On 26 Mar 2008 at 6:34, dhbailey wrote: > How do you know that the symphonies which were lost were real crap, and > not just stuff that the musicians of the day couldn't be bothered > mastering and so they dismissed it as unplayable.
Well, even I wouldn't go that far. But there is a point in there. I remembering having to listen to Sammartini's music (both of them, actually) in music history classes and thinking YAAAAWWWWWWNNNNNN! Then I heard Ensemble 415's recording of their music, and it was a revelation -- they made it sound exciting and interesting. It's no hard music from the standpoint of notes and rhythms, but in terms of style, it's not obvious, and most of the recordings available back when I was a conservatory student were of C-grade orchestras basically sight-reading this stuff. Another good example of this is Bamert's series of "contemporaries of Mozart," which has a lot of stuff you've never heard of, but so beautifully prepared and recorded that you realize we are missing a whole helluva lot by not have Kozeluch and Pleyel and others in our modern repertory. Much of the French baroque is a victim of this same problem, in that the content of the music is (rather like jazz, in fact) far above the notes written on the page. It require and intimate understanding of the style, the rhetoric and of the ornamentation, in order to get it off the page. Otherwise it sounds completely boring and disposable. When played properly, it's some of the most delicious repertory ever written (in my opinion). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
