The denouement?

[JasonBlack]

(09-28-2022, 07:36 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: A current craze in classical music is the attempt to rediscover "period performance" in which musicians attempt to rediscover old musical practices including intonation, tempos, instrumental vibrato, interpretations of note lengths, and the use of old-fashioned reeds and strings. One irony is that period performance often sounds less attractive than more modern practice. Imitating the lesser standards of performance is incompetent, as shown by the fact that conductors who conducted as early as the 1930's and into the 1950's (and often well beyond) never spoke of any "golden age" of orchestral play. Musical training is better and more rigorous than it used to be. Instruments often have richer sound, and they are designed to fully 'get' composers from Mozart onward. I cannot imagine a satisfying pianoforte performance of Schubert's piano sonatas; I can better imagine a fine performance of them on a Moog synthesizer (which is as un-genuine as is possible) than on some pianoforte from Schubert's time.

The problem isn't that they're trying to imitate sub-par standards. It's that they're not imitating them correctly in the first place. It turns out....we actually have recordings of some of the original performers for works Verdi, Puccini and others.

For example: Franceso Tamagno, the first Otello






compare that to a modern example. It's not the worst (I didn't want to be too biased and just pull up the worst example I could find), but you can tell pretty quickly his technique is off. It sounds strangled, pushed, almost constipated). 




Rosa Raisa: The first Turandot (note: this aria is not from Turandot, but it is from another verismo composer). Pay close attention to that note at around 3:30. "io piAAAAAAAAAANgo!" That's called chest voice or "voce di peto" in Italian. 





modern example: hollow, artificially dark from too much falsetto singing. Remember that monster chest voice note at the end of the previous video....nope. Completely gone here, and with it, the bulk of raw emotion the piece is supposed to convey. As with my previous comparison, I did not scrape for the bottom of the barrel here. This is very good singing by modern standards, but when you compare it to real bel canto/verismo technique....no, she doesn't hold a candle.