Oh, I've heard some studio recordings in which things were sung so
egregiously *wrong* that I was convinced that the only excuse was that the
singers didn't use the scores, and had terrible memories to boot. I
preferred this explanation over the other one that occurred to me, which
was that the singers - and the conductor - had only marginal respect for
what the composer wrote. Or that they were using a spurious edition of the
score which was riddled with errors. Of course, given the obnoxious
rewriting of baroque music that was the norm earlier in this century, it's
virtually impossible to tell whether what was sung on many earlier
recordings of works like MESSIAH and RINALDO was even remotely related to
what Handel actually *wrote* - unless one had the actual score at hand to
refer to and discover that it most definitely was *not*. I was
particularly tickled to listen to the "classic" Beecham recording of
MESSIAH in which arias I thought I knew were so amazingly distorted by
"creative interpretation" that apparently was quite acceptable even 30
years ago. I'm also VERY amused when I listen to some of Marilyn Horne's
scrupulously Bel Canto-era rewrites of the da capo sections of Handel
arias. Dazzling, but so totally anachronistic, and rather (I hate to say
it) unforgivably disrespectful of Handel. It's one thing to ornament a
piece for effect. It's another to completely rewrite whole phrases so they
are almost unrecognizable in terms of having any relationship to the aria
from which they were derived.
KM
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My NEIL SHICOFF Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
My Website:
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
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I sing hymns with my spirit,
but I also sing hymns with my mind.
- 1 Corinthians 14:15
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