Alexander Scriabin's Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor, Op. 20 (1897), has a rather peculiar history.Its inception and early performances were beset by problems.The initial versions of the score, as well as first public performances, were met with harsh criticisms.Then, in 1899, the critics' and the public's reaction suddenly went from disparaging to admiring.Subsequently, Scriabin's own performances of the Concerto continued to consistently gather highest accolades throughout Russia, Western Europe, and the US.After the composer's death in 1915, however, the Concerto has gradually faded into virtual obscurity.This article will examine circumstances surrounding the history of the Concerto, Scriabin's interpretive approach to his published scores, and a recent endeavor by Mikhail Pletnev to revise and revive the Concerto in accordance with Scriabin's performance practice principles. The inauspicious beginningsScriabin first mentioned that he had begun working on the Concerto in his letter of 15 [27] October 1896 1 to Mitrofan Belyaev, his publisher at the time. 2 Apparently, Scriabin was working so precipitously that, within five days, he had already started the third movement.Less than a month later, on 12 [24
Reviews of clarinet performance in Paris and London, c. 1770 – c. 1810 make specific reference to 18th-century performance ideals, as identified by the contemporary writer Charles Burney who described the “principal excellencies of perfect execution”. The performance qualities described by Burney and their inclusion in contemporary reports is particularly valuable in assessing performances featuring the newest woodwind instrument, the clarinet. References to many of these performance qualities combine to form detailed accounts of the sonorities, technical execution and expressive qualities evident in performances given by clarinet players in Paris and London.
DVD Review: Rossi, Luigi. L’Orfeo. Pygmalion, musical direction by Raphaël Pichon, staging by Jetske Mijnssen. Recorded at L’Opéra National de Lorraine (Nancy), February 7 and 9, 2016. Arles: Harmonia Mundi, 2017. HMD 9859058.59 DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
Score review: Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Les Indes galantes: Symphonies, RCT 44 ed. Sylvie Bouissou, ed. no. BA 7568. Paris: Société Jean-Philippe Rameau; international distributor: Bärenreiter, 2017; Rameau, Jean-Philippe. Daphnis et Eglé, RCT 34, ed. Érik Kocevar, piano reduction François Saint-Yves. Paris: Société Jean-Philippe Rameau; international distributor: Bärenreiter, 2017.
Alexander Scriabin's Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor, Op. 20 (1897), has a rather peculiar history.Its inception and early performances were beset by problems.The initial versions of the score, as well as first public performances, were met with harsh criticisms.Then, in 1899, the critics' and the public's reaction suddenly went from disparaging to admiring.Subsequently, Scriabin's own performances of the Concerto continued to consistently gather highest accolades throughout Russia, Western Europe, and the US.After the composer's death in 1915, however, the Concerto has gradually faded into virtual obscurity.This article will examine circumstances surrounding the history of the Concerto, Scriabin's interpretive approach to his published scores, and a recent endeavor by Mikhail Pletnev to revise and revive the Concerto in accordance with Scriabin's performance practice principles. The inauspicious beginningsScriabin first mentioned that he had begun working on the Concerto in his letter of 15 [27] October 1896 1 to Mitrofan Belyaev, his publisher at the time. 2 Apparently, Scriabin was working so precipitously that, within five days, he had already started the third movement.Less than a month later, on 12 [24
Book Review: Hartenberger, Russell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Percussion. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-107-09345-4.
Book review: Ballard, Lincoln, Matthew Bengtson. The Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-4422-3261-7.
Book review: Gordon, Stewart. Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas: a Handbook for Performers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-19-062917-5.
Ritchie, Stanley. The Accompaniment in “Unaccompanied” Bach: Interpreting the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-25-302198-4 (ebook: 978-0-25-302208-0)
Although the title of this book may suggest a comprehensive study of nineteenthcentury conducting, it in fact contains a collection of eighteen essays by different authors, offering a series of highlights rather than a broad and connected picture.The collection arises from an international conference in La Spezia, Italy in 2011, one of a series of enterprising and stimulating annual conferences focusing on aspects of nineteenth-century music that has been supported by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca), in this case in collaboration with the Società di Concerti della Spezia and the Palazzetto Bru Zane Centre de musique romantique française (Venice).The topics are presented under five headings: Conductors and Conducting in Nineteenth-Century Europe; Historical,
Brown, Clive, Neal Peres da Costa, Kate Bennett Wadsworth. Performing Practices in Johannes Brahms's Chamber Music. Kassel, Basel, London, New York, Praha: Bärenreiter, 2015 [2nd printing 2016].
Beyond the Score: Music as Performance is a very ambitious book.Nicholas Cook describes his goal as "rethinking musicology."The book is motivated by "my longstanding belief that the study of music has from the beginning been skewed…by its orientation towards music as writing" (2).Noting that an explosion of recent work on performance suggests that this view is widely shared, he writes that "My aim in this book is to add what weight I can to this belief, underline its radical implications for this discipline, and bring together a wide range of concrete proposals for how we might study music as performance and what we might learn from it" (2).
Timothy McGee reviews and discusses Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Leach's 2015 work. Deeming, Helen and Elizabeth Leach. Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN: 1107062632.
As its protagonists retire or pass on, there is increasing urgency to document the emergence of Early Music (hereafter EM) in the second half of the twentieth century.Nick Wilson has taken up this task in a stimulating study of the movement in England.While he alludes to the pioneers-Dolmetsch, Donington, Leppard, et al-his main focus is on the rise of EM as a commercially viable proposition from the 1960s.Histories of the EM movement have been written before.In Early Music Revival (1988), Harry Haskell traced the movement back to the nineteenth century, and Joel Cohen's Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music (1985) chronicled progress mid-stream, looking optimistically towards a promising future.The Art of Re-enchantment takes a different track.Delving deeper than an oral history or chronicle, it theorizes a sociology of EM.The author, an EM singer who teaches in the Department of Culture, Media, and Creative Studies at King's College, London, takes a philosophical and analytic outlook.Drawing on first-hand knowledge, interviews, press releases, and reviews, Wilson addresses the diversity of practices-research, editing, instrument building, performance practice, ideologies, marketing, entrepreneurship, recording, and so forththat grew up under the aegis of EM, which it situates in the context of late Modernity.The outgrowth of Wilson's dissertation, the book examines what people have said about EM, and, despite repeatedly arguing that "doing art" relates to actual practices, Wilson shies away from discussions of specific performance issues or interpretations such as found in Bernard Sherman's Inside Early Music (1997) or Haynes' The End of Early Music (2004).What Wilson does not shy away from is interrogating EM's doctrinaire principles.Over the course of the book, he traverses the minefield of paradoxes and contradictions associated with the term Authenticity, which for Wilson is the most important of EM's discursive practices (or "rhetorics").But it is not purist historical veracity that is his primary concern.On the contrary, Wilson is quick to point out the limitations of historical authenticity.What he draws attention to are the broader implications of authenticity as a
Approaches to the history of performance in what one might call the very long nineteenth century are many-faceted.Instructive methods and treatises are important, but much more revealing is the notation of repertory, as the fundamental work of Clive Brown and others has shown.Even more revealing, perhaps, are early recordings, particularly in the prevalence of rubato as an expressive resource, something not generally apparent from notation.This and the routine arpeggiation of piano chords, another aspect not otherwise evident, have been explored by Neal Peres da Costa, and the whole field of early recording by the CHARM group. 1 George Kennaway is a member of CHASE (Collection of Historical Annotated String Editions, centered in the University of Leeds). 2 The fruits of the study of instructive editions are rich, and it has been sad to see conservatoire libraries jettisoning "out-of-date editions" at the very moment when they were becoming primary research materials.Kennaway's book is path-breaking in that it is the first to deal exclusively with the cello for the specified period.He aims to provide a comprehensive survey of a field that has been only patchily covered until now.Articles in Grove online are still based on sometimes erroneous information from Wasielewski (1888) and Van der Straeten (1914).It is also pathbreaking in its scope.Unlike Valerie Walden, Kennaway takes in not only a full range of methods and treatises and the notation of case studies, with discussion of early recordings, but also cultural context in the form of contemporary criticism both professional and amateur, literary references to the cello. 3 He ends with more than a nod in the direction of gender stereotypes, gesture, and the body.All this requires sensitive and knowledgeable assessment (who do concert reviews tell us about, the describer or the described?).As a musicologist as well as a professional cellist, Kennaway is well placed to provide it.As the title declares, the focus of the book is on playing the cello rather than exclusively on specifics of performing style.Accordingly, three initial chapters deal with fundamentals of posture, bow-hold, and left-and right-hand actions.Kennaway is particularly concerned to
Schubert, Franz. Werke für Klavier zu vier Händen, Band III, ed. Walburga Litschauer (Nos. 2-5) and Werner Aderhold (No. 1); Urtext of the New Schubert Edition, BA 9645. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013.
significantly from that of other keyboard instruments (harpsichord, organ, fortepiano, and modern piano).This very quiet yet extremely expressive instrument should be approached in a totally different way, if one wishes to do it justice.
