William Hong wrote:

>...based on the Brandenburg Concerti, would you figure that the Cothen
>ensemble had a bunch of slackers in the 2nd and 3rd sections? Or that the
>back side of Lully's Violons du Roi were not able to reach a minimal level
>of competence to please a Louis XIV?

Surely, the Cothen ensemble and the Violons du Roi had the best trained
players available in its times.  But this is not the problem.  Perhaps (and
I just say "perhaps") the minimal level of competence to please Louis XIV
would not be enough to please a modern listener.  It's possible (without
regarding unequal temperament) that a note or a passage "ill tuned", or
played negligently according to our ears, would be admissible according
to the practices of those times.  There wasn't, almost surely, an uniform
standard as we have today.  Bach played at Cothen with the "elite" of
his time; but later, in Leipzig, he played most of his choral works with
ensembles composed of almost amateur musicians.  I suppose that the level
of exigence depended on the different listeners and places where music was
performed.  Even in XIXth century, when we reads Berlioz's description of
some performances of his own works, we perceive some practices --perfectly
normal by those times-- that would scandalize us.  The performance on
period instruments, then, is in my opinion, just a matter of sound.  We
can't reproduce the authentic performing practices --if we really know
them-- but as a curiosity, because we are in a different cultural context.

Pablo Massa
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