Quote:
Originally Posted by robertwhite  Topic split from "NY Philharmonic Audition" thread:
It's Charles Brady playing on "L'Histoire" (with LA musicians), Nagel and Weis on the Octet (in NY), which is where the picture comes from. Don't have the notes in front of me, but that's what I remember reading.
Anyway, about Eric's point -
Brady was 22 when he made this recording, and according to Tom Stevens (you can find the story on his website) had an hour-long, one-on-one session with Stravinsky about the cornet part alone.
To my knowledge, no other L'Histoire recording has been made with as much "first person" input by the composer. Indeed, that was the intent of all the Columbia series recordings with Stravinsky conducting. The fact that he sometimes conducted tempi different from the scores' indications, or even when he revisited a work which he recorded earlier, doesn't change the importance of checking these documents out and appreciating the truth they contain.
No one can stop someone from "interpreting" things their own way, but it becomes rather difficult to justify when the composer has basically said "this is how it goes". Individual players can lend distinctive beauty to something already done, but is that "interpretation"? How do you determine what's "being flexible" and what's distortion? |
I have never heard the recording in question, I am sure it is great. I am not trying to play a sophomore-ish game of “GOTCHA!!!” with a long dead composer --- “Listen to this recording of him conducting….and then this one…and now look at the tempo in the score…the 3 tempos are all different!! GOTCHA!!!!!” That is pretty stupid. obviously there are a million things that can dictate a live show..acoustics of the space plays a huge part in tempo for example.
Wagner was constantly on Mahler’s @ss when Mahler was conducting Wagner’s music. Mahler was a very fine conductor and obviously had great musical instincts but he just heard things differently than Wagner did, and since Wagner had not been infinitely clear in the score, Mahler got yelled at, and more than a couple times. So when Mahler starts to write he includes very detailed instructions on how to play his music. And yet with all this “prose” written into the editions we read off of today, no Mahler performance sounds the same. But isn’t that the whole point? I mean would anyone here go to a concert if they knew exactly how it was going to sound?
I have heard that Stravinski said something along the lines of, “you do not need to interpret my music.” Someone explain this to me.
And ultimately, as trumpet players and not conductors, much of the time we simply do as we’re told, whether it is exactly, positively, without a doubt what the composer wanted, or it is the craziest thing anyone has ever heard. This is only if we want to keep playing where we’re playing, however.