Following up on the example of the sidedrummer who could, if he wanted, “sabotage” a performance of “Boléro” by keeping to accelerate (he might well risk his job doing that on purpose; conductors as a rule are more dictatorial than composers): this can happen in chamber music: if any one member of the ensemble keeps accelerating the others can’t do anything but to follow, at least to the next G.P. (If one person drags there is a good chance to “fix” it while playing, but slowing a colleague down is impossible even to the person who is supposed to lead at that particular passage). More importantly though, in the absence of a conductor every decision is up for debate, sometimes heated. So now we have the text of the composer PLUS several versions of the interpreters to somehow fit into a coherent result. Most debate in my experience involves no change to the text; just different yet legitimate readings of it.

Which brings me to Shostakovich’s piano trio (no. 2), which I once worked on for performance with my friends (I should admit to being an amateur; our coach suggested the choice, but it was one of the highlights of my musical life and we gave a creditable performance for our friends).

We listened to several recordings to see what other people made of it. It turns out that some people have actually changed the text and added glissandi and much later than Cortot. In the first trio section of the scherzo there are a sort of “inverted sigh” motives, with a crescendo on the long note and with the short noted loudest, played with up bow in the strings. The recording with Yo Yo Ma for example (others also) plays these motives glissando. Gidon Kremer on the Argerich/Maisky/Kremer recording (extremely impressive though very opposite to Shostakovich’s own style) does very ugly things with glissando in the last movement. There is glissando in the score, but not at these places.

There is a recording around with Shostakovich, Oistrach and a Hungarian cellist (Milos Sadlo?) from 1948 (plus or minus a year or two). There is none of that on it, the whole recording is dry and matter of fact, just giving the music as written. The piano playing is far from perfect technically (I believe Sh.’s had disease had already started; the strings are flawless). The tempi are fast, almost as fast as the metronome markings, there is hardly any rubato, the dynamic range is relatively modest, no screeching fff (though fff occurs at several places in the score; there may be technical reasons for that though).
Yet the performance is incredibly alive and in large part it comes from Sh.’s piano playing, particularly also when accompanying: the way staccato is differentiated, rhythm is subtly underlined is masterful and utterly devoid of performer-vanity. To me it is the best recording of the piece I have heard (the trio is considerably more impressive live, so don’t miss a chance to hear it).

This I think is the art of performance at its best: reproducing the score as written and filling it with life by means of phrasing, accenting, articulating the notes and phrases. No gimmick can live up to such an achievement.

And it is true that Cortot and Kreisler (and Callas) died before any of the three of us has a chance to hear them live.

And that collectively, these have sterilised musical performance.

Let me try to address these.

1. I never heard Cortot live, and probably neither you nor Albrecht did. We have read about him and listened to his recordings – and both of you have qualms about what recordings have done to musical performance. His live performances were probably inspirational, and if we had been there, we probably would have forgiven the wrong notes and memory lapses, and never have forgotten the occasion, but we don’t know this first-hand. It is invidious to hold him up as a shining example of performance practice and the power of the interpreter under these circumstances. Witnessed live (if live performance is important), most of us most of the time experience less than brilliant performances by less than brilliant performers. How much license would you like them to have? Where Bernstein can decide to double a composer’s tempo marking, with his background as performer, composer and generally rather flamboyant musical genius, I’m not sure that I’d want Fred Bloggs, plumber by day, who conducts the Smallsville Amateur Symphony Orchestra to feel he has the interpretative authority to do the same. But he can still inspire his players to produce a performance that is as true to the score as the players’ faulty techniques allow, and nevertheless excites and moves the audience, who maybe last heard a live orchestra at their last concert six months ago. Or it may be a rubbish performance and I find I’m bored to tears. But whichever, that’s not sterility in my book.

I reiterate that there are copious possibilities of interpretative freedom in the scores of all composers, even those who smother their scores with interpretation marks (like Ustvolskaya, for example – how would Cortot have interpreted her music? There’s a question for you!).

2. A composer, through notation or lack of it, tries to enable performers to recreate what he hears in his head or otherwise imagines. The composer can choose deliberately to leave major decisions up to the performers (like instrumentation, or tempo, or pitches, or indeed everything, in the case of some graphic scores), or to chance (as in some of Cage’s works). With other parameters, the composer will expect certain conventions of his time. For example, in Renaissance and Baroque times, he would expect that performers would add their own ornamentation whether he liked it or not. As you say, Albrecht, Bach might sometimes strive to prevent it by writing the ornamentation out in full, so there was no room for the performer to add more (I bet that didn’t stop some of them, though!), but otherwise it was likely to happen. Puccini could write I think it is an eight note top C in Nessun Dorma, but would have known full well that tenors would dwell there for as long as their technique would allow, ignoring the score and milking the applause for all they’re worth. He would know that. Why didn’t he write a long note with a hefty pause on it? Did he actually wish the tenors would shut up and get on with the plot, or did he happily accept it?

But whatever you may say, Nicholas, and whatever the composer may write, there is always a lot of interpretative freedom possible while adhering to the score.
This is not to say that composers are always best judges when it comes to those parameters that they do prescribe – far from it. But who is to decide that they are wrong in major ways? A great artist, like Cortot or Bernstein? A maverick like Glenn Gould? Another composer? Any old Tom, Dick or Harry? Well, yes, of course, any of them! Who’s to stop them? But who’s performance would you want to hear? For my first encounter with a piece, I’d rather like to hear a reasonable stab at what the composer intended, as far as that can be done. If I hear it lots of times, I’d be interested in what other performers can do with it without straying too far from the composer’s markings. And then sometimes, for variety, I like to hear other more extreme interpretations. But first, let’s hear what the composer’s saying.

I put it to you, as a conductor, Nicholas, what would your feeling be if you were conducting Ravel’s Bolero and the side-drum player decided, as an interpretative act, to perform a gradual and continuous accelerando through the piece – something that would be very hard to ignore and fight against. You’d either have to stop the piece or go with him. I understand that it is a gruelling part for the side-drum on account of its excessive repetitiveness, and an accel would really express his frustration. And it could be enormously exciting! But you’re the conductor, it’s in performance, what do you do? Pat him on the back at the end and say “Great to hear you expressing yourself!” Or do you say “You fired! I make the artistic decisions!” Who’s the performer? Who does the expressing? Remember Ravel didn’t rate it much as a piece of music.

As a footnote, concerning opera singers, there are those I like and those I dislike from all eras. My opinion is frequently not the same as the critics or popular opinion. Ah, critics! There’s another beef for you Nicholas! What power do they have and what good and what damage have they done over the years?

When I conduct I sometimes use an idea that was often utilized by Stokowski called “free bowing”. The composers would likely dislike this idea as we ignore the bowing written on the page in order to achieve a musically lush tone. And I have to say, although “appeal to authority” is a fallacy, I come to the following ultimatum: good enough for Stokowski, good enough for me.

And what do you think about Bernstein conducting Shostakovich’s fifth symphony? Did you know that he changed the tempo of the final part of the finale to about twice the written speed?

1. Your anecdote recalls something I left out of earlier posts to save space: there is a privilege in working with composers who are alive: you can ask them to explain their vision; you can even challenge them on their decisions. This conductor is suggesting a very major change to your piece; the entire trajectory of your music is altered (personally often wince when “amen” comes along as an exhilarating fugue undergirded by trumpets and timpani, though that happens quite often–even the words “dona nobis pacem” at the end have this upbeat-ending-tone in so many masses. So–though not knowing the piece–I’d risk to say I’d prefer your version of it.) If you want to accept his suggestion or argue against it is of course your decision. There is the story about the Violin sonata by Cesar Franck: Ysaye wanted to play it slower than the composer had envisioned it and Franck actually changed the tempo marking of the first movement to sanction the change (this is of course a much smaller change than the one in your anecdote). So it is possible for an interpreter to see things differently from the composer and be “right” about it. But we can not go and ask Mozart about it and this puts more responsibility on the performer.

2. & 3. The conventions of the time of the composition do matter in my opinion (though it is also important to remember that we are playing Vivaldi to people who have heard Shostakovich; Vivaldi’s vision is possibly better served by using more modern conventions such as “well tempered” tuning than by painstaking imitation of baroque practice). But the fact is that our understanding of these conventions keeps changing and is not always accurate. Example: Mozart- and Haydn-symphonies are typically played nowadays (not in my youth) with 6 first violins, maybe 30 musicians total, because few venues were able to mobilize more than those back in Mozart’s day. But there is a letter by Mozart to his father where he described a performance of one of his symphonies with 40(!) violins and all winds doubled (I believe in Mannheim). He obviously loved it. It seems we have set ourselves a rule that Mozart would not have supported. For Baroque: I still remember “Terassendynamik”, the idea that everybody handled dynamics the way a harpsichord has to (due to technical limitations) and that there were no crescendi or diminuendi, just abrupt changes. Nowadays it seems absurd. Also: The continuo has been played by a basse instrument (Cello, Bassoon) combined with a chord instrument (harpsichord, organ, lute etc.) for quite some time now. But then came Andrew Manze and claimed that new evidence suggested that the correct execution is with harpsichord alone…
The fact is that we don’t have all that many sources (Leopold Mozart’s “Violinschule” and Quantz’s book about the flute are the most often quoted sources and they deal primarily with technical problems; besides they come very close to the end of the baroque) about this stuff. There is an edition of the Corelli sonatas (from those days) with embellishments which the editor claims were the ones Corelli himself used in performance. If you look at them closely you see that they often cut against the phrasing of the original (i.e. the un-embellished text of Corelli); I can’t imagine that a composer would embellish his works like that.

And Bach of course (also Handel in some works) wrote out the embellishments (almost always); no point in adding a second layer. Depending on the character and function of the movement in question there is more and less embellishing going on, a sarabande has less of it than a slow movement in a sonata etc.

Choral trills are technically demanding and eat lots of rehearsal time. I can understand if amateur performers sing the works without the trills. And I think that this compromise is better than a trill that is just a “cluster” of people trying supervibrato. Not even all soloists can sing proper trills.

4. On this just a question: repeats are often skipped (though not as often in the age of the CD as they were when the LP was the recording medium…). As a composer what do you think about that? In many works there are prima volta / seconda volta endings that strongly suggest that the composer envisioned the repeat. Also separate markings for the first and second time (Haydn, emperor quartet, first movement, “seconda volta piu presto” for the coda).

I’d like to reformulate what you say at the end from the composer’s point of view to reflect the performer’s task: The source for the composer’s vision is the score (in vocal works also the text); it is the primary guide. The task then is to discover, re-envision the composer’s vision through study of the score and to find means to make this vision sound. My point in all this has been that there is plenty to do which does not involve changes to the text of the score; you can follow every marking conscientiously and still produce live (in the literal sense of the word) performances. Which would mean that more freedom for performers is not a necessary recipe against “sterility”.

NLewis, you seem to me to resemble those opera fans who are convinced that the true art of singing has been lost and nobody can sing nowadays like Maria Callas. When Callas was alive and active of course the same people said nobody could sing like Malibran…