On 1/16/07, Raymond Horton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Rifkin got some attention with his project, and got the musical world thinking about smaller choirs, perhaps, but the one-on-a part B Minor Mass is just silly.
Really? Tell that to Paul McCreesh: **snip**(from an interview Paul McCreesh gave on his one voice per part performance of the the St Matthew passion) I've always had an instinctive feeling that the fundamental hypothesis Rifkin proposed was the right one. I had done these pieces [in the past] with small choirs, as you would expect; I've just become more hard-line. Really, the evidence seems to be just so overwhelming that we've got to start rethinking the whole process. What annoys me in some sense about the whole "Early Music" business is that ... you know, I have no objection to people performing Bach with a large orchestra-and-chorus or a small orchestra-and-chorus or quartet of saxophones. It doesn't worry me in the slightest. It's when people try and create spurious musicological arguments to justify things that are basically just musical taste. I understand the practical arguments: performing the St. Matthew Passion with solo singers requires a certain type of voice; the pragmatic demands of touring may prevent that approach. I also acknowledge the argument that in large concert halls, it's harder to bring that sort of thing off (although I don't think it's as hard as people often make out). http://www.andante.com/Article/article.cfm?id=18169 Kim Patrick Clow _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
