On Feb 9, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Gernot Hilger wrote: > My reference interpretation, a beloved compagnion for more than > thirty years is Hoppy's 1978 rendition on the 1755 Widhalm lute, > Reflexe edition, not the later recording on his van Lennep lute. I > find this particular piece overflowing with emotion, ardently > played, very moving. It just hits and touches me. The music is so > deep and calm and nevertheless arousing. What a masterpiece. And an > example of what can be done on the lute. > > Upon further reflection, I find that Robert does in fact express > himself, but only on a smaller scale. More civilised, perhaps. > Which I find a pity. > > Why is it that the emotional range of many lute recordings is so > small? Or compressed? It can be done otherwise. Or is it just a > matter of my ears being clogged?
They may very well be clogged. If you've been married to one performance for 30 years, it's only natural to think of it as THE performance, and think of every other performance as if it were an attempt to duplicate it; therefore any other performance can hardly differ from it without being inferior. We all tend to judge music- making by some model we've internalized, and recordings are very powerful internalizers. You may be right about emotional scale, but I think you should be scientific about this: put away the Smith Reflexe recording, spend 30 years listening to Barto's, and then get back to us. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
