Hope you all had a nice Christmas. Hearing I was learning something as obscure and ancient as the lute, a well-meaning friend bought me a couple of CDs for Christmas, played on original instruments, the Handel Fireworks music, and the Mozart horn concertos. The horns in particular sound dreadful, awfully out of tune, so much so that I got a headache after a while.
My question: do you believe that the composers heard that out-of-tunesness in the heads when they composed the music, even liked the sound (knowing no other), or would they have longed for instruments that actually played what they wrote? (Though Bruckner liked the natural horn because of the flat seventh, which he preferred). In the Handel it simply spoils the wonderful tutti effects, that glorious brass. In the Mozart there's little left of the actual solo music, just this bloke, no doubt doing his best, and playing as though he were having some sort of extremely unpleasant seizure while doing so. Would not Mozart, Handel and co been utterly delighted with a modern horn, and does this not cast certain doubts on the validity of at least some of that the Authentic Instruments people are doing? I realise this is not a lute question, just a thought that crossed my mind and which I would like to pass on, in the hope of receiving an answer which might convince me that recording music such that the result makes one long to be a bus driver, and not a musician, is worth the effort? Cheers, happy new year to all Tom Beck --
