Are non HIP recordings ever made any more?

[Don]

So it was HUMP (Historically Uninformed or Misinformed Performance)?

Actually, the Thielemann Requiem is just an old-fashioned performance (and very good too).

[Harry Collier]

I respect your right to like what you want ... In that respect, you don't know what you're talking about.

Is this not a little arrogant and contradictory? I like all ALL performing styles, when they play in tune and let me hear the music. But I do so dislike fashions in performance, and arrogance as to what is "best". My youth was dominated by critics denouncing Furtwängler's performances "because he modified the rhythm and did not obey the composers' wishes". Now, for a few years, we have critics and experts strutting around denouncing anyone who plays pre-Elgar music with vibrato, or who cannot get Handel's Messiah on to one CD (with room for Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, as a fill-up). Well, I like Colin Davis's performances of 18th century music with the LSO -- just as I like (most of the time) Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d'Astrée (if only her choir could have sung in tune on her latest Bach-Handel CD). Go for good performances, not the latest fashion. And please do not strut around telling people they "don't know what they are talking about". For a start; it's rude and ill-bred.

[KevinP]

Of all my 100+ recordings of Bach choral works, the most recent truly non-HIP recording is Calibidache's 1990 recording of the B Minor Mass.  Not all HIP recordings are 100% HIP of course. Rilling, for example, uses modern instruments but lets history otherwise inform his approach to performance.

[Don]

Is this not a little arrogant and contradictory? I like all ALL performing styles, when they play in tune and let me hear the music. But I do so dislike fashions in performance, and arrogance as to what is "best". My youth was dominated by critics denouncing Furtwängler's performances "because he modified the rhythm and did not obey the composers' wishes". Now, for a few years, we have critics and experts strutting around denouncing anyone who plays pre-Elgar music with vibrato, or who cannot get Handel's Messiah on to one CD (with room for Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, as a fill-up). Well, I like Colin Davis's performances of 18th century music with the LSO -- just as I like (most of the time) Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d'Astrée (if only her choir could have sung in tune on her latest Bach-Handel CD). Go for good performances, not the latest fashion. And please do not strut around telling people they "don't know what they are talking about". For a start; it's rude and ill-bred.

When you question the ability of period instrument bands to play in tune, you rate being told that you don't know what you're talking about.  And I'm not telling "people" that they are askew; I'm just telling you that you are.

One more thing - period instrument performances of baroque music are not a fashion.  That you consider them a fashion just shows your bias.

[KevinP]

HIP will always be around, but I'm sure performance practice will re-invent itself again. So I would say HIP is fashionable, but I'm not dismissing it as a fashion.

[Guido]

Oh my God; you sound like the BBC Music Magazine! "Musical correctness" and current fashion will ruin musical performance of pre- 1830 (1930?) music -- at least for the next 10 years or the current fashion has past. Listen, as Handel or Bach, or Purcell, or Mozart, did, to what SOUNDS good. They rarely, if ever, wrote with particular musical timbres in mind. I like orchestras that play in tune, and warmly, and with affection, and with intelligence, and together, and with letting me hear all the parts, and with rhythmic agreement. Not many period instrument bands do this (particularly being able to play in tune). But then, someone here will say, Bach or Purcell didn't EXPECT their bands to play in tune, or agreeably! They may not have expected it ("the bloody trumpeter has a hangover again; I'll use the oboe instead") but they knew that they wanted their music to sound good.

Oh come on... Let's please not cling to this cliché.