I can't be the only music lover to have had this experience: a performance of a well-known work - say, a Beethoven symphony - sounded all wrong, and yet there is not one reason I can think of that would convincingly explain my response. The performance did not violate the score. It did not suffer from technical defects of execution. It was not sabotaged by noisy audience or unexpected headache. And yet it almost made me gag...
Not that I have some rigidly fixed idea of how a score - Beethoven's or otherwise - must be translated into sound. I have no problem with Beethoven's music clad in heavy Teutonic armor, its structure buckling under the slow-moving extra weight. I don't mind it being pumped full of steroids to give it restless tempos, cranky dynamics, and impatient transitions.[1] Or when, medicated with Xanax, it sleepwalks lethargically [2] through what once were audacious modulations and startling dynamic contrasts. My skin did not crawl when I was introduced to Beethoven the Foppish Metrosexual sporting skinny jeans, pointy shoes, and tight-fitting jacket, his expensively disheveled moussed hair cascading over designer eyeglasses.[3] And if my blood boils at the thought of Beethoven the Circus Freak grotesquely disfigured by off-pitch amateurish playing of period-instrument bands [4], at least I understand clearly why I feel this way.
No, my problem is not with the variety of ways in which a composer's musical personality can be shaped by conductors and instrumentalists. Rather the problem is that on rare occasions I find the results inexplicably repulsive. My most recent experience of this kind was with Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony whose concert recording of the Eroica symphony still seems to me as perverse as a Netflix remake of Dirty Harry in which the title character is a bi-curious Asian-American detective who defends undocumented Mexican migrants from vicious Federal agents and, on his days off, distributes clean needles to cute heroin addicts in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.
Of course such experiences are not the only mystery of my musical life. Those of the opposite kind - where I am awed by performances which violate the score [5] or suffer from defects of execution [6] - are no less mysterious. It is just that people are not eager to scrutinize positive experiences. After all, we don't pay psychoanalysts to help us understand why we have happy marriages, fulfilling careers, and well-behaved children. Nor do we expect the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs for treating cheerfulness and optimism. So I suppose I am just being human here...
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1. Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic.
2. Frans Bruggen and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra.
3. Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic.
4. Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood.
5. Sergei Rachmaninov's recording of Chopin's Piano Sonata in B-flat minor.
6. As heard in recordings of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Edwin Fischer, or Alfred Cortot.
