On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music BAROQUE PRACTICES BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH u nttl roughly the '50s, au-diences at large knew the baroque only as reflected in scores available from the 19th century, or at least in the...
...Questions of period style did not arise...
...Her fluent ornamentation and boldness of phrase (occasionally marred by patches of dull, matted tone) serve the music and the drama equally, and her vibrant sound suits Dido's extremes of passion...
...Without surgical intervention, a male alto must "construct" a singing voice outside the compass of his "natural" range...
...The performance is small-scale, as Handel meant it to be, and wonderfully polished...
...Richard Stil-well's performance brings the Trojan hero to Dido's level...
...curiously, it is at its best (most sharply focused and richest in resonance) in the longest, trickiest lines of his part...
...Preoccupied with the period practices, Jacobs attempts to turn back the clock over 200 years, but his dry as dust academicism achieves nothing more poetic than mimicry...
...with its tearing harmonies and close vocal lines shearing mournfully apart) forcefully testifies to the wisdom of holding baroque ensembles to the sizes their composers intended...
...Raymond Leppard's new performance (RCA ARL 1-3021) combines the intellectual rigor of Fischer-Dieskau's Handel recital with the immediacy of Gardiner's^cis, and adds a blazing theatricality all its own...
...Although he exhibits amazing dynamic control, he does not match Burrowes for sheer beauty of sound...
...As her unhappy swain Acis, Johnson also supplies expressive articulations...
...Yet those were chiefly with academics whose expertise was untouched by the gloss and fire that distinguish first-rate performers...
...he explains what it is—and through intellect reaches the emotions...
...but its mode, instead of pastoral, is tragic...
...In their time, musical notation was a kind of shorthand, an outline for the individual performer to fill in according to taste and talent, albeit within certain stylistic limits...
...They prove to be of slight musical value and highly repetitive, so the first purpose earns the musicians marks simply for their good intention...
...His voice is dry...
...His rhythmic alertness, his dignity, the stalwart beauty of his baritone, and his generous sensitivity paint a picture to set beside the Virgilian original...
...the effect, highest magic...
...His notes sound frigid and fabricated...
...As the Carthaginian queen, Tatiana Troyanos declaims heroically...
...Rhythm, melody and harmony were all twisted awry...
...A disc of Antonio Vivaldi's Cantate italiane (Archive 2533 385), with Rene Jacobs, alto, accompanied by a baroque consort under the direction of Alan Curtis, seems to have two purposes: to bring the music (which is unpublished) before the concerned public, and to demonstrate musicological propriety...
...The giant Polyphemus, who kills Acis to spite Galatea, finds in White an ideal interpreter: His well-tuned bass, dark and full, lends this bouncing buoyant part grandeur and a hint of clownishness...
...Historicity, which in the hands of the pedant entombs the baroque spirit, is for them the final gloss of performance, the bloom of a living tradition...
...more often, they outperform him...
...In recitative he rushes cadences (the instruments trailing after) to achieve "free" declamation...
...Who can count the ways of Handel's eloquence...
...The gulf between Fischer-Dieskau's metropolitan sophistication and the innocence of the cast offering a new and complete recording of the first version of Handel's Acts and Galatea (Archiv 2708 038) could scarcely be wider...
...Hill's Damon rounds out the cast with distinction, and the four soloists are joined in the choruses by bass Paul Elliott...
...in the greater utterances—her two laments and her duets with Belinda, her waiting woman, and with Aeneas—she soars higher still...
...His interpretation, too, is a riot of artifice, and each carefully calculated effect misfires...
...With his encyclopedic command of the history, Fischer-Dieskau always assumes the style most proper to his texts...
...Wretched lovers...
...They had replaced the compact baroque bands with larger orchestras, upsetting original balances and introducing foreign timbres...
...Fischer-Dieskau does not abandon himself to the sentiment of the music...
...A larger group might add brute mass, but at the cost of this five-voice choir's keenness and vivacity...
...The aria "Passo di pena in pena" from the cantata Amor, hai vinto develops the image of a wave-tossed boat...
...in arias, tackling the lines and ornamenting conscientiously, he scatters accents of cloying -preciosity...
...The serenity of "Peace crown'd with roses" (from Susanna), for instance, floods sudden light on the words "joyous plenty...
...Like Acis and Galatea, Henry Pur-cell's opera Dido and Aeneas (composed in 1689, some 30 years before Handel's masque) finds its source in antiquity...
...and although his flawless technique guides him through even the most ornate vocal lines, he does not have the limpid fluidity (or the natural trill) of the native baroque specialist...
...His concerns are all-enbracing, revealing a penetrating mind and scrupulous musicianship...
...But the editors of 100-odd years ago, boundless in their self-confidence and advocates of progress, had freely recast the baroque to conform to their own esthetic, making everything big...
...These Italian cantatas are among close to 40 extant manuscripts scattered in European libraries...
...John Eliot Gardiner, who leads the English Baroque Soloists and the singers—soprano Norma Burrowes (Galatea), tenors Anthony Rolf Johnson (Acis) and Martyn Hill (Damon), and bass Willard White (Polyphemus) —approaches the Ovidian fable with an ingenuousness that invites us to enter the pastoral world with unironic delight...
...The 17-piece band of strings and winds provides a transparent, astringent background against which the lightweight voices are heard to the best advantage...
...As for the performance, it is of the narrowest academic interest...
...Curtis recordings I had heard in the past (notably his Incoronazione di Poppea on the Cambridge label) left me no very cherished impressions: His scholarly passions sounded like mere matters of pedantry...
...Aeneas has always seemed to me a lesser part: short, all recitative, only a few moments of arioso...
...The serious editions now published are prepared by scholars aware of the applicable conventions, and performers are learning how to use them...
...Several recent recordings of the vocal literature illustrate how widely artists can spiral within the circle of stylistic accuracy...
...His readings are enlightening, and at their frequent best, moving...
...Felicity Palmer's rapt Belinda and Philip Lan-gridge's gamesome Sailor stand out in a cast that betrays no weakness...
...She can even tinge such a line as "The skies are clouded" with fear and pity...
...Vivaldi's excellence in the passage is equal to the players...
...But his cerebral approach gives the Handel album a professorial touch that is by no means displeasing...
...Stylistic awareness is the beginning, not the end, of living performance...
...The vocalist, though, repeatedly vitiates their contribution...
...He hoots and whoops...
...he seems to cross a break at every half-step...
...they include the resolute, sculpted phrases of "Dopo l'orrore" (from Ottone) and the amorous lilt of "Pur ritorno a rimi-rarvi" (from Agrippina...
...Music, it was generally thought, was to be played as written...
...And something remarkable has happened: The more performers embrace the canons of period style, the more strikingly personal are their performances...
...lacking suppleness, he ends phrases in blunt cuts...
...indeed they expect it...
...The English Chamber Orchestra and the cast, from principals to chorus, have been carefully schooled in the use of appoggiatura—grace notes—and other embellishments, so that their impassioned execution unlocks the deep expressivity of the baroque devices...
...The solo character of the instruments was lost, individual invention became impracticable and the arts of embellishment fell into disuse...
...The means are technical...
...Her virtuosity complements her graciousness, in both the nymph's gladness and woe...
...Its scene is beautifully set by a short introduction that begins with a duo for violins and, with the addition of other voices and an agitated bass, quickly summons up a maritime vista of sombre mystery...
...Audiences are no longer puzzled by historicity...
...This laborious falsetto technique seldom produces a pleasing result, and Jacobs' application of it is no exception...
...Here Curtis (at the harpsichord) commands seven masterly string players, each equipped with a prize instrument from Vivaldi's own day, and the overall complaint of dreariness does not apply to their accompaniment...
...In Nahum Tate's libretto we may miss the accents of high tragedy, but Purcell found them, and Stilwell reawakens them...
...The selections, from operas and oratorios in English and Italian, range from the noble linear simplicity of "Ombra mai fu" (from Serse) —known to churchgoers as "Handel's Largo"—to the florid elaboration of "Si, fra i ceppi" (from Berenice...
...Burrowes' exemplary phrasing enhances the warmth and purity of her tone, and her agility allows her to ripple through Galatea's swift melis-mas with an air of becoming modesty...
...Unlike Jacobs, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau does not observe the baroque niceties out of antiquarian fanaticism in his album of arias by George Frederick Handel, featuring the splendid Miinchener Kammerorchester under the direction of Hans Stadlmair (Deutsche Grammophon 2450 979...
...Today, it is widely known that baroque scores cannot be rendered literally (and surely not from 19th-century editions), for the very simple reason that they were never set down note for note...
...Other periods, notably the Romantic, suit his temperament better...
...On Music BAROQUE PRACTICES BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH u nttl roughly the '50s, au-diences at large knew the baroque only as reflected in scores available from the 19th century, or at least in the 19th-century tradition...
...If the 19th century was the Dark Ages of baroque performance practice, however, we are nonetheless indebted to it for rescuing masterworks from potential neglect...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 7
