RECORDINGS, STYLE, AND ALBAN BERG

posted by James Reel

    Via ArtsJournal, here’s a link to a very interesting item in the New York Review of Books (which is stingy with online content). It’s a review by that most intellectual of American pianists, Charles Rosen, of Robert Philip’s Performing Music in the Age of Recording. Says Rosen:

Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording is a brilliant analysis of how [the advent and ubiquity of recordings, replacing live music-making] has affected performance style. It is also incidentally, for much of the time, the best account I know of how musical life in general has changed since the introduction of vinyl and long-playing records in the 1950s, which made it possible for records to invade everyone's home. But it starts even further back with the end of the nineteenth century, when recording was invented by Thomas Edison, who recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his new machine. The book is full of fascinating detail cogently presented on rehearsal practices and standards, recording on piano rolls, the different instruments used in orchestras, the way records are edited, and the contrasting musical ideals of performers. Philip is large-minded, tolerant, and sympathetic to various positions, and consistently judicious.

    Typically, Rosen does far more than summarize the Philip book (which is about all the English contributors to the self-defeatingly Anglophilic NYRB can manage and is the main reason I stopped subscribing to the publication years ago). He offers what he calls “footnotes” to the book, which add up to a thoughtful essay on changing tastes in performance in the past hundred years.
    Rosen is not entirely convincing in his few, mild objections to Philip's thesis that the need for accuracy and repeated listenability in recordings dulled the expressivity of live performance. Toward the end of the review, for example, Rosen writes, “There are, however, enough recordings where precision and a sober lack of mannerism reach a state of grace.” But the examples Rosen then cites were all recorded well before World War II, or shortly thereafter—before the changes that Philip details became widespread. Nevertheless, Rosen’s essay is well worth your time.
    One of Rosen’s remarks leads to something I’ve been meaning to say about Wednesday’s concert at the Leo Rich Theatre by the Cypress String Quartet, the most fully satisfying performance I’ve ever heard of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite. Although Berg wrote it 80 years ago, the Lyric Suite has only recently become palatable to the general open-eared music lover. Part of that has to do with the natural expansion of public taste over the decades, but largely it’s because performances have become more and more effective. As Rosen writes,

With radical changes of style, it takes more than a decade for performing musicians to catch up and find an adequate way of rendering the new. We can trace this process in recordings of Stravinsky's music, in which what first sounded awkward and unconvincing was later performed with greater ease and more warmth. The trick, as always, is to find a form of expression in performance that is adequate to the new.

    Berg’s use of the twelve-tone system of composition, as well as his abrupt and frequent shifts of mood (characteristic as well of Leos Janácek’s quartets, which also date from the 1920s), have long made the Lyric Suite seem disjointed and even inscrutable. In the beginning, and for many years, musicians had to work hard just to achieve accurate performances; interpretation and expression seemed hardly possible. Calling the suite “lyric” seemed like a cruel joke.
    But today, groups like the Cypress Quartet are accustomed to essaying challenging scores, and they’re frankly more technically adept than most ensembles of the middle 20th century. I’ve heard performances that were more consistently intense from beginning to end, but on Wednesday night the Cypress Quartet made all the elements of the Lyric Suite cohere; the players found not only the longer line within individual melodies but also the line linking the various brief motifs. Although they did not use the sort of portamento and rubato common among string players when Berg wrote the suite, the Cypress Quartet did present the work in a way that was expressive and communicative.
    Meanwhile, many classical musicians are moving away from the obsession with spit-polish perfection that recordings have nurtured. They’re not getting sloppy, but they are enjoying far more freedom of expression than was considered appropriate during the last half of the 20th century. Just listen to any recent recording by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, or discs from the more daring Italian early-music ensembles like Il Giardino Armonico and Europa Galante. If these practices continue to spread, Philip’s book will soon be a chronicle of the recent past, rather than a description of current trends.