the inoffensive-but-dull.
It is a strange situation. Thirty years ago, it was the "modern" players who had the secure, settled idiom and the "period" players who were taking it on from any number of precarious and even contradictory positions. Today it's the "period" players who have the secure idiom and the "modern" ones who are at sea; and I don't think it's only historical rectitude that makes most "period" Baroque performances stronger and more interesting than most "modern" ones. It's confidence; it's the sense of swimming in the music as a fish swims in water.
This is why it was such a pleasure to hear Maxim Vengerov in "Baroque violin mode" recently. He's the only eminent "modern" violinist I've heard really get inside the "period" ethos, swim in the stream; and it's no accident that he's also the only one whose Bach I am eager to hear more of. It's not a matter of "historical correctness" or "authenticity" at all; it's that there is one intact, whole, living tradition of Bach performance today, and he has found it and entered into it. It's a strange chance that it's a tradition whose roots are only a few decades old.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
©2002 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved
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