Romanticism is Dead!

The mawkish and pompous exaggerations of the the 19th C Romantic performing tradition, I mean, which actually reached their apogee of excess in the mid 20th C, with Klemperer and von Karajan. The monumental music of the Romantic era -- the works of Schumann and Brahms, for instance -- will never die, I sincerely hope, but will be exhumed and revivified by a performing tradition based on the aesthetic revulsion from Romanticism that has emerged in recent decades. Actually, Romanticism died first in the visual arts, in painting if not in sculpture. Cezanne drove the stake into the heart of Romanticism; Picasso, Miro, Klee hammered it harder, and the abstract expressionists closed the coffin lid on it. Mozart was, you know, born too soon to be a panting Romantic, but that never stopped the exponents of the Romantic Performing Tradition from treating him as one. I would like to think that sort of musical child abuse is over, but if there is acrimonious debate about the merits of Simone Perugini's interpretations of Mozart's Symphonies 40&41, the terms of disagreement are not about the competence of the musicians of the Fête Galante Baroque Orchestre, but rather about the validity of rival performance traditions -- the Romantic versus the Historically Informed. Okay, take sides if you must. Music is a question of subjective personal response. The essence of my review of this CD is simply that I like what I hear. Mr. Perugini has boldly discarded that Mozartean warhorse tradition and chosen to give us a Mozart of the Enlightenment, an operatic and capricious Mozart. The issue, for me, is not the vexed question of "authenticity". The Fête Galante Baroque Orchestre does perform on period instruments, and that does make a difference, especially in the timbre and expressiveness of the reeds and horns, as I'll discuss later. Rather, the main issue is one of sensibilities, as manifested in performance practices.

The first fundamental is the scale of the performance, the size of the ensemble. At 35 musicians, the FGBO is half the force of many 20th C orchestras. A huge orchestra might have the advantage performing in the Gare du Nord, but for a recording session, size is far less important than clarity. Instead of fuzzy en masse tuning, one hears the chords as such. Likewise, the flutes sound like flutes, the contrabasses like contrabasses, and especially the bassoons like bassoons. Stated simply: the recording technology of this CD is a triumph; the realism of the instruments is unexcelled. Even the kettle drums, which are prominent , have dramatic precision and clarity of tone. Having mentioned bassoons, I wonder if listeners to performances such as Klemperer's or Boehm's were aware of the brilliant passages given to the bassoons. Often the inner voices were covered in the old-fashioned rumbling versions of Mozart. The baroque bassoon was a softer but much more expressive instrument than our modern one, and I was thrilled to be able to hear the bassoon passages that I know are in the score. Transparency and attention to the inner voices are among the main tenets of "historically informed" early music performance practice, and here they pay off. This Mozart is more complex in texture, more heterophonic, than any you've heard before. Another hallmark of modern historically-informed performance practice is extension of phrases, attention to the horizontal structures of music in real time. The habit of listening to polyphony still prevailed in the 18th C and it makes a huge impact in listening to "late early" music like Mozart's. The stately andante movements especially depend on continuity of phrases that flow from one instrument to another bar after bar. If articulations and dynamics are not well matched, the voices sound like slices of meatloaf slathered with chordal gravy. What makes this CD and the companion Perugini recording of the K.550 and Jupiter Symphonies so superb? Freshness! Revelation of detail! Acoustic realism! Intimacy! I deliberately listened to all the CDs and LPs of Mozart's final four symphonies symphonies available to me - Casals, Klemperer, Krips, Ter Linden, Boehm, and Mackerras - in response to low-star reviews here on amazon that I consider wrong-headed. Only the Mackerras comes close to the Perugini, and that not very close. These may well be the Mozart CDs that launch a new performing tradition.