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…
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