Len Fehskens replies to me:

>>Try taping a radio broadcast of a live event you attended
>> and compare it to some of the conductors I have mentioned
>
>I have, and the experience retains its vitality.

Or in my own experience it CAN retain its vitality.  But what can be a
wonderful live experience doesn't ALWAYS work as well as a recording.  I
think we can be more forgiving of less inspirational music making live -
simply by virtue of the very magical quality that live music making can
have.

>I would suggest that these performances can't be "ranked" by some
>objective/linear scale of quality or "inspirationality".

I agree that there is no linear scale.  That's also why I am generally
rather reluctant to write criticisms of performers.  I think one's
ability to fully judge the quality of performances can only be so
good as one's insight into the music.  Still, sometimes we come across
performers whose perspective effectively comes to define that very insight
into a composition or even of a whole composer's musical world.  The
interpretation seems so deeply penetrating, but moreover communicates that
insight with such incisiveness it seems all other perspectives appear, for
a moment - and for some a lifetime - impossible.  That is dangerous if you
can then only see Beethoven from the perspective of Furtwaengler or Mahler
from that of Horenstein to name just two examples.

>They are just different.  And how we react to them is, I suspect, more
>a matter of our values  than of anything inherent in the performance itself.

In a sense I sympathize deeply.  I hate to condemn performers.  Even
the least known back row player in an orchestra, just like the non-star
conductor whose name I have never heard of knows an incredible amount about
music and has studied and practiced the music so much more intensely than
I ever have.  I realize now just how careful we all must be not to casually
dismiss ANY performer's interpretation of a work.  How many hours of toil
and anguish have gone into preparing the performance we never as listeners
know nor appreciate.  Whatever the case it will be more than the brief
second it takes for a casual off hand dismissal.  No wonder most
professional musicians have so little respect for record critics and look
down on them with pity.  I think as listeners we are duty bound to be
humble enough to learn from these musicians how and why they come to the
conclusions about the work that they play even if we at first fail to see
their point of view.  The past notion of the critic as some omnipotent
judge of the Beckmesser variety should be dead.  We ought rather to be
participants in an unending dialogue about the music.  It is a dialogue
in which we are questioned, indeed challenged by the artist over our most
cherished pre-conceptions about a work and in which we embark on journey
of discovery.

Yet in this dialogue and journey of discovery there are those to whom
I turn with a special reverence - not because they are always 'correct'
in any absolute sense nor even because they provide the greatest surface
excitement or polish, but because they TEACH me something new.  I agree
that doesn't necessarily make them 'better' in any absolute sense for being
able to do so but merely indispensable to MY musical journey.

Nor should this journey of discovery ever consider to have ended or to have
an end.  Even in works which have been played seemingly to death must be
continually rediscovered.  THAT is the importance of historically informed
practice today - not that what they do is 'correct' in any absolute sense,
as some of its proponents misguidedly claim, but rather that they allow us
to rediscover long over familiar works.  "Correctness" means that it is no
longer possible to (re)discover and is the death of performance.

So returning to my previous post I think there are things we are
discovering with a wondrous sense of 'revelation' (an act of revealing
and unconcealment, 'aletheia' in Greek) especially in the fields of early
music.  We generally (if not necessarily always) play Bach better than
in the past, and definitely play Josquin, Isaac, Ockeghem, Frescobaldi,
Monteverdi, and Schuetz much better than in a past where they weren't
played at all.  Nor do I think will future generations easily play Boulez
as beautifully as Boulez plays it - with that same sense of discovering
and revelation, and quite irrespective of any 'authenticity'.  But in the
field of19th-early 20th century orchestral music the conductors of the first
half of last century played this music with a greater keen-eyed sense of
discovery and 'revelation' than we routinely see today.  Menuhin was once
quoted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying that most people today
play Beethoven like a 'bad habit' and I am inclined to agree - perhaps our
interpreters are often feeling too 'burnt out' as we play his music often
only because everyone else does.  That is to say they all too often (but
not always) lack the power to make this music a 'revelation'.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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