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Classical Music 101: What came before is contained in how we play and what we hear today

By John Terauds on February 7, 2013

Venus and Adonis, largely painted by Titian in the mid-16th century.
Venus and Adonis, largely painted by Titian in the mid-16th century.

The stars aligned this week to give me some extra insight into the meaning and value of historically informed performance. The catalyst was a visit on Tuesday with a class of vocal students at University of Toronto, where the instructor, countertenor Daniel Taylor, asked me if there was any value to Early Music in the 21st century.

The question completely broadsided me, because the idea of a world without Early Music seems as bereft as a world without Renaissance history, with the paintings of Titian banished to decommissioned nuclear bomb shelters, and St Mark’s Church in Venice hidden behind tall plywood hoardings.

We don’t have a today without yesterday, even on the most superficial level, which speaks to a multitude of perspectives and aesthetic choices.

My reply to Taylor’s question was not profound. I covered up my fumble for an answer with a suggestion that it is up to today’s interpreter to ensure that yesterday’s music continues to be relevant.

But the question kept ratting around in my head.

Wednesday morning, I uncovered a pile of unread mail that included the latest issue of Early Music America. Whether consciously designed that way or not, the features in the issue all speak to the relevance of old music in new times — including the strange and wonderful revelation that baroque dance forms clearly mimic the patterns of fractal geometry, which was not explored until just a few decades ago.

In an editorial on plainsong, the always thoughtful Harvard music professor Thomas Forest Kelly writes about the way chant has evolved, concluding that, “its weatherbeaten countenance shows the millennium of practice to which it has been subjected. Like all art, its meaning changes with its users; each of those meanings has a value, and each style of performance — of which there are many! — deserves our serious attention.”

Toronto composer Healey Willan’s timeless 20th century music makes perfect sense in the context of chant, as does that of his approximate  contemporary, Maurice Duruflé. Yet the music of these composers sounds vastly different.

Friday evening’s concert by Schola Magdalena at Willan’s Church of St Mary Magdalene will underline this long and impressive evolution in chant.

During the desk cleaning, picked up a new 2-CD Franz Schubert album by the venerable Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda that had been frustrating me.

The album contains three separate recordings of the Sonata in B-flat Major, D960 — the last and most haunting and, for the interpreter, most frustrating of Schubert’s piano sonatas.

Badura-Skoda recorded on: a made-in-2004 Steinway concert grand, a 1924 Bösendorfer Imperial Grand and on a circa 1826 Conrad Graf fortepiano, the wooden-framed genetic ancestor of the cast iron-framed modern pianoforte.

I had found Badura-Skoda’s interpretations to be messy and unfocussed in my previous attempts to figure them out. So I tried again, and found that the fortepiano version was the only one that made sense, because Badura-Skoda was trying to play the modern pianos in a similar way, and the results were wrong.

Trying to put a finger on why this was so, I considered instruments as potentialities — each capable of a certain dynamic and tonal range. As a rule, modern instruments have broader abilities in both areas, but the sound is also more homogeneous from lowest to highest notes and from softest to loudest.

It’s true for a gamba vs a cello, an English horn vs a shawm, a treble viol vs a violin. But what the older instrument may lack in power or range, in can make up for in colour variations in the hands of a musician who knows how to use it.

Many modern instruments sit there daring their owners to play them louder, harder and faster. Baroque or Early instruments need to be caressed and coaxed, not whipped to life.

Badura-Skoda sits easily at the Graf fortepiano, allowing his right and left hands to sometimes go slightly out of sync. His tempo varies subtly, constantly. His fingers stop to breathe. It is a quiet, but intense conversation that, directly translated to the more demanding modern grand — demanding physically in its heavier action, if nothing else — dies to a barely coherent mumble.

One can simply not treat historical versus modern instruments the same. And when one doesn’t, wonderful things start to happen with both.

A modern piano is like a plastic bag of homogenized 2%, while a fortepiano is like a glass bottle filled with organic, full-fat milk with clumps of cream floating on top.

Different people will say “eww” to one or the other. But both have their place in our lives.

The relevance of the old in informing the new in ways we do not realise every day came to a head with pianist Malcolm Bilson, who is the subject of a feature in Early Music America.

His decades of experience and scholarship made him realise, among many other things, that, in the late 18th and early 19th century, the early piano-type instruments were considered musical equals to stringed instruments, while we moderns know the piano to be a loud, percussive collaborator rather than a sweet cousin to the violin, viola, cello and bass.

Here is a little clip of Bilson with Elizabeth Field, from his latest instructional documentary, Performing the Score. We discover that, in a Mozart sonata, the pianist’s right hand and the violin are equal partners — and that the right and left hands playing together with the violin create a virtual string quartet.

This makes sense with a quieter fortepiano, but this kind of sound balance is much more difficult to achieve with a modern piano while still keeping the music exciting for the listener:

Here is a full-length illustration, using Mozart’s G-minor Piano Quartet No. 1, K.478, first in a period-instrument version with Bart van Oort, Tjamke Roelofs, Bernadette Verhagen and Jaap ter Linden, followed by the very finest kind of modern version at the hands of the Fauré Quartett, which is coming to Music Toronto next season.

Listen not for volume, but in the vastly different qualities of sound and texture and, above all, a sense of homogeneiety:

So what is my answer to Daniel Taylor’s question after all that?

It’s clear that Early Music — more appropriately in this context would be anything pre-19th century — is relevant to a musician’s understanding of where music stands today both in terms of composition as well as interpretation.

The scholarship and insights that keep coming from musicologists who specialise in pre-19th century music get brought to life by period-instrument specialists. Their success over the past generation has revolutionized the way modern soloists and orchestras interpret that repertoire, adding an extra spark of life to long-ago compositions.

An audience doesn’t care about the background stuff. They want to be taken on a journey. By mixing old forms with new knowledge and new forms with an awareness of historical roots, there’s a better chance that what each audience member hears will be relevant, engaging and, ultimately, moving.

My Wednesday ended with a long, deeply moving visit with legendary French pianist Marcelle Meyer (1897-1957), whose 1953 recording of keyboard works by Jean-Philippe Rameau brought me to tears.

Here was a magical melding of new and old as Meyer played on a modern piano with all the delicacy and craft of a harpsichord. It’s breathtaking. Meyer was also a great modernist, a muse to several 20th century composers, including Igor Stravinsky.

Let’s start with a 1954 recording of Stravinsky’s Sérénade, Three Movements from Petrouchka and two rags, followed by two hours of sublime Rameau — and then ask ourselves exaxtly how far does the 20th century lie from the 18th?

John Terauds

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