"Period Authenticity" is a marketing gimmick. No one lived then to experience the performances. And it's insulting to the original composers' incredible creativity to claim they would not want to see their work re-interpreted a few centuries later in any new and different way. Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy that angle, but why not create beyond it with today's possibilities.
I actually very much enjoy something like Max Richter's Recomposition of Vivaldi's 4 Seasons on the Deutsche Grammophon series (genius!), and Gregson did a mind-blowing, fantastic job with Bach in that series too. And probably my fav recording of Pachelbel's Kanon is Karl Munchinger's with a full orchestra loading up on full strings. Far more powerful than many of the "era authentic" lightweight re-enactment pretense.
It's no different than the modern era, where some classic songs actually seem better or fresher when a great musician puts a new spin on them. And several songs got a new lease on life (and made the original composers $$$) when someone else re-recorded them. Ask Leon Haywood how much he made of "It's a G Thang" by Dre (well you can't he passed, but he did).
I'm sure I said all of this before in this thread, and I suspect Pablolie and I don't much disagree, but to respond: Let's make some distinctions. One is a purposeful rearrangement of old music using a different set of modern instruments. I'm using the strict, musical definition of "arrangement", which is a new set of parts for instruments to play a musical work for different instruments than was originally the case. For example: a piano arrangement of an orchestral work (or vice-versa). This could be anything from converting viola de gamba parts to modern violoncellos, or ophicleide parts to tuba, which may require only minor edits to the musical notation, to Switched-On Bach. Rearranging music is a thoroughly valid musical interpretation that some composers would have embraced and others would have condemned, so imagining their opinion on the matter seems to me like ex-post-facto justification. That is, unless they wrote about it, in which case there is some obligation to respect that instruction with at least a disclaimer.
It was also common practice for composers to rearrange music at need for performance in a new town. There were periods of rapid advancement in instrument technology--a big cusp being the invention of the first practical valves for brass instruments, making chromatic note choice possible for the first time--but musicians adopt new technologies slowly. Ophicleides were in common use up to the end of the 19th Century, but as orchestras switched over to more modern alternatives, composers had to adapt their music to get it performed.
But I don't think the question of this thread has much to do with rearrangements, reorchestrations, or transcriptions.
Another distinction, and the one that seems to me relevant to this thread, is attempting to perform old music as it was originally performed. This isn't just about instrumentation, but also about musical practice. There is more known about this than we imagine, because there are lots of ways to describe musical practice that don't require recordings. The use of portamento was common a century ago, for example, but I can say that because composers wrote about it using words. Recordings validate that, but they aren't necessary--the practice was described with some clarity. The use of vibrato is another example.
The motives for this may be merely academic--trying to understand what things might have sounded like similarly to understanding how to style a diorama at a museum to give people a notion of what things might have looked like. But the motives may also be purely musical. I'm sure I've said before that Roger Norrington described his motivation for recording Beethoven using period practice: He wanted to make the music "sound new again." That is a musical objective that can be approached in purely musical terms. It does not attempt to eliminate interpretation, but rather to cut away the summed interpretations of historical and traditional performance technique so that the interpretations can reapplied afresh. Norrington's Beethoven cut away a lot of traditional Wagner-inspired performance technique from conductors--some of them my absolute favorites for late Romantic German composers (including Wagner)--such as Furtwängler. Performances of Beethoven had grown longer and longer as the music became increasingly ponderous, and new conductors took those performances as a baseline for further emotification. It's not a "reinterpretation" of music to bypass that buildup of performance technique to return it to what was notated by the original composers, at least to the extent that we understand the meanings of notation. In the case of Beethoven, we understand a lot--Beethoven had access to a metronome and he marked his music, though in some cases after the fact and in competition with performance practice even while he was alive.
Within this distinction, there are further distinctions. Some orchestras have been content with just attempting to recreate the original sound, some have been interested in recreating the original performance technique, and some have attempted to create the original stated intentions of the composer beyond what was notated or practiced in his day. An example of the latter is Berlioz, who notated
Symphonie Fantastique for two ophicleides, but later (in the 1850's) wrote much praise about modern tubas. Modern practice (of course) uses tubas, but some period performances have attempted to return performance to the use of ophicleides. Even the tubas of the 1850's that motivated Berlioz to re-notate the music would have been
much lighter in sound than the enormous "grand orchestral" style of contrabass tuba now often used for the second tuba part. And yet Berlioz fantasized about the ideal orchestra for the work: 400 musicians if I'm remembering my readings on the topic from some decades back. When I hear it performed with two ophicleides, I hear the ophicleides as extensions of the bassoon section. That seems to me appropriate for the
Dies Irae in
Symphonie Fantastique. Even now, that melody is played with two tubas and bassoon, and in modern practice (and as a demonstration of masking), the bassoon is basically inaudible. Tuba players joke amongst themselves, "What bassoon?" Which would Berlioz have preferred? Arguments abound. But Berlioz did not remove the bassoon part when he re-notated works for tuba. Modern practice that attempts to be a bit more true to the original practice but still with instruments playable by the musicians on the payroll would use two smaller bass tubas in F, which are much closer to the original Baßtuba as patented by Carl Moritz and Wilhelm Wieprecht in 1836. The bassoon has a chance of sneaking through a bit.
But some orchestras go get period instruments, record using their notion of historical performance practice, and when they get a clean recording, believe their work to be done (Hogwood, I'm looking at you). They write program notes similar to what one might read on a placard next to a historical painting in an art museum. These performances are interesting but not necessarily self-sufficient as performances. This is where Norrington's early Beethoven recordings were revelatory, though some think he did not sustain the standard he set initially in attempt to ride his own wave. I still enjoy his Beethoven cycle, but his Berlioz, not so much.
Pachelbel's
Kanon with a period-authentic ensemble on period instruments can be musically powerful, and show clarity that would be difficult on a full orchestra. But a full orchestra can also approach that music in a way that will move people powerfully. Both can also be perfunctory. I've heard Pachelbel played by a brass quintet that was astoundingly good, and that's about as far from the original as can be imagined. It's not about the instruments with some music. But if one attempts to play, say, Ralph Vaughan Williams's
Tallis Fantasia on, say, brass instruments (and I've heard it done well), they had better bring it. I was impressed by the performance of the triple quintet comprising the Canadian Brass and the quintets of the New York and Philadelphia orchestras. But it was not the transformative experience that was listening to the work performed in the original by the Philharmonia Orchestra in Royal Festival Hall in 2008, which I attended, or even listening to Adrian Boult's standard orchestral performance. This is because Vaughan Williams's
sound is as important to what he did as the architecture of the
notes. As he described, he learned from Ravel to compose in "points of color", and instrument selection and performance practice is a key part of preserving that. Pachelbel and the music of his era was more about the structure, and composers of the era had no particular commitment to any specific sound just as a matter of practical necessity. But performing Pachelbel on original instruments isn't pretentious unless it's performed pretentiously.
So, I don't think we can just ask "Historical or Modern?" and expect a binary judgement. There's a lot more to it than that. Any performance has to stand on its musical power, no matter what instruments are used, if it's going to be more than just a curiosity.
Rick "probably said all this before" Denney