Gosh, doesn’t the soundworld of the Penderecki Dies Irae sound close to that of Ligeti’s Requiem! Ligeti wasn’t slow in acknowledging the influence of Penderecki’s Threnody on his own work; in the case of those two religious works, though, I can’t help feeling that the inspirational “traffic” went in the opposite direction…
Christopher Culver
2 years ago
Thanks for drawing my attention to this new Gielen. The question of “do we need any more recordings of X” is especially acute for works where the composer oversaw the recording process. I admit to feeling almost zero interest in recordings of Ligeti outside the “György Ligeti Edition” and “The Ligeti Project” series, because the composer meant them to be definitive. (The exception is the <i>Requiem</i>, where the poor live sound quality of the “Ligeti Project” recording has made me prefer Eötvös’ surround-sound recording on BMC Records).
Messiaen, interestingly, was the opposite. I’ve read a great deal of biographical material on him, and I have never seen documentation of him disapproving of a recording. He had only praise for everything. But since, as you say, there appears to have been a tendency for performers to always take the same approach to his music, maybe he really was never disappointed.
Also, György Kurtág has overseen multiple recording processes, but he is infamous for never being able to achieve the result he can hear in his head, and so performers and engineers eventually simply give up after some number of takes. Since the composer is no help when it comes to what is a proper recording of his work, perhaps there is more room for competing recordings.
Finally, sometimes composers turn bad, and there is room for new recordings that make up for their faults. Here I’m referring especially to the late Boulez works, which exist in recordings by the tired old Boulez, but need to be recorded afresh by younger artists who still have the energy of the younger Boulez.
Hi Christopher, thanks for your comment. That’s interesting about Kurtág, i had no idea he was so exacting (and, apparently, fruitless) in the studio!
Regarding Messiaen, i remember as an undergraduate writing a paper on the history (as it was at that time, in the mid-1990s) of recordings of Turangalîla-Symphonie, and discovering how much the question of tempo had become altered since its première – specifically the tempo in ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’, which had decreased massively from its relatively brisk origins. This was exacerbated by Messiaen himself, who (as i’m sure you know) revised the score in the early 1990s, sanctioning the much slower speeds, with the effect that the birds in that garden now sound doped up to the eyeballs, rather than the bright, chirpy creatures that originally populated it. An old man’s view of the piece, presumably.
Edit: Further to my comments about Messiaen, i believe you’re right about him never (openly, at least) disapproving of a recording, though it was precisely at that “old man” stage in the 1990s when he collaborated with Myung-Whun Chung on the recordings for Deutsche Grammaphon that he publicly declared to be “definitive”. Personally, i find those DG recordings to be magnificent, really dazzling performances captured so vividly. Yet for all that, plus Messiaen’s imprimatur, i can never shake the feeling that it’s just one interpretation – and by no means necessarily the best one.
Rachel Beckles’ Wilson’s Ashgate monograph on Kurtág’s Sayings of Peter Bornemisza has a case study of perhaps the earliest story of Kurtág being impossible to work with in the studio. In that 1970s Hungaroton project, literally dozens of takes of that piece failed to satisfy him, and his attempts to put into words what he wanted from performers became increasingly hyperbolic. In later years the same conflicts have been recounted by e.g. the Ardittis and some of the performers involved in the big ECM New Series set.
[…] any performance, even such a stunningly lucid one as this, is forced to contend with. i’ve written previously about the difficulties of performing Messiaen with regard to faithfulness to the score and the possibility (or otherwise) of interpretational […]
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Gosh, doesn’t the soundworld of the Penderecki Dies Irae sound close to that of Ligeti’s Requiem! Ligeti wasn’t slow in acknowledging the influence of Penderecki’s Threnody on his own work; in the case of those two religious works, though, I can’t help feeling that the inspirational “traffic” went in the opposite direction…
Thanks for drawing my attention to this new Gielen. The question of “do we need any more recordings of X” is especially acute for works where the composer oversaw the recording process. I admit to feeling almost zero interest in recordings of Ligeti outside the “György Ligeti Edition” and “The Ligeti Project” series, because the composer meant them to be definitive. (The exception is the <i>Requiem</i>, where the poor live sound quality of the “Ligeti Project” recording has made me prefer Eötvös’ surround-sound recording on BMC Records).
Messiaen, interestingly, was the opposite. I’ve read a great deal of biographical material on him, and I have never seen documentation of him disapproving of a recording. He had only praise for everything. But since, as you say, there appears to have been a tendency for performers to always take the same approach to his music, maybe he really was never disappointed.
Also, György Kurtág has overseen multiple recording processes, but he is infamous for never being able to achieve the result he can hear in his head, and so performers and engineers eventually simply give up after some number of takes. Since the composer is no help when it comes to what is a proper recording of his work, perhaps there is more room for competing recordings.
Finally, sometimes composers turn bad, and there is room for new recordings that make up for their faults. Here I’m referring especially to the late Boulez works, which exist in recordings by the tired old Boulez, but need to be recorded afresh by younger artists who still have the energy of the younger Boulez.
Hi Christopher, thanks for your comment. That’s interesting about Kurtág, i had no idea he was so exacting (and, apparently, fruitless) in the studio!
Regarding Messiaen, i remember as an undergraduate writing a paper on the history (as it was at that time, in the mid-1990s) of recordings of Turangalîla-Symphonie, and discovering how much the question of tempo had become altered since its première – specifically the tempo in ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’, which had decreased massively from its relatively brisk origins. This was exacerbated by Messiaen himself, who (as i’m sure you know) revised the score in the early 1990s, sanctioning the much slower speeds, with the effect that the birds in that garden now sound doped up to the eyeballs, rather than the bright, chirpy creatures that originally populated it. An old man’s view of the piece, presumably.
Edit: Further to my comments about Messiaen, i believe you’re right about him never (openly, at least) disapproving of a recording, though it was precisely at that “old man” stage in the 1990s when he collaborated with Myung-Whun Chung on the recordings for Deutsche Grammaphon that he publicly declared to be “definitive”. Personally, i find those DG recordings to be magnificent, really dazzling performances captured so vividly. Yet for all that, plus Messiaen’s imprimatur, i can never shake the feeling that it’s just one interpretation – and by no means necessarily the best one.
Rachel Beckles’ Wilson’s Ashgate monograph on Kurtág’s Sayings of Peter Bornemisza has a case study of perhaps the earliest story of Kurtág being impossible to work with in the studio. In that 1970s Hungaroton project, literally dozens of takes of that piece failed to satisfy him, and his attempts to put into words what he wanted from performers became increasingly hyperbolic. In later years the same conflicts have been recounted by e.g. the Ardittis and some of the performers involved in the big ECM New Series set.
[…] any performance, even such a stunningly lucid one as this, is forced to contend with. i’ve written previously about the difficulties of performing Messiaen with regard to faithfulness to the score and the possibility (or otherwise) of interpretational […]