ORCHESTRAS NOW TEND TO SOUND PRETTY SIMILAR. BUT IT WASN’T ALWAYS THE CASE
T o what extent do the earliest commercial recordings help us understand how classical music was played in the dim and distant past? That was the question music historian Robert Philip asked himself in the late 1960s when he was considering a subject for PHD study at Cambridge.
So began a lifelong interest in the history of recorded music, which not only influenced his professional work as a BBC producer for the Open University, and the various books he has written on what can be learnt from historical recordings about the changes in performance styles, but also led to him asking serious questions about the assumptions being made by those “period instrument performers” who professed to have found the answers to the way music was performed 200 to 300 years ago.
Philip turns 70 next month, and recently moved to Edinburgh with his wife, Scots pianist Susan Tomes. Although effectively retired, he is busy writing his latest book on orchestral music.
So what got him interested in dusty old records? “There weren’t many around in the mid-sixties,” he explains. “But the one that was, and which caught my attention, was that famous recording of the teenage Yehudi Menuhin playing Elgar’s Violin Concerto with Elgar himself conducting the LSO.
“Everyone talks about the wonderful violin playing, but the thing that struck me as most odd about it was that the orchestra sounded as though it came from a different planet. It didn’t have anything of what we call modern refinement; it was free and easy, with a lot of sliding around in the strings and the oboes had no vibrato. I thought: what’s going on? This was recorded less than 40 years ago and yet everything has changed.”
Philip turned his attention specifically to orchestral recordings made prior to the late 1940s, the point at which LP records came in and editing became possible. It struck him that they were a vital key to the past.
“If you take recordings from the early 20th century, some of these performers were in their 70s, so the roots of their playing style go back to the mid-19th century. You can hear recordings of Joseph Joachim – for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto – from 1903, when he was in his 60s,” says Philip.
“It sounds so strange: you do get that lugubrious old-fashioned sliding up to notes, but you also get very little vibrato. Joachim argued against vibrato, saying it was terribly vulgar and should only be used as occasional ornament. One might assume
It sounded as though it came from a different planet
that, therefore, to have been the prevailing classical style as far back as the 1860s.”
Yet, go further back in time, and you find Mozart writing to his father: “I’ve been playing there and everybody’s been admiring my tempo rubato. The secret of it is my left hand doesn’t follow my right”. There are, of course, no recordings to verify that.
But they can help us when it comes to the issue of national styles. Nowadays we’re used to hearing much the same homogenous orchestral sound no matter which part of the world an orchestra comes from. We know that wasn’t always the case and the evidence, says Philip, is there in old recordings. “Orchestras from different countries sounded completely different, well into the 20th century. Take flute sound, for instance. In France you get the very vibrant modern sound that the French brought in, but in Germany they were still playing with virtually no vibrato; a pure old-fashioned sound on old wooden flutes.”
Is it possible that the recording phenomenon itself played a part in destroying these localised idiosyncrasies? “What happened with the mass distribution of recorded performances is that everybody could hear everybody else,” says Philip. “Added to which, musicians themselves could now travel to the other side of the world to play with an orchestra and very quickly fit in.”
But there is another social factor that intrigued Philip in relation to the change in orchestral style. It’s what happened with the divide between popular and classical music.
“If you read about the lives of musicians from 1900 and further back, the same violinists, for instance, were very often playing in theatre orchestras, dance bands, popular operettas as well as symphony orchestras,” he says.
“By the time you get to the big divide between popular and classical music in the 1930s and ’40s, stylistic gulfs begin to appear. The oldfashioned sliding portamento, once popular in classical music, disappears from symphony orchestras to become the trademark of the popular style.”
It’s amazing what you pick up when you take time to listen.
20 JUNE 2015