Jocelyn Wang <[log in to unmask]> writes of my example of Schubert's C
Major Quintet:

>...you eventually pointed out that the reason it was unpalatable was that
>the accoustics of the venue motivated the performers to play the piece at
>a considerably slower tempo.  The problem, therefore, was not the repeats,
>but the fact that the performers chose a work that was not suitable for
>the performing space.  They should have made a wiser choice.

 [ Sorry, Jocelyn, I haven't been clear.  No, they didn't have a choice
about playing the work, or about the venue.  It was a memorial request.
What they did have a choice about was to repeat or not to repeat, and
that's where their inflexibility - or noble scruple, if you will - led
them to do disservice to Schubert's masterpiece.  ]

I find Steve Schwartz's Bach examples ring profoundly true, and not just
for special cases like the one I've tried to outline.  Again, the great
Verdi scholar Julian Budden can be equally persuasive when he argues for
the shearing of repeats from some of the operatic cabalettas - on strictly
aesthetic grounds.

A published score isn't like a car manual.  There clearly can be genuine
aesthetic justification for the Performer's Right to Choose, at one moment
in time, just as there more obviously was for the Composer's Right to
Decide, at another.

Why be so frustratingly unwilling to admit the need for both? After all,
it is precisely this fruitful tension between the two that produces living
music.  Sometimes, it seems, we are in danger of fighting so hard to save
the pennies that we lose sight of the pounds.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"