The denouement?

[pbrower2a]

(10-01-2022, 12:43 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(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





Excellent! Modern singers need learn of singing from the chest. Even I know enough to do that, and I am not from a family of opera fans. (Many were hick German-Americans, and in case you think that they listen to classical music including opera ... they don't. The older ones are mostly devotees of country music, and the younger ones are mostly into pop music of various origins). I'm guessing that classical music, including opera, unites people along some other cultural trait.   

Verdi lived into the era of the gramophone and surely heard it. Opera arias were among the obvious music to be recorded, as recorded music was a luxury until the age of the LP record, at least for classical music. 

Quote: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).
 




The name Vladimir Galouzine should give away part of the problem. In Soviet times, Italy was not part of the Soviet sphere of  politics, and any opera singer who did Italian opera was a likely defector. Needless to say, Soviet students of classical music as singers or orchestral players rarely got permission to go to the West. Soviet pianists and string players were none the worse for wear from that. Opera singers were compromised musically if they tried to perform Italian opera on a Russian stage. (The DDR was open to Soviet students of great music, and it had its great tradition of German music. The DDR claimed (legitimately) J S Bach as undeniably one of its own. This said, there are differences between German and Italian... and Russian opera is much more Russian than Italian after more than seventy years of Soviet rule that tended to isolate Soviet creative people from the West. 

Don't get me wrong. Russia has a great operatic heritage. But that is more related to Boris Godunov and Yevgeny Onyegin than to Trovatore or Turandot.  That gap has been shrinking. 

Quote: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.

The great conductors such as Arturo Toscanini (earliest-born) and Szell (latest-born) born in the later half of the 19th century  who conducted into at least the 1950's (Toscanini. 1868-1957) and 1960's (Szell, 1897-1970) never spoke of any Golden Era of orchestral play. It is telling that orchestral musicians despised composer-conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) for his disparagement of the orchestras of his time for inadequacy for playing his demanding works... and the works of others as he wanted them played. Mahler, it seems, was right! The reputation of Franz Liszt as a pianist regrettably does not appear in recordings, but we have Rachmaninov playing his own piano part in his concertos... and it was extremely good. Fritz Kreisler, who recorded into the 1920's, was also excellent. 

There were few truly professional orchestras around 1900. The New York Philharmonic may have been adequate for Mahler when the Vienna Philharmonic was unavailable due to antisemitism and his reputation as an @$$hole, which helped things not at all. Mahler was only seven years older than Toscanini. 

In contrast to orchestral play (more highly-trained musicians are out there, and that means that small American cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis can have fine symphony orchestras, and the real constraint on quality of orchestras is the quality of instruments available) due to the more rigorous training of symphonic musicians. Singing is a different matter. Itzhak Perlman could buy the violin of Yehudi Menuhin, but Luciano Pavarotti could not buy and use the vocal cords of Enrico Caruso.