Speed Freaks Do Bach
   Please, stop turning sublime classical works into dance music.
   By Jan Swafford
   Posted  Friday, September 5, 2003, at 10:37 AM PT

   I'm pleased to possess, in a dusty sleeve from the
   cheapo-but-interesting days of Vox records, what appears to be
   the world's first recording of a major Baroque work on original
   instruments. It's Handel's "Royal Fireworks Music," recorded in
   1961 with masses of keyless oboes and bassoons, serpent horns,
   valveless trumpets, hunting horns. I put it on for musician
   friends and watch them slide off the sofa laughing. It's a howling
   mob of splattering horns, and blatting oboes, everything gloriously
   out of tune. Oh, the pleasures of the really, really bad.

   Nearly as great is the scholarly lecture on the flip side, in
   which we are informed that, believe it or not, this is exactly
   how Handel sounded in his time. Since brass instruments could
   not be played in tune, they simply carried on out of tune while
   everybody else was in.

   Of course, our lecturer got it wrong. The game but incompetent
   pioneers on that recording simply didn't know how to play their
   horns. Listen to any decent original-instrument group of the
   last 30-odd years and you'll hear lucid, in-tune, elegant playing
   - as in the Royal Fireworks by Trevor Pinnock and the English
   Concert.  And the original-instrument folks have been creeping
   forward in history.  We've seen more releases of Mozart, Beethoven,
   and beyond with original instruments.

read on here- http://slate.msn.com/id/2087887/

-Neb Rodgers <[log in to unmask]>