The Validity of Suggestions

[Don]

Yes, but many find it difficult!

Oh, I don't buy that.  Folks on this board are intelligent and know how to find multiple melodies.

[71 dB]

Some of it's juicy. Some of it's dry.

I find the Piano Quintet juicy and the symphonies dry. I haven't explored Brahms much so I take recommendations for juicy Brahms. 

[orbital]

Re:George's original question:

It also has a lot to do with whether the recommendations are for a familiar or an unfamiliar piece. With pieces you already know, valid recommendations from valid users may still prove bad simply because the performance may not suit your already conceived notions about how the piece should sound. You may overcome that hurdle (I really think it is a hurdle for me), but it takes some patience.
This is what happened to me with Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony with Bernstein/NYPO which I purchased a short while ago based on the comments I read here. Now, it is probably a special recording but the less-phrased, more straightforward approach of Markevitch whom I've gotten to know this piece by, works better for me. Had I not have had that expectation I might have enjoyed Bernstein as much as others

With unfamiliar pieces the recommendations generally work much easier if you trust the source.

[Mark]

With pieces you already know, valid recommendations from valid users may still prove bad simply because the performance may not suit your already conceived notions about how the piece should sound.

This is what happened to me with Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony with Bernstein/NYPO which I purchased a short while ago based on the comments I read here. Now, it is probably a special recording but the less-phrased, more straightforward approach of Markevitch whom I've gotten to know this piece by, works better for me. Had I not have had that expectation I might have enjoyed Bernstein as much as others

With unfamiliar pieces the recommendations generally work much easier if you trust the source.

How very true.

[karlhenning]

I find the Piano Quintet juicy and the symphonies dry.

Well, I do not find the symphonies dry, not at all.  Even that movement from the symphonies which I do not like quite so well as all the rest of them, could not be described as "dry" IMO.

So, perhaps, you might say something like "I find Brahms dry" rather than asserting "Brahms is (supposedly) dry."

[MishaK]

It also has a lot to do with whether the recommendations are for a familiar or an unfamiliar piece. With pieces you already know, valid recommendations from valid users may still prove bad simply because the performance may not suit your already conceived notions about how the piece should sound. You may overcome that hurdle (I really think it is a hurdle for me), but it takes some patience.
This is what happened to me with Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony with Bernstein/NYPO which I purchased a short while ago based on the comments I read here. Now, it is probably a special recording but the less-phrased, more straightforward approach of Markevitch whom I've gotten to know this piece by, works better for me. Had I not have had that expectation I might have enjoyed Bernstein as much as others

I dunno about that. This depends somewhat to the degree to which you are willing to open your mind and ears to a completely different approach to a work and recognize that there are many valid ways of interpreting a great work of music. Thus my earlier comment that recommendations are more useful if the recommender sets out what the spectrum of possible interpretations is and where the individual recording fits in within this spectrum. That makes understanding the recommendation and preparing oneself for listening much easier and aviods disappointment.

[karlhenning]

. . . the degree to which you are willing to open your mind and ears to a completely different approach to a work and recognize that there are many valid ways of interpreting a great work of music.

This came to me very naturally over years of performing, both in orchestras and choirs/choruses.  The fact is, great music sustains a range of interpretation.

I expect Don has found this, in spades, in his voluminous Goldbergs collection.

[orbital]

I dunno about that. This depends somewhat to the degree to which you are willing to open your mind and ears to a completely different approach to a work and recognize that there are many valid ways of interpreting a great work of music. Thus my earlier comment that recommendations are more useful if the recommender sets out what the spectrum of possible interpretations is and where the individual recording fits in within this spectrum. That makes understanding the recommendation and preparing oneself for listening much easier and aviods disappointment.

I agree that concrete information is much more helpful than obscure adjectives when making recommendations, but to everything we do, we have to add a bit of our subjectivity, no ?
But Mensch, still, how can you be as open minded to a second or third helping as you were to the first listening of a piece? You can get close to being infinitely open minded but with the multiple recordings your brain is doing a comparison whether you want it to or not. You have the skeleton of the work in your mind which is shaped by that first exposure. I don't know how you can completely overcome that 

Perhaps can we take a similar situation, say reading two [same language] translations of a foreign book. After you read the first one you know the story, you know the style of the author. What you are doing is you are rating the book itself. When you read a second translation you are judging the translators against one another. The material is the same but how you got to know that material is by the first book.

[MishaK]

But Mensch, still, how can you be as open minded to a second or third helping as you were to the first listening of a piece? You can get close to being infinitely open minded but with the multiple recordings your brain is doing a comparison whether you want it to or not. You have the skeleton of the work in your mind which is shaped by that first exposure. I don't know how you can completely overcome that 

Well, the question is what kind of open-mindedness are we talking about here? I am still conceptually open-minded about the 4,875th performance of Zauberflöte. I do have much higher expectations on technical execution, though. Of course you're comparing. But are you just comparing (as in cataloguing similarities and differences) or are you holding one out as the "standard" and are you merely measuring whether new performances comply with the blueprint of the "standard"? My response was to your disappointment on hearing Lenny's Pathetique. I would never ever expect Lenny to sound anything like Markevich. That doesn't mean that Markevich "gets it" and Lenny doesn't. I would argue that your disappointment with Lenny was based on an expectation that Markevich's conception of the work is the "correct" way of doing things and when Lenny's way therefore didn't conform to your expectations you discarded his approach as "incorrect". This is quite a common occurrence. For many people, the first hearing of a major musical work is a formative experience and certain interpretive notions from that first hearing stick and become obstacles for enjoying different interpretive approaches. But if you ask: "OK assuming Lenny's musical premises are correct, does he make a convincing, coherent argument for his view of the piece?" I think you will appreciate better what different conductors are trying to do and will recognize the vailidty on an equal footing of two or more different interpretive approaches. Even if you do so, you may still retain Markevich as your favorite. But I suspect your response to someone asking for a recommendation will be more along the lines of: "Markevich does A, Lenny does B. This is how they differ. Take your pick. A suits me personally better as an approach."  It will both make your preference better to defend and it will be more helpful to the recipient of your recommendation.  (Of course none of the preceding, which is just used an example, should mean that it isn't possible that, even accepting Lenny's premises, he just may have done a bad job with it. I have heard neither Lenny nor Igor in this work.)

Perhaps can we take a similar situation, say reading two [same language] translations of a foreign book. After you read the first one you know the story, you know the style of the author. What you are doing is you are rating the book itself. When you read a second translation you are judging the translators against one another. The material is the same but how you got to know that material is by the first book.

The analogy fails here. Making music is much more than translation (and this is not to disparage translation - I once worked as a translator, actually). A translator is taking a text from one cultural and linguistic idiom and trying to transport it into another cultural and linguistic idiom while attempting to retain as much of the original meaning and ambiguity that the original text would have had to members of its cultural context. The more unrelated the cultures and the more time has passed between writing and translation, the harder the exercise. In the case of something like Dante's Divine Comedy, no translation will be fully adequate, as it cannot simultanously retain the ambiguity of the original vocabulary AND the melody and meter of the original Italian terzarima. Our ignorance of its contemporary cultural context moreover makes footnotes and annotations unavoidable. That is a very different exercise than the one in which a musician is engaged who is trying to bring black dots on a page to life as sound.

The better analogy would be theater performance. There are a myriad ways of playing Hamlet that can be convincing in their own right. He can be an angst-ridden teenager or an already fully formed adult who has been unexpectedly thrown into an irresolvable moral conflict. Or his character can be conceived in any of a number of other ways. John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh or Ethan Hawke will all speak at different speeds, with different phrasings and different emphasis. But each can be convincing within their own idiom, based on whether or not you buy into how each actor conceived his part. The text is still the same, just as both Lenny and Igor are still conducting the same music.

[Mark]

Well, the question is what kind of open-mindedness are we talking about here? I am still conceptually open-minded about the 4,875th performance of Zauberflöte. I do have much higher expectations on technical execution, though. Of course you're comparing. But are you just comparing (as in cataloguing similarities and differences) or are you holding one out as the "standard" and are you merely measuring whether new performances comply with the blueprint of the "standard"? My response was to your disappointment on hearing Lenny's Pathetique. I would never ever expect Lenny to sound anything like Markevich. That doesn't mean that Markevich "gets it" and Lenny doesn't. I would argue that your disappointment with Lenny was based on an expectation that Markevich's conception of the work is the "correct" way of doing things and when Lenny's way therefore didn't conform to your expectations you discarded his approach as "incorrect". This is quite a common occurrence. For many people, the first hearing of a major musical work is a formative experience and certain interpretive notions from that first hearing stick and become obstacles for enjoying different interpretive approaches. But if you ask: "OK assuming Lenny's musical premises are correct, does he make a convincing, coherent argument for his view of the piece?" I think you will appreciate better what different conductors are trying to do and will recognize the vailidty on an equal footing of two or more different interpretive approaches. Even if you do so, you may still retain Markevich as your favorite. But I suspect your response to someone asking for a recommendation will be more along the lines of: "Markevich does A, Lenny does B. This is how they differ. Take your pick. A suits me personally better as an approach."  It will both make your preference better to defend and it will be more helpful to the recipient of your recommendation.  (Of course none of the preceding, which is just used an example, should mean that it isn't possible that, even accepting Lenny's premises, he just may have done a bad job with it. I have heard neither Lenny nor Igor in this work.)

The analogy fails here. Making music is much more than translation (and this is not to disparage translation - I once worked as a translator, actually). A translator is taking a text from one cultural and linguistic idiom and trying to transport it into another cultural and linguistic idiom while attempting to retain as much of the original meaning and ambiguity that the original text would have had to members of its cultural context. The more unrelated the cultures and the more time has passed between writing and translation, the harder the exercise. In the case of something like Dante's Divine Comedy, no translation will be fully adequate, as it cannot simultanously retain the ambiguity of the original vocabulary AND the melody and meter of the original Italian terzarima. Our ignorance of its contemporary cultural context moreover makes footnotes and annotations unavoidable. That is a very different exercise than the one in which a musician is engaged who is trying to bring black dots on a page to life as sound.

The better analogy would be theater performance. There are a myriad ways of playing Hamlet that can be convincing in their own right. He can be an angst-ridden teenager or an already fully formed adult who has been unexpectedly thrown into an irresolvable moral conflict. Or his character can be conceived in any of a number of other ways. John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh or Ethan Hawke will all speak at different speeds, with different phrasings and different emphasis. But each can be convincing within their own idiom, based on whether or not you buy into how each actor conceived his part. The text is still the same, just as both Lenny and Igor are still conducting the same music.

A first-rate post, one with which I wholeheartedly agree.

[orbital]

Very good points indeed!

Well, the question is what kind of open-mindedness are we talking about here? I am still conceptually open-minded about the 4,875th performance of Zauberflöte. I do have much higher expectations on technical execution, though. Of course you're comparing. But are you just comparing (as in cataloguing similarities and differences) or are you holding one out as the "standard" and are you merely measuring whether new performances comply with the blueprint of the "standard"? My response was to your disappointment on hearing Lenny's Pathetique. I would never ever expect Lenny to sound anything like Markevich. That doesn't mean that Markevich "gets it" and Lenny doesn't. I would argue that your disappointment with Lenny was based on an expectation that Markevich's conception of the work is the "correct" way of doing things and when Lenny's way therefore didn't conform to your expectations you discarded his approach as "incorrect". This is quite a common occurrence. For many people, the first hearing of a major musical work is a formative experience and certain interpretive notions from that first hearing stick and become obstacles for enjoying different interpretive approaches. But if you ask: "OK assuming Lenny's musical premises are correct, does he make a convincing, coherent argument for his view of the piece?" I think you will appreciate better what different conductors are trying to do and will recognize the vailidty on an equal footing of two or more different interpretive approaches. Even if you do so, you may still retain Markevich as your favorite. But I suspect your response to someone asking for a recommendation will be more along the lines of: "Markevich does A, Lenny does B. This is how they differ. Take your pick. A suits me personally better as an approach."  It will both make your preference better to defend and it will be more helpful to the recipient of your recommendation.  (Of course none of the preceding, which is just used an example, should mean that it isn't possible that, even accepting Lenny's premises, he just may have done a bad job with it. I have heard neither Lenny nor Igor in this work.)

This makes me think: Perhaps it may have to do with how familiar you are to a certain work. I am saying this because with certain solo piano music, I can be rather more open minded -simply because I know the works better by having listened to more interpreters many more times than orchestral music. For example, my first exposure to much of Chopin's music was through Idil Biret Naxos box set. At the time I was more fascinated with the music than how she was playing it. When I started adding Rubinstein to the ledger, it sounded just better suited. The phrasing, the clarity, the rhythms everything seemed to work better. Afterwards others came and I had the chance to compare tens of different interpretations, in a way losing the [not so]fair ground as to how the music should sound. I guess you can loose that but it probably takes more than two interpretations and much more listening time. With the Pathetique, my experience comes from Markevitch alone. So, in time this performance turns into the piece itself. And that may be where I am disoriented a little bit. What I want to say is if I had, say, 8 different interpretations in addition to Markevitch before purchasing Bernstein, he might have found a better place in my collection. That's something to ponder about I guess.

The analogy fails here. Making music is much more than translation (and this is not to disparage translation - I once worked as a translator, actually). A translator is taking a text from one cultural and linguistic idiom and trying to transport it into another cultural and linguistic idiom while attempting to retain as much of the original meaning and ambiguity that the original text would have had to members of its cultural context. The more unrelated the cultures and the more time has passed between writing and translation, the harder the exercise. In the case of something like Dante's Divine Comedy, no translation will be fully adequate, as it cannot simultanously retain the ambiguity of the original vocabulary AND the melody and meter of the original Italian terzarima. Our ignorance of its contemporary cultural context moreover makes footnotes and annotations unavoidable. That is a very different exercise than the one in which a musician is engaged who is trying to bring black dots on a page to life as sound.

The better analogy would be theater performance. There are a myriad ways of playing Hamlet that can be convincing in their own right. He can be an angst-ridden teenager or an already fully formed adult who has been unexpectedly thrown into an irresolvable moral conflict. Or his character can be conceived in any of a number of other ways. John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh or Ethan Hawke will all speak at different speeds, with different phrasings and different emphasis. But each can be convincing within their own idiom, based on whether or not you buy into how each actor conceived his part. The text is still the same, just as both Lenny and Igor are still conducting the same music.

I hate nitpicking in general, but hardly anyone goes to a Shakespeare play without being familiar with the text first 

[Don]

This came to me very naturally over years of performing, both in orchestras and choirs/choruses.  The fact is, great music sustains a range of interpretation.

I expect Don has found this, in spades, in his voluminous Goldbergs collection.

Sure have.

[MishaK]

I hate nitpicking in general, but hardly anyone goes to a Shakespeare play without being familiar with the text first 

You must hang out with a very literate crowd then. Believe me, it's more common than you think. Alternatively, substitute a different, less familiar playwright. Shakespeare was just an example.

[orbital]

You must hang out with a very literate crowd then. Believe me, it's more common than you think. Alternatively, substitute a different, less familiar playwright. Shakespeare was just an example.

I know. I was just kidding around.