Tonight I continued ripping Christopher Hogwood’s and Jaap Schroder’s Academy of Ancient Music recordings of the complete Mozart Symphonies (plus 27 other symphonic works). 27 other works. Plus an alternate version of the 40th symphony and works that MAY have been written by Mozart (but listed even in the liner notes as doubtful). It is 19 discs. The research that Hogwood went into for these recordings is also very deep, trying to match the orchestral forces to the ones that would have performed these symphonies during Mozart’s life time. If he could have, I imagine Hogwood would have found a way to decipher out of the background noise of every day life echoes that still vibrate in the air from these performances to discover if there were mistakes made at first performances so they could be recreated here, for us, the modern listener.

Before I bought this set (which was released as a budget box in the 90s) I remember reading a Penguin review that gave these recordings much of the credit for the early music ‘authentic’ recording movement. The idea was to find instruments and figure out the performance practices that were happening during the time when a work was composed and try to recreate it so we could hear what the composer would have heard. Of course, this is really impossible. Even when written down, music is ephemeral. Even with digital recordings, there are so many variables in playback systems that the same disc can sound different in two different homes – when it comes down to it every device or performance will make the air vibrate in a different way. So why try to recreate the moment when something was performed?

By the 50s, it would not be unheard of to have Mahler sized orchestras performing the works of Mozart. These were modern interpretations and it is interesting to hear recordings of these performances. They do play Mozart, but they also tell us about how Mozart was expected to be heard. When I was taking my music history classes at UC Berkeley with Richard Taruskin, he has us read one of his articles that talked about the early music movement, and about how the movement, like any other performance practice is a reflection of its time. I don’t think he was rejecting the idea that performance practice shouldn’t be studied, but that we shouldn’t think of the performances as what the composer would have heard. We should think of them as what we want to think Mozart would have heard, but that these are modern performances with modern scholarship. The performances of any other time were just as informed, and reflected the ideas of their time. And from the 70s on, part of this thinking was ‘perhaps we don’t need to turn things way up to hear them better’. In fact what I hear in these performances (and in the Bach one-per-part performances I ripped a couple weeks ago) is a sense of clarity. With a different balance between winds and strings, musical lines that may be buried with larger orchestra forces may appear. With these Mozart recordings, I remember being surprised how much more contrapuntal Mozart’s writing seemed to be (and the use of continuo in later symphonies link the performance tradition more to the Baroque then I was used to). And also how much lighter. When you hear Mozart on fortepiano for instance, the bass strings are weaker and the sound thinner. But his orchestration (in his piano and orchestral writing) find ways around these limitations. Octave doublings bring a different force to the lines in these recordings then many modern, larger recordings. These moments pop out of the texture much more brilliantly. I like these ‘modern’ performances… of course, they are 30 years old now. And I haven’t purchased a disc of Mozart symphonies for probably close to ten years… maybe I should see if there is anything new-ish on eMusic just to see where things have been going lately.

(and by the way – just finished disc 13 / 19… I hope these finish up tonight!)