From the golden age of period instrument ensembles

John Borstlap says:

The author of this silly comment sounds like the foot stamping of a teenager protesting against math.

It may be helpful for readers of SD to actually know something about the movement.

The HIP movement is not one thing, but a landscape of many discussions, and with different outcomes and different ideas. Taruskin only focussed his amplifying glass on one single component, the hardcore fanatics, but they are not representative of the movement as a whole. On top of that, Taruskin was wrong with calling the movement modernist. Schönberg really had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it, which is very clear when you know Schönberg’s ideas about ‘old music’. HIP is a revivalist, restorative movement, born from humanism – like the music itself.

HIP was born from the understanding that developments in performance traditions and the changes of instruments meant that works from before ca. 1800 did not sound as the composers must have had in mind at the time. So, musicological research of sources and aesthetic re-evaluations of the music itself led to experiments to recreate the instruments that were used in the time before important alterations. After all, between us and pre-19C music there is the long age of romanticism which spread its own ideals over any music to be performed. To better understand the sound of older music, many important insights came about that nowadays have very positively influenced interpretation of pre-1800 music, including Beethoven. And it goes further: it has appeared that Brahms, a classicist by nature, is not at all the composer of muddy and heavy scoring as he was made-out earlier in the 20th century.

Every conductor playing Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven, now takes into account the lighter and clearer textures that the music obviously demands, and a sensitive conductor can achieve the transparancy and lightness with a regular modern orchestra (the recordings of Mozart by George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra). Playing on (copies of) period instruments and in a rather small orchestra, in a relatively small hall, gives a beautiful result if played well, in a musical sense. There are aesthetic problems, for instance, with the string section playing with a warm, broad vibrato to achieve a warm expressive sound (Karajanistic). Textures of Mozart etc. sound much better with a clean, non-vibrato sound, only enlivened with a light vibrato at some places – as was the tradition of playing at the time, well-documented. This is not a matter of taste but of historic fact. It is thus the very opposite of destructive, it is highly creative, enlightening, and has led to a great improvement of performing older music everywhere.

There is an interesting example of Brahms symohonies as recorded by Chailly. His first symphony box with the Concertgebouw Orchestra is the traditional, mellow, warm approach, and very good. Later-on, he changed his mind when he got to know Weingärtner’s recordings of Brahms symphonies and read that Brahms himself was highly complimentary of the way Weingärtner played his music. So, Chailly’s 2nd box for Decca with the Gewandhaus Orchestra is quite different: with a normal, regular modern orchestra he achieves a clear, light but strong, crisp sound of this wonderful and great classicist music and the result is highly epressive and also clear, and never lacking in warmth. This was the result of HIP influence: going to the sources.

But such nuances and insights are irrelevant for people who prefer their world to be black or white, or, for music, major or minor.