Jazz for aficionados

Learsfool:

Not trying to make a mountain of a mole hill, or bore you to death. I don't pretend to know much about Paganini, or follow all the author's musical reasoning, but I always thought the composer's intent was sacrosanct. This is the relevant portion of the article:

CUT VERSIONS

I want to hear every note Paganini wrote, which means, sadly, that several otherwise fine versions are 'hors de combat', including two by the tragic, extravagantly gifted Michael Rabin.

In the score, after the opening 12 bars, a second theme is heard in D major. With Lovro von Matacic in 1954(SCH) this is ignored and a terrible cut is made of eight bars to letter A, meaning that you hear this theme for the first time not in the Tonic but in F. A further cut of 57 bars omits the first statement of the important third subject, and the music resumes just four bars before the soloist's first entry. It makes no musical sense. The cadenza is by Carl Flesch.

In 1960 with Eugene Goossens, in addition to the same cuts in the opening tutti, Rabin makes another one in the last movement, which jumps from letter L to letter R, omitting 151 bars--a whole section in G major with material that is otherwise never heard again.

Sadly, as far as this survey is concerned, it's 'au revoir' Rabin, who first made me fall in love with the work art the age of 12.

He goes on the mention cuts by Ruggiero Ricci -- the opening tutti goes from 94 bars to 26. and another 26 bars of the finale.

He mentions several more, but you get the drift. I used the term 'rhyme or reason', because no one seemed to make the same cuts. They were all different.

I did Google this. It seems as if this is not just limited to Paganini. I do recall reading once, that Paganini wrote music that he felt only he, had the skill to play. Could that be a factor in all these cuts? :)

Your comments will greatly appreciated.

Cheers

1106

Learsfool:

Forgot to mention. The piece of music in question is: Paganini's Violin Concerto No 1.

Cheers

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Hi Rok - I'll address the cuts thing first. In reading what you quoted, it is obvious that in the Rabin recording, the cuts are NOT from the soloist, but from the conductor - the passages in question are in the orchestral tuttis, when the soloist isn't even playing. The writer does not know why these cuts were made, and clearly hasn't done any homework in trying to find out - you can take what he said about "no rhyme or reason" with a grain of salt. They may not be particularly good cuts, but obviously they at least work, or they wouldn't/couldn't be made. If they were made specifically for the recording project in question, it almost certainly had to do with the timings of the LP side. That would be my best guess as to why the cuts were made, something this writer obviously didn't even think of (perhaps he is reviewing a remastered recording on CD).

Quite a few people would also argue that one doesn't necessarily need to hear every note Paganini wrote, since he wasn't the greatest composer, but that would be a whole different debate.....clearly every note of the solo part is heard on that recording in question, in any case.

And yes, cuts are made all of the time, especially in operas and ballets, for all of the reasons I listed in my previous post and more. Opera and ballet composers in general expected their works to be cut or rearranged to suit the performers/directors. The idea of the score being sacrosanct did not even exist until the middle of the 19th century at the earliest. In the world of the symphony, really the first composer to make tons of markings in the parts was Mahler, and he was certainly the first to expect that they would all be followed very literally. In the 18th century and earlier, a very great deal was left up to the performer. To give an example from my own instrument - there are absolutely no articulation markings in the solo part of any of the Mozart horn concerti - the performer articulated the part as he saw fit, and any articulations in modern editions of them are editor's markings, not Mozart's. The performer was expected to be consistent in what they were doing, but that sort of thing was generally left up to them. Remember, in that era, the composer was pretty much always a performer writing for themselves, anyway. This is just one of many examples. There are also many other types of musical decisions that are left to the performer, for instance whether or not to repeat certain sections of music in certain musical forms, and there are raging debates on this issue among musicians to this day. That's probably a clumsy sentence, but it is a little complicated to explain. I hope this answers your question, though I realize it probably brings up several others....

Hello again Rok - yes, the principals of each section in the orchestra are the section leaders. They have the final say on how the section blends together, how it balances, how it articulates together, and the overall sound of the section, sometimes dictating what types of equipment will be used (some horn sections or trumpet sections or trombone sections will all play the exact same make and model of instrument). The rest of the section also always tunes to the principal as well. As a section horn player myself, my principal is my most immediate "boss," though this term is only used in jest. It is my job as a section player to follow the principal's lead. String principals do have more work to do - they have to do all of the bowing markings, making sure that everyone is bowing everything the same way. The concertmaster always does this first, then passes the bowings along to the other string principals, who make sure they work for them (meaning say the principal cellist might slightly change something because it doesn't work as well on cello as it does on violin, etc.), and then the librarians put them into all the other string players parts. The section leaders will sometimes make part assignments as well - for instance, say every piece on a particular concert only requires two horns, but there are say four players in the section - usually this program would be split among all four players, two of them playing some of them, two others the rest of them, and the principal would decide who played what, usually subject to music director approval, though most of them wouldn't mess around with it too much. Hope this gives you some idea....