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]>