In case you wondered …

… Historically informed performance: How does it translate into the real world?

Recordings of music on period instruments have acted almost like performance research – seeing what’s possible in studios where acoustics could be fashioned to suit the size and nature of the sound envelope at hand. Few Historically-Informed Performance (HIP) pioneers have opened my ears more than Arthur Schoonderwoerd, whose recordings of the Beethoven piano concertos (and, most recently, the Mozart Requiem) played with ultra-small scale forces are radical but historically responsible departures from what we normally hear. Keep in mind that some Beethoven premieres were in ballrooms, not concert halls, which why the super-small scale makes sense: They showed what was the mind’s ear of Beethoven as he was writing.