Reviewing YouTube

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.

I didn't review any of the vast mass of mediocre performances and didn't happen to stumble across any of the really awful ones--if I had, that would have felt cruel!

Any thoughts from my commentators?

UPDATE: I just ran across this clip from a few years ago by Xuefei Yang playing some music from Latin America. Just to show that you don't have to be from Napoli to play Paganini or 18th century Leipzig to play Bach--you can be Chinese and be a master of Latin American style. This is really excellent: