The other day I recommended three philosophy channels on YouTube and I want to start this post by re-recommending one of them. I just started watching Prof. Victor Gijsbers series of videos on epistemology and they are really great. Here is the third one:
You should get a couple of things from this clear, balanced and well-argued clip: epistemology, along with logic and ethics (and probably aesthetics as well) is a normative discipline, i.e. it is not about digging up knowledge so much as it is about discovering why you should be seeking knowledge. The other main point is that the search for knowledge is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental good (of course it could be both). Like friendship and love and kindness and things like that, the search for knowledge, not the simple possession of it, is intrinsically good.
So, let's do some searching for aesthetic knowledge cleverly disguised as a review of some classical guitar videos. I used to do what I called micro-reviews of music videos, almost exclusively of pop music, but it got tiresome and I had the feeling that it was a bit, well, cruel. This is what often restrains criticism: some poor musician is striving to deliver a fine performance and some nasty ankle-biter (avoiding the use of the obvious term) has the nerve to criticize their sincere efforts, even if obviously flawed. But, assuming the logic of the bell curve, most performances will be mediocre, a few will be excellent and a few will be horrifically bad. This is true despite the best efforts of all the marketing and promotional people.
I have the most appropriate expertise to review classical guitar recordings rather than pop music or orchestras or pianists or violinists, but there is a caveat. A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that I had done a lot of work with called me up one day to ask my opinion of some pianists. I asked him why me, I'm a guitarist? His answer was that he certainly would not ask me my opinion about guitarists even though that is my instrument. The reasons for that are well-founded. The music world is very competitive and one's view of rivals is distorted by this. One does not ask one soprano their opinion of another soprano! The other main reason is that well-established performers have arrived at certain decisions regarding style and interpretation and therefore they have little interest in how other artists work nor do they have much empathy for differing approaches.
But these issues aside, I think I might have some useful views on classical guitar performers these days as I retired as a performer a long time ago so I don't see anyone as a 'rival' any more and second, I take a more objective interest in performance and interpretation as I am no longer giving performances. So, let's have a look at some classical guitar clips on YouTube. I will try to focus on recent ones, but an older one might creep in.
David Russell has recently done music videos of all the Bach lute suites on location in some beautiful places in Spain and Portugal (he has lived in Spain for many years). He is the most well-known member of the second generation of British guitarists the first of which consisted of Julian Bream and John Williams. Bream has passed away and Williams has retired so Russell is really the most prominent British guitarist of his generation even though he has lived most of his life in Spain. He attended the Royal Academy and won the Julian Bream prize twice. He has had a very successful career and performs at guitar festivals all over the world. Here is his performance of the Lute Suite no. 3 (which you will have to click over to YouTube to view):
Nothing wrong with that, right? Technically perfect, musically assured, all together a fine performance. Now go back and just listen to the gavottes, starting at the 18:16 mark. I want to focus on those because I learned and performed them a year and half ago so they are fresh in my mind. Ok, so what do you think? First of all, to my ear, they are just a bit too quick. This is a frequent problem with performances of Bach. His music is often technically difficult so performers sometimes mistake this for being music that calls for a virtuoso approach. This is a misunderstanding, of course. Bach's music is not difficult because he intended a virtuoso display, unlike a lot of Vivaldi or Paganini. No, it is difficult because the musical ideas are original and texturally complex. So, this brisk tempo rather misses aspects of the music. Sometimes I think of it as like being frog-marched through the piece in handcuffs! As we reach the end of the first section we find another problem: there is absolutely no acknowledgement that we have come to the end of a section with a cadence and a repeat from the beginning. I'm sure David is aware of the structure, but he just does not let that cause any deviation in his rigid tempo. These observations apply to the whole performance. The main aesthetic ideal here seems to be perfectly clean technical perfection at the expense of musical expression. You might speculate as to the psychological reasons for this, but I won't. So while we can certainly admire the result of many years of disciplined practice, I find it very hard to listen to Bach played as if musical expression were of no importance.
Here is really recent video, just posted a couple of weeks ago. Jan Depreter at the Antwerp Guitar Festival. Again, I want to focus on just part of the performance so I can make detailed observations instead of vague generalizations. Let's listen to the Weiss Passacaglia and the first part of the Bach Chaconne.
We cannot accuse Jan Depreter of a rigid performance. There is lots of expression in the dynamics, the articulation, the tone-color and in the tempo. However, we might consider if all this is appropriate? Quite a lot of it, yes. Performances of Baroque music certainly do not need to avoid expression! However, the kind of ubiquitous vibrato we hear in this performance does not strike me as a very Baroque type of expression. There were also some missed opportunities to shape rhythms and phrases in ways reflecting what little we know about performance practice. For example, a piece like this with its obvious French antecedents could well benefit from some inégale. Now let's have a listen to the Chaconne, which begins at the 4:31 mark. In the first minute I notice six places where he failed to insert a very obvious ornament such as filling in a third, a couple of trills, a couple of mordents, and so on. Instead, we had the ubiquitous vibrato and chords rolled in a romantically guitaristic manner. Again, ok, but not terribly Baroque and frankly, after a while, tiresome.
Another new clip: this was posted just eight days ago. This is Cristina Galietto playing the Romanza by Paganini.
Here we have a performance entirely appropriate to the music--honestly how could a guitarist from Napoli get it wrong? Her tone is warm and her dynamics are finely shaded. She thoroughly understands the music and is delicate when needed and aggressive when needed. It is a treat to hear a performance so expressive of the musical content, not feeling as if it is applied a posteriori with a butter knife.
Let's hear Scott Tennant play the Sonata K. 322 by Domenico Scarlatti.
I met Scott at one of the Toronto guitar festivals. He is a superb guitarist and placed very well in the competition. This is an excellent performance with loads of clarity, but also the right observation of musical expression. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But just for fun, let's compare this to an older recording of Scarlatti by an absolute genius. Less precise, but wow. This is Leo Brouwer with K. 544.
9 comments:
I guess I am going to take over your role as the neighborhood curmudgeon. At the outset I will say again that youtube is a very artificial performance venue even more than the typical label recording so you get more artificial performances as a result. Also I am not a guitarist, just a high school violinist.
As a whole I found none of these performances captivating. The most musical or alternatively least affected IMO were Ms Yang and Scott Tennant. A problem with many was the lure of the disconnected phrase. I felt that each few notes had a fermata pause after it, which made a complete hash of the music, again IMO. The Brouwer clip was distinctive but felt rather precious with the clipped tones.
As an aside I have a scientist friend who studied piano seriously when young. He lacked the ability to be a career pianist but is still quite good at playing the standard literature from Mozart to Martinu. He kept at his playing and gives occasional house concerts. A couple of years ago he played Schumann's Kinderszenen in a delightfully natural way with very apt phrasing for a piece about, yes, children. OK there were a few minor slips. I asked him afterwards why I didn't hear something like that on records and he said because those performances are all chopped up.
Bryan On some of your own guitar clips from years back I heard a somewhat similar effect on some pieces with very apt and natural phrasing*. Also I promise henceforth never to comment about guitarist clips.
*To blog readers I get no money from endorsing Bryan.
Interesting point with the Brouwer: K. 544 is unusual in that some phrases end with a fermata, followed by a whole measure rest. I can't think of another piece from that period that does that. But I take your point about the potential disconnected nature of edited recordings. This is why live performances are so fulfilling. Yes, I think a fine performance by a gifted amateur can be as or more enjoyable than a professional one. The amateur is playing for the love of it while the professional may be shouldering all manner of burdens having to do with career, professional rivalry, critical responses and so on. You are not just playing.
Thanks for the kind words about my phrasing! Many of my early recordings were made with fairly primitive digital editing.
Just to clarify, I was not critiquing Brouwer for disconnected phrases but for what I view as unmusical Mannerist playing inappropriate for Scarlatti; the reason being of course that Scarlatti has the most wild harmonic phrasing. The first 3 clips before the Tennant were the performances I felt had excessively disconnected phrasing. I don't think they were entirely the result of chop edits but were largely interpretive attempts to wring the maximum affect from each short phrase.
You raise an interesting point about amateur playing enthusiasm. I think this is also relevant to the appeal of certain pop music where the enthusiasm is evident despite the performances and material being less complex and profound. The lesson therefore for classical performers : show enthusiasm!
To amplify what I meant about performer enthusiasm. The starched shirt manner of playing classical music was appropriate for the later 19th C European culture. That culture was badly frayed by WW1 and wiped out in WW2 but somehow their performance manner lingers on in what is a now a deterrent to the existing culture. That ship has sailed like it or not. I'm not talking about orchestra members dressing wildly although I think open collars would be perfectly fine. Chamber music though is particularly suitable for greater individual expressiveness. Classical performers should always remember and appreciate they are playing the greatest formal music ever. Be happy about that!
Yang's early career recording of original works and arrangements of Chinese traditional music (with an original work South China Sea Peace by Stephen Funk Pearson that calls for a second added-on nut to divide the fingerboard in half) was a great album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-2vbQkd6q8
The only way a guitarist could get farther out in using extended techniques would be performing something by Maurice Ohana
I like that she didn't get to the usual warhorses until after she put out a CD of entirely out of the way and worthy repertoire.
She did a recording of Britten's music for voice and guitar with Ian Bostridge a few years ago.
I have played a couple of pieces by Maurice Ohana: the Tiento and a movement from Si le jour pârait. Yes, Yang's recording with Ian Bostridge was excellent and I think I even discussed it here.
Maury, I don't think I agree with you about performers exhibiting enthusiasm. The expression is in the performance, not the stage manner. Some of the most intense performances I have ever heard were by people dressed in white tie, standing perfectly straight and singing with astonishing intensity. I'm thinking of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. But he's not alone. Grigory Sokolov is another. In fact there are a whole bunch. And performers that dress like street-walkers or fling themselves about on stage, I have little time for.
For expression in the performance and not the stage manner it would be hard to top Roy Orbison. He conveyed a remarkable amount of emotional intensity with his voice while, as people who turned with him have said, the rest of his body might as well have been as still as a granite statue.
But if Maury's real point was to propose that zeal for the material can compensate for technical imperfections I think that's a fair point. Scott Joplin's contemporaries could simultaneously make fun of how sloppy his later in life playing generally was among themselves while still respecting his compositional prowess.
What may be different (only maybe) is that back then some kinds of music were so tough to pull off that if you flubbed a few notes in the Hammerklavier people still got the idea that you were playing something above and beyond ordinary. In a different genre I recall Billy Gibbons said he once asked Prince how he pulled off that amazing opening guitar solo in "When Doves Cry" and Gibbons said that Prince said something like, "I was just so glad the tape was rolling when I played that." Sometimes capable and formidable musicians outdo themselves. Luck of the draw can lead us to screw up and others to strike at moments of more or less inimitable mastery.
Which ... if I understand Bryan's larger point/observation/polemic, is what we're hearing less and less of these days.
If Yamashita wants to headbang during Pictures at an Exhibiiton he can as far as I'm concerned. :)
Bryan are you conflating enthusiasm with exhibitionism? The current soloist couture is not enthusiasm but very calculated. I wasn't referring to wild dressing as I mentioned. But the extreme seriousness of the 19th C ethos I think is off putting to younger folks than us. It's possible to be a bit more relaxed about the presentation without changing the music itself. I wasn't speaking for myself. Remember that opera was originally performed in what would now be considered raucous environments and that all kinds of concert liberties were routine in past times. And yes the Hatchet's point about taking chances vs the current not taking chances is relevant too to a kind of deadening of performance in the classical realm. It's unfortunate that pop audiences are wiser about the differences between recorded and live performance than classical audiences and performers appear to believe.
I think we have a basic methodological problem: I am listening to some guitar performances and pointing out some aspects that I think are interesting and or indicative. From this we might be able to discern some aesthetic principles or issues. You are taking a more top-down approach, assuming certain general principles and historical facts. I think we would have to isolate these assumptions and discuss them first. They include: the nature of "19 C ethos," "Mannerist playing," "enthusiasm," "deadening of performance in the classical realm," for example. I'm not sure how you are defining these elements, so we would need to sort that out.
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