The Nature of the Dialogue
Maybe I need to focus a bit a restate a little bit:
It has been my personal experience, as a listener-to of classical music, that for certain pieces of music of which recordings have been made that are well known to me I have found concert-going experiences (that is, being in the audience for a live performance of the recorded musics) greatly diminished due to the inability of my brain to not unfavorably compare the live performance with the established greatness of the recording in question. Specifically, for instance, I have never heard a Beethoven 7 to the level of satisfaction brought by the aforementioned Carlos Kleiber w/ Vienna recording. Same goes for Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique and the Tilson Thomas w/ San Francisco recording.
It may be something that I can unlearn, and maybe I'm over-generalizing, but I tend to see it as a problem with the contemporary experience of classical music as a whole. I can't, as a pragmatist, really see anything wrong with studio magic, and indeed do enjoy my fair share of studio recordings of classical works, but at the same time, have had enough of those quasi-mystical concert-going experiences that I do value the live performance over the recording. I'm not really sure that its a position that I can in any way defend beyond just saying that its aesthetic, and my aesthetic likes live music.
That argument from the point of aesthetics doesn't really do it for me though ("Does the fact that I'm trying to do it for you do it for you?"). Somethings missing, hence the attempted greater reading of the problem of recordings as a whole. I think we all agree that this music is vital, but seems in danger of ever-further devitalization. I tend to think that classical music is its own worst enemy. And the recording industry is part of that self-destructiveness, simply because it does change the nature of the dialogue between the concert-goer and the concert.
It has been my personal experience, as a listener-to of classical music, that for certain pieces of music of which recordings have been made that are well known to me I have found concert-going experiences (that is, being in the audience for a live performance of the recorded musics) greatly diminished due to the inability of my brain to not unfavorably compare the live performance with the established greatness of the recording in question. Specifically, for instance, I have never heard a Beethoven 7 to the level of satisfaction brought by the aforementioned Carlos Kleiber w/ Vienna recording. Same goes for Berlioz' Symphony Fantastique and the Tilson Thomas w/ San Francisco recording.
It may be something that I can unlearn, and maybe I'm over-generalizing, but I tend to see it as a problem with the contemporary experience of classical music as a whole. I can't, as a pragmatist, really see anything wrong with studio magic, and indeed do enjoy my fair share of studio recordings of classical works, but at the same time, have had enough of those quasi-mystical concert-going experiences that I do value the live performance over the recording. I'm not really sure that its a position that I can in any way defend beyond just saying that its aesthetic, and my aesthetic likes live music.
That argument from the point of aesthetics doesn't really do it for me though ("Does the fact that I'm trying to do it for you do it for you?"). Somethings missing, hence the attempted greater reading of the problem of recordings as a whole. I think we all agree that this music is vital, but seems in danger of ever-further devitalization. I tend to think that classical music is its own worst enemy. And the recording industry is part of that self-destructiveness, simply because it does change the nature of the dialogue between the concert-goer and the concert.
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