Sony CD players & French CD's

I have found that Sony CD players have often problems with french classical CD's. For instance the brilliant Jean Louis Steuerman Goldberg variations record doesn't play at all. This is horrible.

 

Dear Bat
You should try a good harpsichord version of the Goldbergs. This may perhaps solve your problem.
Cheers

 

It would not solve the problem which has happened with two Sony players and several French records. The chief suspect is the Disctronics CD factory and oversensitive Sony error detection.
I like harpsichord too but perhaps prefer the sound of a selected Steinway. It all depends on who's playing it. The Goldbergs have so many nyances that harpsichord cannot deliver.

 

'Tis the difference between two schools of thought. The first is that we should listen to classical music as the composer intended it to be, ie on the instrument it was conceived for and using the nuance and conventions of the day. The alternative is that had Bach had a piano handy he would have preferred it, so why not perform his music on it.

 

Please excuse my semi ignorance, but the thought that Bach didn't have a piano to hand seems rather odd.

 

The Piano as we know it was not yet invented.... there were however some instruments around which struck the strings with hammers rather than plucked (like a harpsichord). It think Bach was familar with the Clavichord which was closer to a pianot than the harpsichord. I am no expert in any of this, sure there are people on the forum who will know.

 

basically in Bach's day the two instruments he would have composed for would have been the Harpsichord or the Organ, the piano was an invention waiting to happen. It's immediate predecessor the clavichord is a foul sounding beast, possibly even worse than a harpsichord! The piano didn't really come into it's own until Mozart's time, and even then they were wooden framed so sounded nothing like the piano we know. You could have a listen to the piano on these recordings to see Old Piano

It wasn't until Liszt went on his european tours trashing pianos left right and centre that Bosendorfer (I think) came up with a metal frame, this turned into the piano we know now.

Authentic performance is a touchy area. RDS, Graham or Tones will come and correct me soon but I think the pursuit of authenticity detracts from the music sometimes. I listened to Harnoncourts Mozart Requiem the other day and was distinctly unimpressed, it seemed to feature all that was wrong with authentic performance, losing the lyricism and beauty that others have found in the first three quaters at least.

I would wager that were Wolfie around today he would take our modern trombones and metal stringed violins over the crude trombones, and gut stringed fiddles of his day, there's no reason why we shouldn't look back at what they did, but babies and bathwater springs to mind .

If I were you I'd keep listening to what you enjoy. Thomas Beecham said the harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof. I'm inclined to agree.

 

Thanks for that, I also thought that the Clavichord was a forerunner to the modern piano in that is uses key depression and not plucking. Small details really

 

Yep that's basically it the harpsichord family are plucked, and the clavi's are hit.

 

Thanks for the interesting brain dump there Lordsummit, most useful

 

Dear Lordsummit
From a tecnical point of view the modern piano is not well suited
to polyphonic music, so I think Bach would have written his music otherwise, if he had wanted to write for piano. Why did the later piano composers else write in totally different styles.
Cheers

 

The answer to that question is quite simple, because they could. Music and in fact art never remain stationary, hence the move from homophony, to polyphony, to more chordal textures to atonal music.
Tell me where is the difference between the counterpoint he wrote for the organ and that he wrote for the keyboard?
Think of art as it moves from the primitive, through naturalism, to impressionism onto surrealism, that's why composers write in different styles. The history of western art music has been covered at great length elsewhere, but as I see it there is no way that Bach would have written differently had he had my Bechstein at his disposal.
Anyway I disagree with you entirely as to the modern piano being unsuited to Bach, a sensitive player will convey the music in a subtle way. There's no doubt that you can separate out the different melodic strands of the music on a piano than you can on a harpsichord, there will be more nuance, and ultimately to my ears a more satisfying performance will result. The beauty of music is that someone somewhere will be disagreeing as I type

 

I have two recordings of Goldberg variations, both on modern piano - Angela Hewitt and Murray Perahia. Can anyone recommend a harpsichord one to try?

In general I like authentic style performances, as often the music is simply too plush and untextured with modern instruments.

 

Dear Lordsummit
Sure, Bach did not write for piano because he could not.
Bach wrote for harpsichord and should be played on harpsichord.
There are different reasons for pianists to play Bach on piano, I think. Some do it because they do not master the harpsichord, and still want to play Bach, this is understandable. But others play Bach on piano because they find the harpsichord too primitive, and want to put more expression into the music. In my
opinion this is a suspect angle of view, because they essentially want to alter the intended composition in some way. Surely we do not know in detail how the harpsichordists of Bachs day played his music, but wee know still a lot about it, enough to
say that it is so to say impossible to recreate the style in a loyal manner on a piano. I think Bachs music is so rich in every respect, and it is completely unnessecary to season it with piano sound and pianistic expression.
Cheers

 

Dear Alanbeeb
The most impressive recording of the Goldbergs I have heard, is made by my compatiot Lars Ulrik Mortensen on Kontrapunkt
KP 32 023. Rather a middel-of- the-road performance, in the style of Trevor Pinnock (his teacher) but more informed and personal. I wonder if RdS know it.
But Gustav Leonhardt (preferably on DHM and not on Teldec)
is surely the golden standard of informed harpsichordplaying
of our day. Sabine Bauer (on Ars Musici) is joyful, playful - really enjoyable.
Cheers

 

Here's the crux of the "authentic performance" controversy. Why should it be any more valid to try to recreate the sound that the original audiences heard - especially as our reception of that sound will necessarily be very different in any case? The authenticists throw a different interpretative light on many works, but it's certainly far from the 'one true way', and indeed contemporary academic (and performing) thought is increasingly dissociating itself from the self-styled authenticity movement of twenty years ago or so.

 

I think the performance always alters the composition in some way -
authenticity fanatics really shouldn't listen Bach but just read the autograph manuscripts in candlelight and wear a peruke.
The reason most Bach pianists suck is that they put in too much nuance, minimum amount of pedal is the way to go.
Andras Schiff the pianist has called the harpsichord "sewing machine".
The clavichord isn't ugly! Try Richard Troeger's recordings - desert island stuff.

 

Dear PeteH
It is for me a question of trying to recreate the composers intention as near as possible. This will let the music speak with most authority, since the composer for sure well knew what he intended. Of course we cannot recreate his intention litterally, but we know a lot about which stylistic measures are authentic, which could be, and which are not. And any performance which does not stay witin these limits, makes certainly something else of the music, which the composer did not intend, and with respect to Bach this can never be an improvement, rather the contrary e.g. Glenn Gould.
Cheers

 

pe-zulu we obviously differ. Bach wrote wonderful music, and I am sure he would want it played expressively if it could be done so. Why should the performance be limited by an instrument. Articulation is possible on a harpsichord, and you can surely take the stylistic cues to the piano, but essentially music is expressive and the harpsichord isn't (to my mind at least) You wouldn't sing a bach choral without expression, so why be forced to play one of his keyboard pieces without expression when a better alternative exists?
What about pieces like the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata, should no-one play it because the arpegionne doesn't exist anymore, or should viola players and cellists continue to interpret what is a great piece of music?

 

I understand that of course, but the point I'm trying to make is that in many cases it's not possible or perhaps not desirable to recreate the composer's intention, especially as actual performance practice is concerned. Our own musical experience necessarily comes into play every time we hear a piece of music in how we respond to it - if you like, it's a language and we are continuously developing our knowledge. Accordingly, if we played Bach exactly as Bach would have himself - if we were somehow able to listen back across the centuries - then even hearing exactly the same sounds as the audiences then did, we won't respond to or 'understand' the music in the same way, because our own musical preconceptions are different from how theirs were.

To take a very trivial example to illustrate the point: the famous opening of Mozart's "Dissonance" string quartet. To the listeners at the time, this was unbearably avant-garde and completely unrecognisable as music; to today's listeners, seasoned as they are by Bartok's and Shostakovich's contributions to the literature, it sounds rather old-hat. Of course, we can listen to it in the knowledge that it would have sounded terribly daring at the time, but that's not the same at all as hearing it as terribly daring.

The same argument can be applied - albeit less starkly in many cases - to anything we listen to. Therefore, the ideal of playing it "as it was meant to be heard" is unattainable because we the listeners have changed from the original audience. While it's interesting and informative to find out about authentic practice - and as you point out we can indeed find out a lot about what stylistic points are and aren't correct - there's no philosophical reason to believe that playing exactly as the composer heard it in his head is intrinsically the "best" interpretation.

In fact, there's a strong argument that in many cases the composer's artistic intentions might better be served by substituting modern techniques for what was originally intended, in order to produce the same response from a modern audience.