Big piece in today's Observer, resulting from a furious letter from veteran violinist Raymond Cohen telling it like it is about Roger Norrington's Elgar.
Please pardon my French, but the you-must-not-vibrate-ever-ever-ever movement is a load of utter bollocks. I don't know how people have been duped by it for so long. Has everyone forgotten that Leopold Mozart in his mid-18th-century treatise provides exercises for practising something that any Grade V violin pupil would recognise as vibrato? (Yes, he calls it 'tremolato' instead, so what?) LM complains about the application of indiscriminate 'tremolato' - the implication being that in the mid 18th century string players didn't use no vibrato: they used too much! That does not mean 'you mustn't use any'. Most irritating of all is that audiences who lap it all up in good faith have been swindled.
Apropos de which, has everyone forgotten, too, that the cut-down forces of the misleadingly-named 'authentic' movement in the 1980s coincided beautifully with political funding slashes which meant fewer musicians need be employed?
Enough, already!
Bravo, Raymond, and happy 89th birthday! Now have a listen to this...
UPDATE: Monday 4 August - here's Stephen Pollard's take on the same issue from today's Times.
10 comments:
How lovely to be able to say 'Happy Birthday' to Raymond Cohen -- a great musician. I have read his wonderfully incisive letter -- TimesOnline -- and it, plus additional observations in the Observer article, pretty well put the kibosh on Norrington's nonsense. I have Elgar's own recordings, and of course there is vibrato in the strings. Has Norrington got cloth ears? Yes, less than there later came to be, but it is there for all to hear. And Elgar was plainly open to possibilities that Norrington's antiquarian mind is not, e.g., Marie Hall's vibrato in the 1916 recording of the concerto is quite narrow, that in Menuhin's wider, and I doubt if Elgar would have kept mum if he didn't like either or both. No vibrato in the woodwinds in the earlier recordings, but in the recording of Froissart he made in 1933, there is Leon Goossens with a vibrato and flexibility of phrasing Elgar called "divine -- what a great artist." Norrington's performance is not now available on the Radio 3 site, but anyone who has heard Norrington at work on other composers and who knows Elgar can readily enough conjure what this must have sounded like. But not having heard it raises other questions in my mind, the first being how much portamento there was -- one hell of a lot if he emulated Elgar and the practice of that time, but I somehow doubt that he did. But supposing he did, was it slow portamento, as we hear in earlier recordings, or the considerably faster we hear later? There is no end to this sort of debate. Nothing could make a starker contrast with Norrington's argument than Jerrold Northrop Moore's statement that "...gut strings, their vibrato and portamento, were the sounds of Elgar's world and time." Yes, and we have the recordings to prove it.
oh very good - for sounding the phrase "utter bollocks" at the ker-ching of 'authentic' performance practice.
I agree that passing off total lack of vibrato as historical truth is a load of crap that Norrington should be called to task for passing as truth. But it is absolutely true that in previous eras musicians at least played with less vibrato than they do in the modern era. Contemporary earwitnesses (including Kreisler if memory serves) wrote that Ysaye was the first violinist to play with a consistent vibrato and before him it was unheard of.
Besides, so long as the results sound reasonably OK and nobody is being intimidated into performing this way, what's the harm? I agree that Norrington's dogmatic lack of vibrato can hurt orchestral performances, but it also makes life easier for wind sections who spend their lives trying to cut through high cholesterol string sound. Norrington's Elgar 1 at the Proms was by no means perfect and often could have used a much warmer string section. But it still struck me as a good, sometimes great, performance and the lack of vibrato sometimes helped to bring out strangeness of Elgar's part-writing that I would never have noticed otherwise.
Vibrato is simply part of a violinist's technical armament and enables them to produce certain musical effects. Fine to suggest that performers used to use less of it. The greater the variety of vibrato in terms of quantity, speed, style etc, the greater the range of colour, imagination and fantasy that can be conveyed.
But it is not fine to impose a blanket ban. Philip is quite right: as we have Elgar's own recordings (unlike Bach's...) we can hear exactly how he conducted his own works and how his strings sounded, and they didn't sound like that. A bit of a no-brainer, really.
I am all for Historical Information. What I am objecting to is Historical Disinformation: personal eccentricity masquerading as HIP.
And, Evan, this kind of rubbish totalitarianism DOES lead to musicians being intimidated. It can also lead to them being sacked for arguing back (not by Norrington, I hasten to add, but I've heard of such instances elsewhere).
The no-vibrato theory, generally accepted as historical fact, has produced a great deal of bad singing in the name of "authenticity" as well . . .
Leaving aside the vibrato or no vibrato elements of the discussion (though I agree with Jessica completely on that), anyone who purports to know how all composers intended their music to sound - from Elgar to Beethoven - is deluding themselves. Debate and interpretation is a healthy part of playing music. If Norrington wants to perform Elgar without vibrato, fine, I'm not going to listen to it. But insisting everyone else's interpretations are incorrect, with clear evidence to contrary, is just plain silly.
I thought Roger Norrington himself responded to this uproar and went on record saying that he was not opposed to vibrato of any degree. He seemed quite willing to compromise on the vibrato question. I would like to know how the performances actually went!
Well, Norrington did it with our orchestra and we weren't offended. Maybe we are just younger and more tolerant of different approaches. So Elgar 1 is without vibrato - this time. Interesting. He sold it to us. It was obvious he was convinced, so let's try it. By the way, it does sound better if it is in tune. The timbre also matches the winds somewhat making for a more homogeneous sound. Frankly, I get tired of the syrup (or ketchup?)of vibrato slathered over every single note ever written. I think ideally a range of vibratos from none to a lot should be used with discretion. We shoudn't just turn on the tremolo switch as on an Hammond organ. I agree with Norrington when he claims the absence of vibrato forces us to use other means to make the phrase, i.e. bow distribution, dynamics. He also claims it was a tradition of the early Vienna Phil. to play with no vibrato. Fine. The next week we had another couple of programs to play...
The vibrato question! Gerry, I really did appreciate your well-founded comment from an inside point of view, a musician with well-honed ears giving us his opinion. It couldn't be better and I am really happy about what you said. I firmly believe in "vibrato as an ornament", not a generalized, soup-like tremoloing in the strings covering everything. I am an music-interested layman and just feel, very profoundly so, that the less vibrato, the more details you can witness in a piece of music played. Whatever it is. The early works, of course, but even Elgar and Brucker, very much so Bruckner, gets a MUCH more transparent reading when played with less vibrato, or almost none at all. Especially, as you said Gerry, when it comes to interplay with the woodwinds. Startling! I, for one, want to hear MUCH more of vibrato-less or vibrato-poor playing. MOZART, for instance: I have rediscovered the piano concertos fully anew when listening to recordings with a period instrument orchestra and a true fortepiano. What a sound! What authenticity! The clarity! The transparency! I wouldn't miss it for nothing in the world!
I thought Norrington knew everything. Does anyone know Raymond Cohen's birth date? PLease.
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