Mike Leghorn wrote:

>Composers aren't necessarily the best exponent of their own music.

This is new to me.  I can't think of any reason why Rachmaninov is not the
best exponent of his own music.

If Rachmaninov were a lousy pianist, then we would turn to more skilled
performers but he could still be asked if he accepts the understanding of
his music by those other virtuosos.  But Rachmaninov was among the best
pianists of the century (here I rely on the opinion of other listeners and
critics because I haven't listened to much of him to form my own opinion).
What did he lack to be not the best performer of his own music?

Donald Satz wrote:

>I'm not talking about the composer's "world" in terms of the social
>environment as much as the composer's inner world of thought and emotion.

Well, your understanding of the composer's world is not narrow then.
There are people who prefer HIP recordings partly because of the
reproduction of the sounds the composer presumably heard.  So sometimes
arguments like "Bach played his works on the harspsichord" (or even more
strictly: "he composed for the harpsichord") are used to ground the
position that performance on any other instrument cannot ensure the
identification with the composer's personality or musical idiom.  I don't
agree with this, of course, and understand that you don't agree with this
either but then another questions arises: if you demand the mentioned
qualities from the performers, isn't it possible that the performers
understand the composer's world in their own way?

It's a subjective thing, up to the point that you seldom see a
professional musician enjoying performances of his colleagues.  I know
there are many exceptions to this but generally if a person has devoted
enough time to master a certain musical piece, he will be very, very picky
when selecting interpretations of others to praise and enjoy.  We have
thousands of different renditions of a piece by artists who can swear by
anything that's dear to them that they understood the composer best.

So, Don, if in your opinion, strict objective reproduction of the
composer's world isn't the way to go, don't you think that the problem
you raise in this thread does not exist as everyone is doing their best
already?

Juozas Rimas Jr (not the one playing)
http://www.mp3.com/juozasrimas (oboe, piano, strings)