[lit-ideas] Re: Fan Fluttering 101
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:56:43 +0000 (GMT)
Like John, I appreciate someone like Eric - who seems to know his onions -
engage in these digressions around a theme..
..potted remarks, some of the devil's advocate variety - others scherzo, below.
--- On Tue, 17/2/09, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yet for an audience to dwell on a
> fingerfault, such as Cortot sometimes has in his Chopin
> recordings would have been thought boorish and Philistine,
> like criticizing the cracks in a Vermeer.
Well, Vermeer's cracks ruin it for me. Aertex the Sistine Chapel.
> Furthermore, early recordings did not allow editing. All
> acoustic or early electrical recordings are, in a sense,
> live recordings.
Would this matter? It might be argued, on the flipside, that the possibility of
editing out 'mistakes' later should encourage rather than discourage
risk-taking. In 'rock' there are many stories of 'mistakes' that get left in
because they work or (consider Al Kooper's famous organ part on "Like A Rolling
Stone") of some off-the-cuff improvisation that becomes key to the work. In
pop/rock, the development of the studio as a kind of instrument and laboratory
(rather than merely a booth in which to do a live recording) has allowed many
musical advances.
> The later Soviet pianists like Richter and Gilels had a
> different approach: pure score, no cult of personality.
Must mention that Gilels' account of Mozart's 27th Piano Concerto is one of the
most sublime performances of any musical kind I've ever encountered - but then
I got it coz it was 'rosetted' in a book.
>If a
> piece called for a repeat, it would always be there. Yet
> they were both great risk-takers in concert and produced
> much more spectacular and profound interpretations than
> contemporary pianists. Richter's live recording of
> Pictures at an Exhibition (exactly as written unlike
> Horowitz's) has a bunch of mistakes at the very
> beginning, yet the overall performance is still the
> canonical recording and one of the most breath-taking
> examples of superhuman musicianship yet produced. Same can
> be said of his live recording of the Appassionata or
> Prokofiev Eighth Sonata.
Hence the expression that something extraordinary is "off the Richter scale".
(This quip is a work-in-progress). My real point is that I'm going to look him
up in those books....
> Donal: Do commercial pressures underpin risk-averse
> performances, particularly with recordings?
>
> Certainly! (See above.) That's why risk-taking is
> discouraged. Pianists and orchestras usually tour with a
> series of works before recording them. So unless they are
> already golden artists, they have to produce consistently
> acceptable reviews to get the contract for a recording.
I didn't know they were review-dependent: though this does beg the question why
reviews would be biased towards risk-averse performances or whether risk-averse
performances simply average out in "consistently _acceptable_", even if not
great, reviews? This kind of art-commerce interfacing is most interesting. It
gives me pause that while Dick Rowe at Decca is famously referred to as the man
who turned down The Beatles, the reality is that in the then commercial market
almost anyone who knew their onions would have turned them down - they got
their chance because George Martin was the kind of maverick who liked to take a
punt on ting and because the risk was minimal since squeezing in some recording
time for them cost EMI very little. Bob Dylan is another artist who, as he puts
it, knew he would only get in the door if no one (particularly the
bean-counters) was looking too closely. Of course, once they're in everything
may change...and so with the
Beatle's unprecedented success record companies sought to duplicate this
by...well, because they didn't quite understand what was special about the
Beatles, their corporate strategy was to sign up everyone in Liverpool who was
in a band and Cilla Black.
> I never resort to guides. Don't own any. If you have a
> good library, you can borrow versions and compare. The
> Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library (right next to the
> Met Opera) has a huge collection and, stateside, one can
> borrow recordings from any library via interlibrary loan.
> You Brits probably have even wider resources.
London buses that go past the Lincoln Center are few and far between. But I
would speak up for dem guides, especially for people like me - provided you
take them as just that, guides, and cross-check them etc. and accept that
certain things will be over-rated and certain things will fall through the net.
Gilel I mentioned. I could also mention a Serkin piano concerto I bought
without consulting a guide: this had plenty of the old rubato, the kind that
keeps an orchestra on its toes and is the product of early-stage Alzheimers.
The guide would have warned me off.
> Plus you get to know performers. If you dislike Andras
> Schiff, you'll know what his Goldberg Variations are
> like; you'll know that Alexis Weisenberg's GV is
> likely to be rapid, heavily pedaled, and eccentric.
> You'll know what to expect from Angela Hewitt or
> Vladimir Feltsman.
Yes. But they're not always that predictable. Gould is interesting here. The
books no longer highly rate his famous, idiosyncratic reading of the Variations
in the 1950s but do estime his 1982 account, which is very different and
probably my favourite of all versions I've heard - because of its meditative
quality and lightness of touch. Oh yeh, and his scat singing.
Donal
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