Hosted by the Royal Academy of Music in collaboration with the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park, and directed by Olivia Sham (Royal Academy of Music), this event brought participants together in the unique setting of two collections of keyboard instruments. The first day took place in the Piano Gallery of the Royal Academy's Museum. In an opening lecture-recital, Sham argued that the ‘aged’ quality of historical pianos could in fact offer a new range of creative expression for performers today. After this, harpsichordist Medea Bindewald (London) and violinist Nicolette Moonen (Royal Academy of Music) explored those sonatas in which the violin accompanies the keyboard, performing excerpts on the Academy's 1764 Kirkman harpsichord and an 1801 Broadwood square piano. In ‘Why Cristofori Matters’ Andrew Willis (University of North Carolina) and instrument maker David Sutherland (Ann Arbor) addressed the ‘baroque piano’ – pianos of the early Florentine school – and their relative neglect and subsequent misrepresentation, much of it due to the identical external appearance and naming conventions of the baroque harpsichord and piano.
Kai Köpp and doctoral candidates Camilla Köhnken and Sebastian Bausch (all Hochschule der Künste Bern) then examined traditions of piano-duet performance as they can be gleaned from piano rolls. They differentiated original four-hand compositions from transcriptions of orchestral music, since the two genres prompt different responses from the performer. Performances of orchestral transcriptions tend to emphasize the primary musical parameters of pitch, rhythm, tempo and form rather than ‘soloistic mannerisms’. The particular focus was a piano roll, made by Carl Reinecke and his wife, Margarethe, of Reinecke's overture from Nussknacker und Mausekönig, Op. 46. Tristan Lee (PhD candidate, University of Melbourne) examined editions of Beethoven's sonatas by Liszt and Hans von Bülow, arguing that they offer insights into historical performance. By way of demonstration, Lee performed the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, Op. 27 No. 2, on the modern piano but informed by ‘Liszt’ on issues such as pedalling and fingering. ‘Scarlatti in Perspective’, by Elena Vorotko (Royal Academy of Music), suggested that the absence of extensive information regarding Scarlatti's own performance practice opens up interpretative liberties for performers today on both modern piano and harpsichord, with specific possibilities depending on the instruments used. To conclude the day, four Royal Academy students performed a selection of solo works by Roseingrave, Purcell, Couperin, Haydn and Schubert (arranged Liszt).
The second day took place at Hatchlands Park, where delegates were treated to a guided tour of the collection's keyboard instruments by Alec Cobbe. I found Cobbe's demonstration on the 1784 Christian Gotthelf Hoffman clavichord particularly beautiful (he played through the complete Prelude of Bach's C major cello suite using both hands). A clavichord in the Silbermann tradition, the instrument sounded full-bodied under Cobbe's hands while retaining its natural proclivity for nuance. It was a telling moment, in which one realized how much the specific resonance of the performance space interacts with the expressive range of early instruments; in this case, the space allowed the clavichord to blossom in a way that is rarely experienced. Other highlights were Cobbe's demonstrations on the 1636 Andreas Ruckers harpsichord and a quadruple-strung Graf piano dated 1819–1820. Graf made only a handful of quadruple-strung pianos, one of which was owned by Beethoven. The added stringing makes the piano notoriously difficult to tune, but any shortcomings in the tuning did not diminish the overall impression of this very special instrument.
The first keynote address came from David Owen Norris (University of Southampton), who explored period instruments’ impact on performance practice, specifically on the interpretation of particular expressive markings that point to tempo fluctuations in music of the early nineteenth century. His presentation culminated in a complete performance of William Sterndale Bennett's piano sonata ‘The Maid of Orleans’, Op. 46, split between an 1845 Érard and a much earlier 1816 Broadwood grand. The lunchtime concert, given by students from the Royal Academy of Music, continued with the same repertoire focus, featuring performances of piano sextets by Bennett and Mendelssohn.
Giulia Nuti (Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana) then sought to trace the stylistic and geographical origins of Mozart's Sonata in A minor, k310, composed in 1777 during a six-month stay in Paris. According to Nuti, the unusually thick chordal textures that recur in different guises throughout the work can be traced to a late eighteenth-century French school of keyboard music that the composer encountered during this time. She convincingly juxtaposed passages from Schobert, Edelmann and Hüllmandel with those from k310 that contain similar textures and harmonic progressions. During the conference there were some wonderful moments when threads from one presentation serendipitously connected with another: in his morning demonstration on a 1777–1778 Zumpe square piano, Cobbe had suggested that Mozart might have played his newly composed k310 for J. C. Bach in 1778 on Bach's Zumpe piano at St Germaine-en-Laye. The hand-operated, registrally divided pedal mechanism on the English square, Cobbe argued, would have allowed the staccato quaver bass line in the development of the second movement to remain short and articulated while lending the triplet semiquavers in the right hand a pedalled effect. Nuti's demonstration of excerpts from the work attempted to respond to Cobbe's suggestion by introducing the damper pedal – or rather, knee lever – to the opening material of the first movement. Though an intriguing interpretive choice, to me the pedal took away some of the Sturm und Drang character of this opening material.
Neal Peres da Costa (University of Sydney) opened with a performance of Brahms's Klavierstück Op. 117 No. 1 on an 1845 straight-strung Érard. Its artistic qualities notwithstanding, the performance had one distinctive feature: almost all of the vertical sonorities were rolled (in either direction, the majority from the bottom up), so that the two hands were consistently asynchronized. Peres da Costa takes his cue from evidence of such practices found in recorded performances by musicians within the broader Brahms circle, including by-now familiar names such as Fanny Davies, Etelka Freund and Carl Reinecke, arguing that expressive devices such as asynchrony and chord-rolling were used pervasively but only occasionally notated. The question, though, is not whether such devices were used when unnotated, but what it means in those cases when Brahms does notate a roll. Working from Peres da Costa's very convincing premise, it would be worth exploring the extent to which ‘secondary’ performance domains (such as asynchrony of the hands) relate to the more nearly ‘structural’ features of Brahms's music. Taking Op. 117 No. 1 as a case in point, how does the written-out rhythmic displacement between the hands that pervades the middle section relate to the more general practice of asynchrony that Peres da Costa argues for in this body of music?
My own presentation (Mike Cheng-Yu Lee, Indiana University Bloomington) sought to explore exceptional cases in early nineteenth-century music that extend a familiar feature of eighteenth-century musical metre. In much eighteenth-century music, changes in the composed metrical hierarchy can be perceived without an explicit change in the notated metre. Focusing on the first movement of Schubert's Sonata in A minor Op. 42, my presentation argued for such a metrical shift between the movement's two principal thematic materials, and further posited a correlation between these shifts and the movement's tonal and formal design. Schubert imbues the materials with properties that suggest different tempos, owing to their contrasting pulse units and formal functions. The presentation concluded with a performance of the first movement in this new tempo relationship on an 1823 Nannette Streicher six-and-a-half-octave piano.
One minor setback for the conference-festival was that several of the afternoon presentations had to be abridged because of the closing protocols of Hatchlands Park. The brunt of this fell on the final presentation of the day by Stephanie McCallum (University of Sydney), who began with a complete performance of Weber's very brilliant Sonata No. 2 in A flat major, Op. 39 (again on the 1823 Streicher piano). McCallum's paper (which was delivered in its complete form the following day) called attention to differences between the single-escapement action of the Viennese piano and the double-escapement action patented by Érard, and reflected on the impact of this difference on how the damper pedal could be used.
We returned to the Royal Academy of Music for the final day of the conference-festival. After McCallum was given time to conclude her paper, Roy Howat (Royal Academy of Music and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) explored how Fauré’s pianism might inform one's understanding of the songs. One focus was the frequent lack of synchronization between the vocal metre and the metre projected by the piano accompaniment. This was followed by the second keynote presentation, delivered by Kenneth Hamilton (Cardiff University): ‘Do They Still Hate Horowitz? The “Last Romantic” Revisited’. Hamilton set out to reappraise our conception of Horowitz's legacy, one that the pianist himself was shown to have helped shape. Following the recent release of many previously unavailable recordings of live performances, Hamilton began by excavating those frequent moments (typically involving considerable pianistic challenges) of heightened expression bordering on ‘chaos’ and ‘incoherence’, as well as the equally frequent attempts by record producers, in collaboration with Horowitz himself, to edit out such moments when it came to release commercial recordings of the artist's ‘live’ performances. A broader aim was to re-evaluate such moments as artistically valid and expressive, not in spite of their apparent failures, but rather because of their very qualities of chaos, and to his credit Hamilton avoided an uncritical celebration of all such moments of ‘failure’. However, despite his professed interest in issues of ‘ethics’ and ‘authority’, framed for the most part as regulatory forces between performers and their critical listeners, Hamilton did not reflect on the obvious, but by no means clear-cut, ethical issue underlying his own project: that of publicly uncovering and celebrating traces of an artist's work that the artist wished to keep unknown. One wonders what the net gain is of such a ‘humanizing’ enterprise – one that exposes, though with good evidence, proven ‘deceptions’ on the part of the artist and his team of publicists. If, as Hamilton expressly argues and wishes to promote, the creative endeavours of pianists ought to move past pursuing composer intentions, might not the same be appropriate for what one might argue is the equally creative act of critical listening?
The afternoon continued with a joint presentation by Tom Beghin (McGill University), Chris Maene (Ruiselede, Belgium) and Eleanor Smith (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), who brought a replica (built by Maene in 2013) of Beethoven's Broadwood piano that the composer received from the English firm in 1818. Beghin argued that Beethoven's Broadwood piano was more central to his late music than was the contemporaneous Viennese piano through which it is typically understood. Building upon his published research on the Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106 (‘Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106: Legend, Difficulty, and the Gift of a Broadwood Piano’, Keyboard Perspectives 7 (2015), 81–121), Beghin asserted that structural and textural features throughout the Sonata in E major Op. 109 both point towards the Broadwood as an expressive and structural resource for its conception. Beginning with a consideration of the compass of the English keyboard, which defines its six-octave span (C2–c4) a half-octave lower than the contemporary Viennese keyboard (F2–f4), Beghin noted that the only pitch in the entire sonata that lies outside the available range is the high C♯ towards the end of the last movement (bars 117–181). Moreover, the adjacent C♮ is avoided throughout the three-movement sonata, so that it could be tuned up a semitone and made available for the climactic moment (a kind of keyboard scordatura).
Beghin then moved on to consider moments in the sonata that display distinctively thick textures and their subsequent sonic and tactile impact on the performer, playing pre-recorded excerpts of such passages (derived from both the Broadwood piano and a contrasting six-octave Viennese piano). The recording device was set up to capture not the musical tone of the instruments, but rather its by-products: the mechanical ‘noises’ and vibrations that are generated. For a moment, one could imagine that these mechanical sounds, coupled with the muffled contours of the music in the background and the vibrations felt by the player through the keyboard, could have approximated to Beethoven's personal experience. Owing to its different principles of construction, the Broadwood piano generates the more vigorous vibrations. Though not pursued in this presentation, Beghin's notions open up similar questions about the sonata Op. 110, which features the topmost note of the Broadwood's range (c4) as the overshot goal marking the sonata's final climax.
In the final set of presentations Bart van Oort revisited the ongoing theme of notation and performance, suggesting that many dynamic markings lie beyond the domain of merely loud or soft execution. In particular, he offered a much-needed critique of the pervasive modern practice of treating Beethoven's dynamic markings as implicitly subito. He convincingly argued that in cases of a crescendo marking followed by a piano marking, for instance, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that this combination (which recurs with great frequency throughout Beethoven's music) calls for a messa di voce style of execution so that the crescendo tapers before the onset of the subsequent piano. Yet sometimes these ideas seemed to be developed rather literally. A case in point is the characterization of the fortissimo marking at bar 90 in the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 10 No. 1. Van Oort cites this as a case whereby a ff marking, here associated with a single pitch in a high register of the piano, necessitates a softer execution – his point being that the dynamic here is necessitated by the instrumentally achievable dynamic level, because the five-octave Viennese piano is incapable of producing a ff dynamic on a single pitch in a high register. Yet one might argue that the meaning of the marking is contingent on the very tension between the sense of a ff (reinforced by its structural and hypermetrical status) and its material conditions. This is a quintessential feature of Beethoven's music, and similar examples can be readily located elsewhere, when the notation embodies an inherent impossibility.
The final keynote presentation, by Daniel-Ben Pienaar (Royal Academy of Music), took the form of a recital on a modern (Hamburg) Steinway concert grand, and was nothing short of a tour de force. In an academic environment that cultivates performance not only as a legitimate field of research but also as a medium for delivering that research, Pienaar's recital sparked a rich and passionately debated question-and-answer period from the delegates. The central thread of the programme, which included works by Orlando Gibbons, Mozart and Schubert, was ‘lateness’ or ‘late positioning’, which is broadly defined as the engagement in the here-and-now with the historical past. The thesis, or rather, the challenge that Pienaar has set for himself (and implicitly for others as well), is ‘to fashion a language of his or her own, not merely [to produce] “interpretations” of the works he plays’.
The conference-festival concluded with a panel moderated by Timothy Jones (Royal Academy of Music) and featuring contributions from Beghin, Hamilton, Howat, Norris, Pienaar and van Oort. Discussion ranged over the utility of urtext editions and how Werktreue remains a structuring ideology for performers, how one might reconstitute the notion of ‘authenticity’ productively beyond earlier debates, whether ‘interpretation’ itself ought to be abandoned altogether as a legitimate framework for the performance of existing music, and the degree to which thinking about composer intention remains a valid point of departure. During this panel, subtexts that had underpinned earlier individual presentations came to the fore. The discussion quickly organized itself across a continuum defined at one end by those who believed in the interpretative act and the central importance of historical sources (whether they be period instruments, treatises or early recordings) as guiding mechanisms for that act, versus those at the other end who approached the performance of pre-composed music as a purely creative matter and believed it should be freed of any attempts at re-creation, however imagined. To me, there was an unspoken sense that perhaps we have reached a post-Historically Informed Performance era, in which history and historical materials could no longer inform interpretation in any obvious way, and that the performer's persona ought to be celebrated as the focus of any act of performance.
It did strike me, however, that the manner in which ‘interpretation’ was evoked by some members of the panel was simplistic. It could become a blanket term that denoted a kind of subservience to (and in turn, reverence for) texts, the availability of some verifiable ‘truth’ and the ever-looming pitfall of believing in the possibilities of ‘authenticity’. It should be possible to reach some reconciliation of these differences if the notion of interpretation were expanded beyond the sense that there might be a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’, or a historically valid and a historically invalid, interpretation. As Richard Taruskin had already pointed out at the height of the HIP movement, whatever the internal underlying motivation may be – whether it be exegetic/interpretive or purely creative – performers can and have produced highly creative artistic results that reflect contemporary aesthetics even when they profess to have alternative goals in mind. It is possible, then, to argue that ‘interpretation’ can be framed without recourse to blind reverence. The difficulty, as implicitly acknowledged by those who wish to move past the notion, lies in erecting frameworks that can serve to regulate the creative act of performing pre-composed music. Perhaps the argument should hinge not on whether one ought to be for or against the notion of interpretation, but rather on what kinds of frameworks one brings to bear on what is by its very definition a creative act, and to move towards refining and expanding what these frameworks might be. Some of these thoughts emerged during the panel, such as framing a performance as a response to a work's cumulative performance history, or to play for/against modern critical values, or to condition one's performance choices on one's physical capacities (since no two persons are the same), or to understand a performance not as the end point but rather as a mid- or starting-point within an ongoing artistic process.
Finally, much credit is due to conference director Olivia Sham, who framed a coherent set of concerns at the intersection between the functions of history and the contemporary goals and aesthetics of performance. One hopes for a continuation of the dialogues that took place at this event.
This report was compiled with the help of Olivia Sham for the portions of the conference-festival that I could not attend.
