Re: Has GG's star faded in the midst of recent trends?

["K. Berry" <kb@cs.umb.edu>]

    *style(s)*, but I wonder what the composer would have thought.  And then I

Of GG?  Well, the living composers who GG recorded are on record (no pun
intended) as saying his conception is (very) different from theirs, but
valid.  Mozart and Beethoven might well say the same.  Bach and the
earlier contrapuntalists, though, might well find themselves in more
sympathy with GG's interpretations, or so I speculate, because there the
things that were important to GG (counterpoint, structure, etc.) were
also important to them, so their (the composer's and GG's) approaches
were closer to the same.  Does this make sense?  We'll never know, of
course, but it's fun to think about.

On GG and HIP -- I'm reading Bazzana's book right now, curiously enough,
and he talks a little about that very subject.  His idea is that
although GG and HIP actually come to fairly similar performances in some
cases (no big washes and rubato in Bach, to oversimplify), they come to
it from very different places.  GG creates those performances out of his
conviction that the interpreter is a creator just as much as the
composer is, and his other ethical and moral stances.  HIP folks create
the performances out of a desire to hear exactly what people back then
heard, or so I vaguely understand.  Please correct me, someone, if
that's incorrect. I'm not a big HIPster myself: the argument that `even
if you use period instruments in a period church, the people performing
and listening are *not* 17th century burghers, so the music will
inevitably be different' is convincing to me.  I am somewhat interested
in such performances as a historical thing, but as a musical thing, they
seem no more valid to me than any other.