Somebody recently posted Gardiner's new Symphonie Fantastique video. A lot of us are very down on Gardiner, present poster quite included. HIP issues aside, he's a martinet and his orchestras sound as though playing as though in such a hair-trigger state that they must be terrified. But it can't be denied, in truly theatrical music, he has his days. I saw him do Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy along with assorted others at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, and they were concerts for a lifetime. Even if he does everything 20 BPM too quickly, he's as good a Berliozian as has ever existed. Nearly everything is right in this version - he gets the right bells, the ophicleide, and he takes the repeat in the March. The only problem is the tempi, which after following Berlioz's every other instruction, are often 20% faster than Berlioz's markings. In a composer like Berlioz where sound matters so much, Berlioz is one of the few composers where HIP instruments truly make as much difference as advertised. For all the noise about HIP, the instruments themselves don't make all that much difference in Beethoven, Mozart, Bach et al, because what matters is the quality of the musicianship. Often, when people complain about historically informed performance, what they're really complaining about is so many musicians who took to HIP are clearly second-rate - especially the conductors. As a conductor, Gardiner is clearly a mixed bag, a truly brilliant choral trainer who was independently wealthy and could afford to found his own orchestra. The orchestral results are rarely as good as the choral and vocal stuff, but here, Gardiner really does earn his keep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2_eTAW3e6k&fbclid=IwAR3m7azT0BdIjNYoQYnTploqzjdYcfvabTSR-BoSVop3XtRjmKz1Y0PeFqc
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Czech HIPster Vaclav Luks opened the Prague Spring Festival this year, leading its customary Ma Vlast (one of my favorite pieces of music in the world) with his authentic instrument band, Collegium 1704, seemingly expanded to four or five times its size.
For those of us who never knew a time without original instruments, the shock barely registers, and the appeal or disappeal of HIP instruments in any piece at all should wear off after about five minutes when all that remains is either good musicianship or mediocre musicianship. Be it the OAE or the Vienna Philharmonic, the particular sound of an ensemble does not provide much new in the way of musical meaning. It's a luxury, a pleasurable experience but a superficial one from which one doesn't learn much new about the music. But then again, i's almost a guarantee that you'll learn so much more about the music from hearing these forces than yet another Czech Philharmonic go-round with yet another underrated Czech conductor who is probably too grateful for the gig to insist on much rehearsal.
But it can't be denied, the orchestra makes a very nice sound with an entirely different blend than the Czech Philharmonic of any vintage and Luks clearly has a better feel for the music than hometown rival Semyon Bychkov. Bychkov, brilliant as he sometimes can be in German/Russian opera, clearly does not 'speak Czech music.' Tristan, Khovashchina, Eugene Onegin, Elektra... sure, Ma Vlast? Forget it...
The Czech Philharmonic was founded 20 years after Ma Vlast was written, and I really can't imagine that of all orchestras ever sounding this blended, but who cares? Vaclav Luks is a very fine musician and an 'authentically' great conductor of Baroque repertoire. Is this on that exalted level, well... certainly not, some of this is little short of bad. There are some underrehearsed white-knucklers in Sarka and Bohemian Woods that you can't excuse as products of enthusiasm, but all the same, there are insights here a Ma Vlast stan wouldn't want to miss for the world.
Luks has fantastic Harnoncourt-like ideas, but he has neither quite the stick technique to keep it as together as he does Bach nor, at least I would imagine, the rehearsal budget for a full freelance orchestra. Harnoncourt didn't have much stick technique either, but he generally knew better than to take unsafe tempi and had the luck to spend thirty-five years in front of orchestras that don't really need a conductor. Nevertheless, HIP musicians are so much better than they used to be, and they could be facing Victor Borge, they'd still play themselves to decent professional standards.
Luks is clearly better than Roger Norrington, er... Victor Borge..., and like any good musician in his field, he finds ways to use the 'authentic' instruments to interesting effects, particularly string bowing. The winds produce a truly beautiful blend, and listen to the beginning of the Moldau, the subtleties are exquisite.
But the moments when this performance go from good to great are those moments, like in Harnoncourt or Minkowski, when the instruments are merely the launchpad for imagination. The shock of period horns in the Moldau's hunting horn calls are like nothing else you've ever heard in this work, followed by a wedding dance that is more rhythmically incisive and 'danceable' than any you've heard. But then you get to St. John's Rapids... holy shit... If the ensemble were ever so slightly tighter, it would the shock we should always have in that moment; but then again, it gets 100x closer to that shock than 99/100 performances do. Or that amazing crescendo to the D-major 6 suspension at the climax of Sarka's love music - and a bassoon of such character that the snoring passage actually sounds like snoring!
Tabor and Blanik are, without a doubt, the best movements in this performance (except for, unless I don't know this edition of the score, a truly spectacular misplaced cue at 1:12:45 from Luks in Tabor that the trumpets come back from with truly spectacular professionalism). Period brass are made for moments like this when they compensate for lack of volume with a snarl that modern brass have systematically eliminated.
Historically informed performance and authentic instruments are neither good nor bad, it's a movement that just is. Like so many revolutions, the practical knowhow of the original ideologues was lacking, and consequently, they were, in many ways, their own worst advocates. Gradually, the level of musicianship is going up, and the benefits of the movement can never again be denied - even by those of us with serious misgivings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6-CttlBs4M&fbclid=IwAR1j2Bs3EhM-fOyiKPH5UGgV0CWVlZCK94uKwX0LBHmkM8LK4baF6j5JoWI
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