sjf1967

I think when it comes to Durufle, MM, you can pretty sure of the first - if there was a more craft-conscious composer in this tradition I can't think who it might have been. There's a long list of things to be said relating to your other points, but I'm not inclined to rattle anyone's cage. All I will say is that yes, ears are important - but so are eyes, and we should use them to decipher the information contained in scores about things like duration and tempo before trusting our ears to make all the decisions.

Yes, quite right. But if some people find that their taste lies at a different point on the composer/perfomer spectrum that's up to them as well. For me, this playing (a pianist, not an organist) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMAIag5IPDg is awesome and gets the balance exactly right between the two. Others may disagree.

For what it's worth there are no memory lapses in the performance, MM - he makes a cut in the Toccata which I'm pretty sure Durufle sanctioned before disowning the movement completely, but otherwise it's things like tempi and registrations which are at variance with the score. When you say the point of Fox is the art of the performer, not the music, and the latter is the means by which the former is delivered - for me, that's exactly the wrong way round...

Lee - I think that I'd wonder about any performer on any instrument who was quite so free with the score as Fox is here. I don't have it in for Fox in particular. It implies that somehow the music in itself is not interesting enough to be taken seriously, or listened to closely, without the addition of layers of extraneous material - colouristic tricks, tempo fluctuations, added bars, or whatever. In the end it's a bit of a snub to the composer for any performer, not just Fox, to suggest in this way that the score is somehow deficient without their the benefit of their attentions - that their 'art' adds a missing dimension, rather than realising faithfully the dimensions already supplied by the composer (especially one as good as Durufle). If the piece is so dull that it needs that kind of help, then play something better instead. That doesn't mean the result of fidelity to the score has to be boring - you only have to listen to Carlos Kleiber's conducting to realise that.

Which I think is why Fox's greatest moments tend to be in things which are more convincingly susceptible to that sort of 'recreation'. I'm not sure it's right to use the practice of the 17th and 18th century to justify liberties in the 20th. There is certainly more to music than the dots - but they still have to be respected or something crucial is lost. A pianist who added a couple of extra bars to the start of the Beethoven 'Moonlight' Sonata in order to express him/herself would not last long on the concert platform - why?

I'd tend to the view that a composer as fastidious and self critical as Durufle, who destroyed a lot of pieces because they weren't up to scratch in his eyes, meant exactly what's on the page and nothing else.

I'm a bit reluctant to get into this, Lee, given the evident strength of your feelings about the question. We have dramatically different views and had better leave it there.

Which was the the last thing I wanted to appear. I'm very happy to return to the amazing Jongen performance which is, as MM said, very remarkable indeed.

I am not pontificating at all Lee. The entity that mainly concerns me in all this is Durufle, not Virgil Fox, and if you find that objectionable or unprofessional then I'm sorry.

Calm down Lee. If it was supposed to be an example of triumph in the face of adversity that's one thing, as I tried to point out; I also said that I have the very greatest admiration for Fox's technical prowess in general and that I was fully aware of the emotional charge of the occasion. But this performance was being held up as an example of Fox's ability as a serious interpreter of repertoire, and his state of health has nothing to do with it - or with his need to add extra bars to the Sicilienne for no apparent reason. I don't think there's any need to start throwing the Bible at me.

Oh dear. I really tried, and wanted, to like this, given the extraordinary facility of Fox's playing elsewhere, and the moving circumstances of the performance; but this reading doesn't seem to have much to do with Durufle in spirit or letter. There are so many questionable things happening on so many levels - some them directly against Durufle's clearly expressed wishes - that it's sometimes hard to recognise the piece. If I have to restrict myself to one thing it's the start of the Sicilienne. Why does he do it? I do genuinely admire Fox's technical facility, but this performance embodies for me exactly why I never want to hear him play serious repertoire.

Richard - here you want the boys' jaws tense - a few postings later you want them relaxed. Make your mind up.

I've got a feeling you may be able to find some pages in facsimile on the net somewhere....

I forgot to say ....the lh texture that results from playing on two manuals in BWV 643 is quite unlike any other accompanimental texture in the chorale preludes in general, and certainly in the OB - very angular and with lots of parallel sixths and awkward tied notes. It ends up being like a particularly ungainly transcription texture - compare it to the accpt figurations in eg BWV 605 which are much more feasible. Vom himmel hoch BWV 606 can also be played on two manuals but you get the same problems of technical difficulty, which are so inelegant it's hard to believe that Bach wouldn't have found a better solution to the scoring of the texture, or have chosen a different figura for the prelude which was better suited to the 2 manual scoring.

We're going round in circles now so I'll only add one more observation. The score is all there is, and it's as clear on this particular point as it is on the notes themselves. There isn't any kind of historical or musicological case to be made for disregarding the indications - in fact some rubrics seem to have been added to the score later than the pieces themselves, suggesting that opportunities for revision didn't lead him to add a marking to BWV 643. If there were no rubrics anywhere, then it would be fair game to pick and choose - but that isn't the case, and none of the numerous people who copied it into secondary sources after its composition thought it was for two manuals either. The idea that JSB left the notation unclear to allow performers 300 years later to orchestrate the chorales in novel ways to accord with performance practices as yet unknown to him is...interesting. He would have had little if any expectation that these pieces would still be in currency after three centuries; it's not until much later in his output that the idea of leaving scores to 'posterity' comes in and the OB is far too early for that. I don't think it's 'restrictive' to respect a composer's clearly expressed wishes.

Quite. And even those chorales which few people would think of playing on one manual - like O Mensch or Der Tag, both of which can be played on one keyboard - are given very specific 'a 2 man' markings. If he'd wanted two keyboards in BWV 643 as well it would have been marked. The chances that he 'forgot' the marking are slim. It also seems to me that the unusually dense motivic texture of 643 puts it in a rather different category from the other 2 manual settings, where the accpt is less rigorously worked.

JSB is v specific about scorings throughout the collection - and doesn't mention 'a 2 Clav.' in the rubrics for this setting, which rather suggests that he imagined it should be played on one keyboard.

The short answer is yes.

Paul - the one to a part thing rests on pretty solid grounds. You have to distinguish between what Bach wanted and what he got. It's such a huge topic there's no room to rehearse the arguments, but there's a great deal of evidence that one to apart was the reality, even if his ideal was something different. Parrott and Rifkin are the people to read on this.

...which sort of makes it all the stranger to tune one that's already on the organ sharp! The V Diap at Winchester was an essential sonority in mp-mf dynamics, especially as the 8 flute is a rather acidic Lieblich; now it's straight to the 4 flute (which doesn't blend all that well, also being a Lieblich) or whack on the Oboe.

Because as we soon discovered there is then not enough 8 sonority under the Swell upperwork. It was put there for a reason.....

I don't - so it can't have been all that bad....Just after I left David H had the Swell Violin Diapason tuned sharp - I wouldn't let him do it while I was there....

It's a while since I've been there, but I remember the D and C instituting some sort of tradition of quiet in the cathedral in the early morning, which was a bit annoying sometimes ...the building was always open from about 7 or 7.30 am but there are also said services of course.

Remember what, Alastair?

No, that's how it was when I left it in 1999