The Seoul Philharmonic and Markus Stenz doing more Haydn and Beethoven. We'll save the Kurtag they play for later, this is as good a week to cover Gyorgy Kurtag as any so maybe that'll be the next focus of videos.... But for tonight, this is a good moment to make a further brief comment on 'ensemble culture' and 'sound ideal.'
The Haydn (104 - the London Symphony) is particularly magnificent by any standard. This is not a particularly polished performance. It's not unaccomplished technically, but it's not exactly 'beautiful' by any traditional metric, either of modern performance or of historically informed. It's far better than that. Whatever the transparency or lack thereof, nothing here is treated as piece of Orchestral music, it is treated as a piece of Music for orchestra.
What makes music vibrant is not the sound of the ensemble but the personality and character with which the music is played. Listen to the strings in the Haydn, particularly the violins. What makes this performance extraordinary is not the lack of vibrato or the bow strokes, what makes the performance extraordinary is how the musicians use those techniques to play Haydn for twenty-five minutes in a style resembling Hungarian folk fiddling. The playing not particularly clean, but at its essence, it's music; it says something. Most performances stop at music's phonology, but music is not only its sounds. To form phrases it requires syntax, to articulate meanings it requires semantics. And past there, great music speaks as we speak in a complete language, and within the language of music, every musician communicates in their own idiom.
Sound is only the first dimension of language. The second dimension is its grammar - in music, that is its phrases, rhythms, harmonic content, and form. Music that does not bring out what features in the sound are of interest is not music. The third dimension of music is its meaning. Meaning in music is obviously trickier, but musical meaning is there. Sometimes that meaning is extra-musical (and that's true more often than any music professor ever told us...), but whatever the meaning of music, when music means something, we know it instantly because it requires even the bored among us to take notice and listen.
And then we get to that elusive fourth dimension of art, past even meaning: idiom. When the average person arrives at that fourth dimension in how they use language, they are able to communicate the idioms of their language in ways that are unique to them, and are therefore no longer cliches. Idiom is what happens when many meaningful phrases and sentences are bandied about by people together in the same place for years until they arrive at a shorthand. These idioms can be cliches, and in the hands of mediocre musicians, they are cliches, and even in the most sophisticated classical compositions, form has any number of cliches - perhaps even more than the usual number because every rule needs to be set in order to be broken.
But when a musician truly arrives in that fourth dimension, they are able to take those idioms and evolve them into something truly unique, not conforming to someone else's definition of what art should be, but a definition unimaginable within any ear but the artist's own. There is no great artistry without individuality. Everything before that, no matter how skilled, is just artisanal craftsmanship. It's nice when you can get it, but it's not art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l03Zq1rJ4XY
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