DEFENDERS OF SLUDGE

posted by James Reel

    Newsday music critic Justin Davidson, guest blogging at The Rest Is Noise, has belched one of the most asinine comments about music I’ve seen in some time:

Simon Rattle's performance of Ravel's Mother Goose and Strauss' Ein Heldenleben with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall were … full of overweeningly magnified detail. You could make out the highlights on all those crystalline tremolos and follow the curve of each dewdrop pizzicato. It seems strange to criticize an orchestra for clarity, both because it is so difficult to achieve and because we have come to accept it as the standard of textual authenticity. According to current orthodoxy, since the composer took the trouble to write all those damned little squiggles into the score (and implied a whole lot more), the best performance is the one that makes audible as much of the filigree as possible. This is, in different guises, the principle that guides performers as ostensibly distinct as  authentic performance practice gurus, minimalist burblers, and Boulez and his Boulezzini. But, really, what's so terrible about about letting the edges of a chord bleed a bit, or letting some of those waves of fast fiddle notes gurgle indistinctly? Sometimes some judiciously applied atmospheric murk–what a pianist would call pedal–gets closer to the essential truth.

    The soundly furious A.C. Douglas comes to Davidson’s defense in the case of Wagner and other composers of heavily larded German Romantic music, but he notes that clarity and precision are essential elsewhere, as in the music of Mozart and Haydn.
    I’ll grant that “gurgling indistinctly” can sometimes be appropriate. Listen to an Arturo Toscanini recording of the very first bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the initial bars of the second movement of Paul Paray’s otherwise admirable recording of the Symphonie fantastique: their clarity and precision produce a clear pulse, where the music really needs to shimmer. But Davidson’s dismissal of what he calls “overweeningly magnified detail” is distressingly characteristic of the attitudes of New York music critics whose ears have been amateurized by years of subjection to the superficialities of Zubin Mehta and Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic. After 25 years of dull, uncaring, kapellmeister-quality performances by what New Yorkers but hardly anyone else believe to be the world’s greatest orchestra, New York critics are absolutely horrified by any hint of musical italicizing, personal interpretation or, indeed, real preparation that would allow performers to do more than just get through the notes.
    It’s not just a New York problem. Unimaginative conductors have plagued other major American orchestras for years: Eugene Ormandy and Wolfgang Sawallisch in Philadelphia, Erich Leinsdorf and Seiji Ozawa in Boston, Daniel Barenboim in Chicago. With minimal rehearsal, they can draw a pretty sound from an orchestra, and that’s enough for dullard critics and audiences who haven’t been taught any better. But how many other people really want to listen to performances delivered with the bland, routine efficiency and lack of involvement you'd find in a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles?
    Well, actually there is a long tradition of critics and audiences clamoring for the work of artistically barren non-entities. In the late 19th century, Hans Richter trained the English to prefer his bland, metronomic performances to the more imaginataive work of the likes of Artur Nikisch and Hans von Bülow, and Brits have never recovered from Richter’s malign influence. (They lionize exceptions like John Barbirolli and Simon Rattle because they’re English, not because they’re interesting.) Norman Lebrecht, in his book The Maestro Myth, traces the schism back to Mendelssohn versus Wagner. Mendelssohn insisted on fast, metronomic performances from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, decrying the interference of “interpretation” (although playing metronomically and dully is itself a sort of interpretation). Wagner as a conductor was much freer, with elastic phrasing and a willingness to highlight exactly those inner voices that A.C. Douglas argues should not be highlighted in Wagner’s own music.
    The fact is that most, though certainly not all, composers working since the beginning of the Baroque era have expected performers to bring their own interpretation to the music, within reason. Italian performers were especially free with the score in the first half of the 18th century, which irritated German conservatives like Leopold Mozart to no end. Beethoven, who in the 1980s was victimized by sleepwalkers like Roger Norrington who believed it was necessary only to set an orchestra to Beethoven’s metronome markings and then go on autopilot, apparently conducted his music wildly, in a way that baffled the insufficiently prepared musicians who were just trying to follow the score. Brahms clearly preferred the individualistic (within reason) performances of his symphonies under von Bülow to those of dullards like Richter. In the mid 20th century, John Cage and other aleatoric composers left almost everything up to a roll of the dice and on-the-spot decisions by performers, but that’s an extreme case.
    Recently, for an article I was writing on William Bolcom’s rags for string quartet, I asked the composer about his tempo preferences; he declared that each musician must find a tempo that seems right and corresponds somehow to his or her own inner pulse. Bolcom also discussed how he had to be sensitive to voicings in translating his piano rags to the string quartet medium. Yes, he wants those voices to be heard clearly.
    Obviously, what Davidson calls “atmospheric murk” is not something a composer would believe to be in his or her best interest. Davidson is merely making excuses for laziness and sloppiness. And if laziness and sloppiness are all we can demand from today’s professional musicians, who needs those musicians? And who needs cotton-eared critics like Justin Davidson?