C'est la tare moderne de s'attacher à des détails de moindre importance au détriment des idées.
Je m'en rends coupable très fréquemment mais j'ai lu un truc sur ça hier. C'était pas mal.
Citation:
Everyone loves an irrelevant detail. Life is so big and confusing, the things that matter so hard to identify and talk about, it's reassuring to cling onto small certainties: too hard to reply to a love letter, better to point out there's no apostrophe in "kisses". Plenty of this on the internet, where people caress their consumer electronics in unboxing videos with the tenderness perhaps better, but more complicatedly, lavished on a lover's body; where, would you believe, the basic business of life is ignored in favour of finely grading James Brown singles; where politics gives way to grammar. The other day I read an article railing against the Tories, forcefully stated and reasonably argued if maybe a little vague on the details, for who really understands macroeconomics, and in the in the comments section somebody had mentioned in passing that the politics were wrong and the arguments faulty before getting onto their real complaint: the crimes against grammar. "LEARN HOW TO USE PREPOSITIONS," they requested. Now I don't know, maybe the prepositions in that article were a mess, and maybe they were all up ons - I didn't go back to check - but they didn't stop me apprehending the article's arguments. But the important things are too hard. Let's start by eliminating grocer's apostrophe's, by making sure people understand they are uninterested in love, not disinterested. Someone at the BBC was so exercised over misuse of the word "decimate" that they commissioned a daytime gameshow of that name in which every wrong answer is greeted by a demonic voice yelling "DECIMATE" while the contestant's prize is reduced by an etymologically correct 10%. The programme is bad; the English is unreproachable.
So it is with some hesitation that I note that in this recording of Mahler's seventh symphony, there is a minute-long stretch when the trumpets in F don't play what they're supposed to play - in fact barely play at all. It's from about 18:40 to 20:00 in the first movement (about two bars before figure 61 to two bars before figure 65 in the score). A few mistimed discordant stabs can be heard; mainly they are silent.
Does it matter? I don't think this is just a grammatical error - part of the message is missing. Not a large part, perhaps, but a significant one (the trumpet part is even marked hervortretend in the score). It's like the fifth most important character suddenly and inexplicably going missing from one chapter of a novel. Still, if you didn't know the piece, you might not suspect anything was amiss - a slightly surprising gap in the texture, but after all that too might be deliberate. And perhaps we can claim there's a tradition at work: in Bernstein's Berlin version of Mahler's ninth the trombones miss an entry in the last movement far more prominent than this one, yet that's a much-loved recording. Yes, you will say, but Bernstein has excuses that don't apply here - his performance is live, where this is in a studio, and there are the (surely groundless) rumours about the old Nazi Karajan bribing his players to ensure Bernstein's only performance with the Berlin Philharmonic wouldn't go smoothly. Fine, but from the listener's point of view it's all the same: Halasz's recording could have been fixed, Bernstein's couldn't, but neither were. It might have been a bigger issue in the past, when to hear a recording you had to pay money for it - flaws become less forgiveable when you don't have an alternative version to turn to - but now there's YouTube and Spotify and the rest, this isn't such an issue. And this recording seems to be well thought of - when it came out there was general surprise that Naxos (then considered a label more concerned with low costs than quality) had managed to produce something of real worth, and today, too, a look around online reviews shows there are plenty who think this recording has value. I don't love it, but I think this has less to do with a missing trumpet and more with the overall vision: this is a profoundly rational recording of an irrational piece; you can hear everything but it doesn't go to extremes, everything is in place but nothing is risked; it is, for me, too much like Boulez and not enough like Solti. But I don't know, perhaps I really am punishing it for that slip; perhaps, overwhelmed by hurtling through the enormity of space, I cling to a stupid insignificant rock.
Connexion
FAQ
Rechercher
