Just when rabid music lovers thought they had heard everything under the sun, with every composer interpreted within an inch of his music's life, along came a completely new way of approaching "classical" music, that is, music not specifically modern. This new approach is, paradoxically, a regression--a return to the original sound of the music as it was written by, say, Handel, Mozart, or Beethoven.
Modern strings, for example, are set at a higher pitch than those used in the Baroque or Classical periods. Over the years a great number of refinements have been made in musical instruments and their ranges have been particularly extended, so that modern performances of old works have a decidedly contemporary patina. With original instruments, an orchestra evokes what an original listener must have heard (and therefore felt) while listening to a serenade by Mozart or a symphony by Beethoven.
Such scrupulousness might strike some as unforgivably prosaic. Aren't performances by Furtwangler or Mengelberg of the Beethoven symphonies using modern instruments great? Well, yes they are, and there's room for any number of musical interpretations of the symphonies. But Beethoven conducted by Roger Norrington using original instruments is great, too. Original instruments don't negate modern ones; they simply provide a fresh way of hearing music.
Taste, of course, has a lot to do with it. To some ears (mine included) modern instruments on Handel don't have enough weight and color. Emotionally, the textures of original instruments are more pleasing to some; it's an instinctual response.
It's hard to say exactly when the craze for original instruments--and it is a craze if ever there was one--came about. Certainly the last five years have seen a proliferation of original-instrument performances and recordings. To the music-going public, names like John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood, and Roger Norrington are quite familiar. Gardiner has breathed new life into Handel; Hogwood has championed Mozart and Vivaldi in particular; and Norrington has brought Beethoven into a renewed prominence.
The movement toward original instruments, however, goes back almost twenty years. To the work of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and his performances of the Bach cantatas and the operas of Monteverdi employing Baroque instruments. Yet as much of a pioneer as Harnoncourt was, his approach is dry and tends to the prosaic. It took a conductor of Gardiner's caliber to come along and inject energy into performances with ancient instruments.
Gardiner's Sparkling Sonorities
The recorded legacy of Gardiner and his English Baroque soloists, and his twenty-eight-voice chorus, the Monteverdi Choir, is rich and continuing. It includes on the RCA/Erato label Purcell's King Arthur and Ode to St. Cecilia and The Ways of Zion Do Mourn, ballet music by both Handel and Monteverdi, Bach's motets, Rameau's Les Boreades, and Gluck's Don Juan. On Philips he is represented by Handel's Messiah, Alexander's Feast, and the sparkling sonorities of Solomon, a recording in which musical scrupulousness and dramatic narrative are gloriously bonded. (That old warhorse, "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba," actually sounded newfledged with its delicate transparencies and rhythmic
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