Launching the Portamento Restoration Society

I’ve decided to start a new musical lobby group – the Portamento Restoration Society.

If you listen to early recordings from around 1900 until the First World War, all musicians – singers, string and woodwind players, chamber groups, orchestras etc – used to slide between notes naturally, using portamento.

Then, sometime in the 1920s, the musical world decided that portamento was vulgar, and so it quite quickly became forbidden, a sign that performers who used it were irredeemably old-fashioned and lacking in taste.

Of course, in more recent times, players have been very interested in understanding how performers from the time of a composition actually played, and so, among other things, they have modified the way they use vibrato. And, unlike earlier generations, one can actually hear from recordings how leading players from the pre-WWI period used portamento.

But players still seem wary about its use, as though they still might be seen as unnecessarily sentimental. But it’s not sentimental to use portamento to create feeling. It’s what all the best players (and orchestras) did.

For me, to play Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Elgar and their contemporaries without it is to sell them short.

BTW, the Society’s by-laws: one paid-up member only. (Me.) Very happy to have friends and supporters…   

Kennst du das Land?

For me, one of the great mysteries in the world of music is why the songs of Hugo Wolf should be so out of fashion. I’ve addressed this question to several of my musicianly friends without getting any kind of satisfying answer.

Three quarters of a century ago, Gustav Mahler’s music was hardly played at all and Wolf’s was programmed regularly. (They were both born in 1860 and lived together as students in Vienna.) Now it’s the opposite way round.

In fact, when Fred Gaisberg and Walter Legge made a great sequence of recordings of Wolf’s songs in the 1930s, they left out his extraordinary setting of Goethe’s “Mignon”, deeming it to be too hackneyed.

You’re lucky to hear it sung once in a lifetime these days.

Here it is, sung live at Salzburg in 1958 by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with Gerald Moore at the piano:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMe22tHvG4c

Do you have a sense as to why he’s so neglected?

Pianist, composer and conductor

I suppose this combination was quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms…

But more recently? Benjamin Britten comes to mind.

A major talent of this kind for the future is Alissa Firsova, who led a performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London on Monday. She opened by playing and directing Mozart’s great A major Piano Concerto K488 and followed this by conducting the first London performance of her own “Freedom” Clarinet Concerto. She ended with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Altogether an amazing achievement.

Currently a conducting student at the Academy, she had around her some dazzling young talent. Anna Hashimoto was the clarinettist and soprano Fiona Howell the soloist in the Mahler. The orchestra seemed to be a gathering together of Firsova’s student friends from the Academy. They were extraordinarily good.

I first met the then teenage Alissa several years ago, introduced by clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, who brought her clarinet quintet “LOSS”, played by the Philharmonia Soloists at our local village music festival in King’s Sutton. And she has been coming back ever since.

A name to watch.