A little nit-picking
I'm headed to Philadelphia for rehearsals and a concert with 20/21, the Curtis Contemporary Music Ensemble. The program next Friday includes a trio of pieces by Messiaen, one of which is "Oiseaux Exotique", which captures Messiaen at his most birdsong-obsessed. It's a trippy soundscape of timbres and rhythms, citing the calls of over 40 species of birds, and is one of the more rhythmically complicated pieces I know. It's hard for the ear to catch any single thing that's happening because it's so densely orchestrated, with individual instruments most often playing discrete parts.
The Minnesota Orchestra played it a few seasons back under de Waart, with Peter Serkin as soloist, which I remember as an excellent performance. Yesterday, as I was poring over the score, I decided to listen to a recording that had been recommended to me, of the London Sinfonietta led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring the Messiaen specialist Paul Crossley at the keyboard. I was rather enjoying the recording (people seem to have vastly differing ideas about tempi in this piece!), until I got about midway in the long central tutti. I've been studying this score for several weeks, and have a pretty good grasp of it, but as I listened, something felt very, very off.
Which, I discovered, it was. I listened to those few minutes a few more times, to discover that the xylophone is off by an entire half-measure for about 16 measure (or 26 seconds of music, depending how you want to look at it). I don't usually listen to recordings looking for mistakes (and with modern recording technology, anything is fixable, so it's usually useless to go looking in the first place!), but this one surprised me. Particularly because, even within the dense writing, Messiaen expressly states that in this tutti the xylophone is forte and solo, an important voice. Granted, if you were simply listening to the recording it might be impossible to catch, but as, say, a conductor or producer looking at the score (or even the xylophone player, who clearly had to add two beats to get back in sync with the rest of the ensemble) the error is obvious. Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?
Any other recorded "errors" out there that people have encountered?
The Minnesota Orchestra played it a few seasons back under de Waart, with Peter Serkin as soloist, which I remember as an excellent performance. Yesterday, as I was poring over the score, I decided to listen to a recording that had been recommended to me, of the London Sinfonietta led by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring the Messiaen specialist Paul Crossley at the keyboard. I was rather enjoying the recording (people seem to have vastly differing ideas about tempi in this piece!), until I got about midway in the long central tutti. I've been studying this score for several weeks, and have a pretty good grasp of it, but as I listened, something felt very, very off.
Which, I discovered, it was. I listened to those few minutes a few more times, to discover that the xylophone is off by an entire half-measure for about 16 measure (or 26 seconds of music, depending how you want to look at it). I don't usually listen to recordings looking for mistakes (and with modern recording technology, anything is fixable, so it's usually useless to go looking in the first place!), but this one surprised me. Particularly because, even within the dense writing, Messiaen expressly states that in this tutti the xylophone is forte and solo, an important voice. Granted, if you were simply listening to the recording it might be impossible to catch, but as, say, a conductor or producer looking at the score (or even the xylophone player, who clearly had to add two beats to get back in sync with the rest of the ensemble) the error is obvious. Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?
Any other recorded "errors" out there that people have encountered?
Labels: conductors and conducting, polling blog readers, score study
posted by Sarah at
7:59 PM
1 Comments:
"Which makes me wonder why they didn't bother to fix it. Or did they simply not catch it?"
Just a WAG (wild-a**ed guess): If there were multiple takes, perhaps the musicians, conductor, and producer all thought someone else would fix it in the normal course of production? Then they all head off to their other projects and this gets past whoever is responsible for the editing.
Serkin played the same piece with our local orchestra a few months ago after another Messiaen bird work for solo piano. Extremely complicated stuff. Don't know how anyone but a very well-educated musician familiar with the music could tell if it was all properly synchronized or not.
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