| It is certainly one of the aims of period performance, to entertain/educate, but surely we can only go so far with our modern audience. We, as musicians, understand the difference between the instruents and most of us would probably agree that there are definite tonal differences between modern and old instruments. This is fine, but are our audiences always blessed with the same musical knowledge?
Could there be a certain degree of intellectual snobbery associated with the period instrument performance crowd?
We play it "properly."
However much we aim to present the music in an historically informed style, the audience will never be hearing it in the same way as the audiences from when it was written. Our audiences (even the most musically intellectually snobbish audiences that frequent many of the music festivals) have grown up with the sounds of contemporary culture - Mozart on gut strings is probably not going to have the same impact on them as Jimi Hendrix did. It is impossible to present the "authentic" aural experience to a contemporary audience because the sound map of the world they live in is very different to that which the composer wrote the music for.
I am not saying that period performance is a waste of time, far from it - I am a huge fan of period instrument tonal colours. The point I am trying to make (not very well, I admit) is that we will only ever go so far. |