The Lost Art

by Peter Burwasser

"Nobody plays like that anymore." This was a comment by conductor Jonathan Sternberg on a recording of great Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, who died in 1955, in his role as a fiddler. Sternberg, for whom Enescu was a mentor, is referring to style more so than technique. You could never set a metronome to Enescu's playing; he would be off the beat in mere moments. His rhythm was internalized, connected to the pulse, breathing and even vocal patterns. And it's true: This is not the way music is played today, even from the students of such tradition-bound schools as Curtis.

This is where the wonderful world of scratchy old records becomes so important. And thanks to remarkable advances in restoration technology, the most recent reissues of earlier recordings are not so old-sounding. Swarthmore's own Ward Marston is an audio restorer known to collectors around the world as a wizard who can make recordings by Thomas Edison come to life. Imagine being able to experience an actual aural event that occurred more than a century ago! Another leader in the exploration of historic performances is the Music and Arts label. I recently acquired their set of the four symphonies and two piano concertos of Brahms as conducted by Wilhelm Fürtwangler, mostly from live concerts in the early 1950s, shortly before his death. The sound is more than acceptable, and the music-making is astonishing. As with Enescu, there is never a sense of a bar line. Fürtwangler gives the music a sense of organic shape that makes it seem physical. There is no awareness of structure, rather an inevitable wholeness.

I do have to take issue with the absolutist quality of my conductor friend's comments. If you attend enough live music events, you will occasionally encounter a musician who can conjure that "old-fashioned" sensibility. More often than not, this happens with an older artist, one not so obsessed by technical perfection, allowing expression to emerge as the muscles move as much by memory as by volition. We heard this in December when Daniel Barenboim gave an all-Liszt recital at the Kimmel. Any recent Curtis grad could have outdone him on purely pianistic grounds, but what freedom of phrasing, what luminous tonality he made. After a meltingly beautiful encore of Schubert, Maestro Sternberg himself leaned over to me, shaking his head wistfully, to say, "Nobody plays like that anymore."

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)