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Historical Recording Takes Us Back to the Roots of the HIPP Movement Feb 07, 2009
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750): Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue), BWV 1080. Performed by members of the Collegium Aureum [Ulrich Grehling, violin; Ulrich Koch, alto viola; Günter Lemmen, tenor viola; Reinhold Johannes Buhl, cello; Johannes Koch, violone; Fritz Neumeyer and Lilly Berger, harpsichord]. Recorded in April 1962 under the auspices of Dr. Alfred Krings. Originally published as 2 LPs by German Harmonia Mundi. Re-released as a 2 CD set in 2005 by SonyBMG, digitally remastered using 24bit technology by Sonopress. Total playing time: 88'52".
For those of us who have come to love music played on historical instruments and in period performance practice, it can be good to take a look back at the last 50 or 60 years of classical music and to see how the trend towards scientifically underscored performance developed. In the 1950's much of the music we know and love today was either unknown, or was played in a way that reflected more the romantic tradition than the way the pieces would have been heard or conceived in the centuries before the nineteenth. Even pioneers like Wanda Landowska, one of the first to make a name for herself as a harpsichordist in the 20th century, was pretty much indifferent to historical accuracy and made her recordings with a modern, custom-built Pleyel harpsichord which has, from today's point of view, been compared to a battleship! I suppose it was three record labels which began to change things: the "Archiv" series on Deutsche Grammophon, the "Das Alte Werk" series on Telefunken (now owned by Warner) and the "Harmonia Mundi" labels in France and Germany. It was thanks to the initiative of the German Harmonia Mundi company (later to be swallowed by Bertelsmann and now incorporated in SonyBMG) that, in 1961, the Collegium Aureum was formed as one of the first ensembles to play baroque music on historical instruments. The two CDs in this box are evidence of the work done back then in recreating baroque music with a view to a semblance of "authenticity" (horrible word!), having been recorded in April 1962. Of course, from today's perspective these are more or less "historical" recordings which, from the perspective of historical performance practice, have been superseded by many others which have the advantage of building on the work done by others. But anyone who wants to know how today's practice developed will benefit by listening in to these groundbreaking recordings which have been excellently remastered and betray, from the point of view of sonics, little of their age.
Of course, today it can be said to be axiomatic that Bach wrote his "Art of Fugue" for keyboard, and an ideal performance would be either on one or two harpsichords or on an organ. The Collegium Aureum members to be heard here chose instead to play a majority of the contrapuntal pieces on four or five string instruments, with a violin joining two differently tuned violas, a cello and a violone. The pieces are played relatively slowly, and the resulting sound could be mistaken, on a superficial listening, for burial music, so sombre and serious does it sound. (That is not true of all the pieces, of course, and a closer listening can yield much pleasure and a good deal of detail.) In the middle of the second CD, however, Contrapunctus XIII is repeated using two harpsichords, after which numbers XIV through XVII are played on a single harpsichord. The contrast could hardly be greater - suddenly, what before was seriously theoretical begins to sound like the most beautiful music around! Only for the last piece, Contrapunctus XVIII, do the string instruments return. The unfinished fugue from the original edition is omitted, as is the closing chorale.
Listening to recordings like this require an intellectual as well as aesthetic approach to the music, and this is where this disk falls down because of the sparing and generally uninformative documentation. There is, indeed, a short essay by Jens Markowsky (well translated by Clive Williams), giving background information about the "Art of Fugue", information that most buyers of these recordings will probably know already. Personally, I would have loved to have more information about the interpretation and the recording itself. There are absolutely no details here about where the recording was made or the instruments used, and there is no indication of the pitch chosen, let alone why. We are left completely in the dark about the choices made by the musicians to be heard here, including why they chose to make this recording in the first place and why they decided on a mainly string interpretation of a work they acknowledge to have been written for keyboard. And I would have appreciated more detailed information on the order the works are played in and their instrumentation.
Of course this set cannot match the later strings-and-harpsichords interpretation by Musica Antiqua Köln [Cologne] on Deutsche Grammophon, but it is still well worth the hearing, and the excellent sonics are a boon. Serious listeners will also want a harpsichord or organ-only interpretation such as that by Davitt Moroney on Harmonia Mundi France.
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