Posted by Rick Denney on July 13, 2000 at 07:45:54:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: F Tuba: American or German? posted by Jay Bertolet on July 12, 2000 at 22:18:32:
One difference between Berlioz and Verdi: While Verdi apparently didn't like the sound of the tuba, Berlioz did. My understanding from what I've read is that Berlioz, after being introduced to a real tuba, went back and changed his scores to replace the ophicleide with the tuba.
Berlioz's conception of orchestral sound was decidedly large. I've heard the recording of the original version of Symphonie Fantastique conducted by Roger Norrington leading the London Classical Players. To me, this is the premiere period-instrument recording of that work. As much as I admire Norrington's work, however, this recording lacks that bigness and dynamic range that Berlioz wrote about and tried to achieve when he was on the podium (by enlarging the orchestra). Part of it is the pitch standard (A=425 on that recording), but much of it is the lack of a good bottom in the brass.
There's another point, too. Norrington makes the excellent point that the purpose of historically informed performance is to make the music sound new again. Clearly, this worked in his outstanding and illuminating recordings of Beethoven, where much of what he does has to do with written tempi and dynamic effects rather than just the instruments. Follow along in a score with Norrington Beethoven performances and every marking is there--the same markings that had been polished out in other recordings by years of Romantic interpretation. But most modern performances of Berlioz already (approximately) follow the composer's tempo and dynamic markings, so the only difference in Norrington's version was the instrumentation and pitch standard.
Modern performances must play to modern ears. Those ears have been conditioned by amplified music, and a modern orchestra must be able to produce the sheer volume and dyanamic range that modern listeners are accustomed to. This requirement was unknown in Berlioz's time.
I ran into the same thing in a Civil War reenactment band in Texas. There was a move in that group to acquire actual 1860's-era instruments (or replicas) rather than use our modern instruments. I resisted that temptation. Our instruments (with the exception of my own horn) looked similar enough to period instruments to fool all but expert eyes. But first and foremost we had to play music, and play it musically. I suspect that a battlefield band in the Civil War had different standards of intonation and sound than we do today. The soldiers for whom they played had heard no recorded music, and in most cases had only that band as a reference for ensemble performance. Our group, on the other hand, was competing with the Canadian Brass and other widely recorded ensembles. My sound is bad enough on a good horn--I shudder to think of what it would take to make good sounds on an over-the-shoulder bass saxhorn or whatever it was called.
Rick "Use that big F without guilt" Denney