Are you addressing moi, David? Your remarks follow mine, but they don't have much to do with them.
On Jan 24, 2008, at 11:05 AM, David Rastall wrote: > >> I'm sure there's a lot of lute music that's inconsequential enough >> that it's not a great sin to tamper with it, but Forlorne Hope >> isn't in that class. > > God forbid that we should Tamper with it! ;-) Is Dowland really as > "etched in stone" as all that? I have a number of renditions of > Forlorn Hope on CD: rather bland sounding because they're played oh- > so-correctly. Or because it's a fiendishly difficult piece. Karamazov's choppiness may be a way to get around the difficulty by picking up his left-hand fingers early to have them ready for the next contorted position, but it wreaks havoc with the polyphonic lines. > Anyway, that aside, name one composer whose music > should sound exactly the same every time it's played. Well, Conlan Nancarrow, since you asked, but that's beside the point. Nobody is suggesting that Dowland's music, or Beethoven's, should sound exactly the same every time it's played, but if some conductor rewrote the end of Beethoven's Fifth so that it ends in C minor instead of C major, he'd get laughed out of the business for thinking he knows better than Beethoven how the music should go, and it would have nothing to do with HIP purism. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html