Archive for January, 2008

For Instance, The Choir Need Neither Receive Or Deserve A Flogging

Sir Donald on performance practice
The conditions under which poor Bach worked were neither metropolitan nor otherwise oputlent. He furnished his church cantatas week by week, as the parson furnished his Sunday sermon; and a trustworthy tradition tells us that the performances were generally atrocious and that a subsequent flogging for the ringleaders of the [...]

Neglected But Not Forgotten

Joshua Kosman at the San Fransisco Chronicle has an piece on ten works that have been, in his opinion, unduly neglected/underperformed/ignored.
Kosman writes, “The canon of classical music is a hard club to break into. The membership rolls were printed up long ago, and the very predictability of contemporary concert life can be a [...]

Qui est-elle?

Ever wonder who Miss Mussel really is? Now you know…sort of. Enough to say hello should she turn up at a concert hall near you, at least. See you there!

This One Time….

Four years ago, I was contracted by happenstance to play the Beethoven Horn sonata on a charity concert. The stance, as it happened, was that I was practicing for my Masters recital in the concert hall just before the pianist had booked some time and the rest, as they say, is history. The [...]

Saturday Photograph

Review: KW Symphony Goes Back To Baroque

The second concert in the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s Back To Baroque Series in today’s Record:
Performing Baroque music can be a nightmare for those in charge of stylistic decisions. Pre or post Tourte bows? Small or standard sized ensemble? Conductor or leader? Gut or steel strings? And that perennial favourite: how much vibrato, if any and if [...]

Come Here, You Old Fuddy Duddy, You

From Sir Donald Tovey’s 1936 book entitled Normality and Freedom.
“Bach, to the few critics who knew of him otherwise than as a brilliant organist, was always hopelessly out of date. When he was nineteen he played figured chorales to Reinken, a man ninety years of age, who exclaimed: “My son!, I thought this [...]