I would imagine that several people who read my last post became curious about performance practice but weren't familiar with the interpretive styles I discussed. This post is for them and anyone else who might like to learn a bit more about the differences between Baroque and Romantic music.
If you haven't done so already, you should go to this website and download Spotify. It's absolutely free, it will give you access to millions of tracks, and it's the only way you'll be able to hear the recordings I'll discuss in this post.
Let's get started. Use Spotify to open this playlist. Its four tracks include two contrasting interpretations of a Bach prelude and fugue. After you've played the first two recordings and listened for differences, come back to the blog.
The first recording features Edwin Fischer playing Bach's 22nd prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Fischer was a Swiss pianist who lived mostly in the first half of the 20th century, and he plays in the Romantic style I mentioned last time. He coaxes delicate tones from his piano, which, depending on the mood of the listener, could sound either soothing or melancholy. He begins quietly but plays louder or softer to accentuate dramatic points in the music. If you listen carefully, you can hear the way certain tones seem to linger in the air when Fischer uses the sustain pedal.
Contrast Fischer's approach with Bob van Asperen's in the next track. Asperen is a Dutch harpsichordist who studied with Gustav Leonhardt, and his playing demonstrates the way many modern performers approach Baroque music. The timbre of the harpsichord gives the recording a different character from Fischer's. The brighter sonority of the harpsichord makes the repeated notes sound more persistent than reflective. The dynamic level remains constant throughout the piece because a performer can't use touch to make a harpsichord sound louder or softer. Finally, the notes die away when they are struck because the harpsichord has no sustain pedal.
I'll look at the next two tracks in my next post. Until then, leave me comments to let me know what other differences you hear in the pieces and which recording you prefer.
Showing posts with label Gustav Leonhardt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gustav Leonhardt. Show all posts
Friday, January 20, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Performing Like a Lawyer
During law school, I met a lot of people who looked at me funny when I told them I had studied music in college. Some articulated their confusion with a question: "What does music have to do with law?" Their implication was clear. In their minds, the rigorous, precise world of legal thinking was incompatible with the fuzzy, feel-good world of music.
Those people must not have known Gustav Leonhardt. Today as I reflected on the great Dutch harpsichordist's passing, the questions from my classmates reminded me of how important Leonhardt's work was.
If you've never heard of Leonhardt, this New York Times article summarizes his life well. The article notes that Leonhardt helped to define the historical performance movement. Unfortunately, many readers don't know anything about that movement.
Many keyboardists in the first half of the twentieth century played Baroque music the same way they played music by Romantic composers, such as Liszt or Brahms, who lived over a century after the Baroque period ended. They played on pianos, used heavy pedaling and legato phrasing, and made dramatic dynamic shifts. In the middle of the century, several performers, one of the most prominent of whom was Leonhardt, criticized that performance style. They argued that such playing was inappropriate because it would have been impossible on typical Baroque instruments. Bach and his contemporaries usually played on harpsichords, which lack pedals and don't allow performers to play louder or softer by varying their touch.
Leonhardt wasn't content to focus on Baroque instruments while interpreting music. He read musical instruction books written in the 17th and 18th centuries. He scoured archives to find early compositional drafts and compared different versions of pieces to determine which editions best represented composers' preferences. He approached music the way lawyers approach cases -- he researched texts thoroughly and carefully evaluated contrasting approaches before presenting his conclusions to an audience.
Leonhardt's life testifies to the power of rigorous thinking applied to heartfelt music making. The combination of those qualities revolutionized keyboard performance and inspired a generation of musicians to look to the past as a guide for the present. Just as importantly, it sustained a musical career that, as the video below shows, remained vital until its final days.
Those people must not have known Gustav Leonhardt. Today as I reflected on the great Dutch harpsichordist's passing, the questions from my classmates reminded me of how important Leonhardt's work was.
If you've never heard of Leonhardt, this New York Times article summarizes his life well. The article notes that Leonhardt helped to define the historical performance movement. Unfortunately, many readers don't know anything about that movement.
Many keyboardists in the first half of the twentieth century played Baroque music the same way they played music by Romantic composers, such as Liszt or Brahms, who lived over a century after the Baroque period ended. They played on pianos, used heavy pedaling and legato phrasing, and made dramatic dynamic shifts. In the middle of the century, several performers, one of the most prominent of whom was Leonhardt, criticized that performance style. They argued that such playing was inappropriate because it would have been impossible on typical Baroque instruments. Bach and his contemporaries usually played on harpsichords, which lack pedals and don't allow performers to play louder or softer by varying their touch.
Leonhardt wasn't content to focus on Baroque instruments while interpreting music. He read musical instruction books written in the 17th and 18th centuries. He scoured archives to find early compositional drafts and compared different versions of pieces to determine which editions best represented composers' preferences. He approached music the way lawyers approach cases -- he researched texts thoroughly and carefully evaluated contrasting approaches before presenting his conclusions to an audience.
Leonhardt's life testifies to the power of rigorous thinking applied to heartfelt music making. The combination of those qualities revolutionized keyboard performance and inspired a generation of musicians to look to the past as a guide for the present. Just as importantly, it sustained a musical career that, as the video below shows, remained vital until its final days.
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