Pretorious
Active Member
- Thread Starter
- #21
I've listened to both the Bilson/Gardiner and the Brendel/Marriner recordings within the last week, although not on my "good" stereo at home. I was listening carefully (it was for a class I teach, so the students and I were specifically listening for differences), and noticed nothing I thought was "off" about the fortepiano. I will say that, while I am a fan of HIP in general and Gardiner in particular, many of his recordings (esp. on the Archiv label, it seems to me) do not sound good. Someone earlier mentioned the quality of Gardiner's recordings has been discussed elsewhere, and I would love to read that!
Very interesting. I won't dispute this, simply because I lack experience in judging how this particular fortepiano sounds in real life; and because these recordings bring so much joy to so many people. It may in fact be an accurate representation of how the piano sounded in that particular venue amongst that particular orchestra.
I can agree with the statement on Gardiner's recordings on Archiv in general. What an amazing musician hampered by lackluster fidelity! His recordings of Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos are so 'thick' sounding, for lack of a better term, almost the antithesis of they being HIP performances. Levin's fortepianos in the concertos in particular seem to suffer the same fate as Bilson's, and Levin's are made I think a decade later. The sounds are consistently lacking in those aforementioned sparkling harmonics, or deep, rich tones that are so lovely on period pianos, markedly in the later concertos. This tells me that this can only be an engineering choice, and a rather poor one at that.