I remember a rehearsal video of the great Romanian Conductor
And it's very funny.
He's got a professional orchestra and, and,
they're sawing away and he stops and says,
in German but he says, you know, well do you have piano printed in your parts?
They said, oh, yes.
Well then why are you playing forte?
Very simple after that.
Of course.
Just play what's written.
So we start from that but we have to adjust, we have to adapt.
We also have to think that some people have great difficulty playing softly.
It's much harder to play softly than
loudly, because it requires control, requires technique.
And we have to always, I find we have to
more expand our range of dynamics downward rather than upward.
As I am fond of saying in our rehearsal, any fool
can play the forte, but who can play piano with beauty
and warmth of sound let alone a pianissimo that just sustains
the interest and has direction and shape and all of that.
Acoustics are a large part of the thing, too.
Some auditoriums.
Very difficult to play softly in.
Others, great dynamic range you can do whatever you want.
And some auditoriums are so loud and harsh, you have to
tone everything down, so you have to adjust to that as well.
It's a constant.
Work in progress of adjustment, rehearsal to
rehearsal, sometimes rehearsal space to performance space
and balancing out your players' abilities and
understanding of their role in the texture.
>> And you mentioned how some composers, moving up to, say, Mahler,
were essentially just, well everyone's piano and you have to sort out.
Of the specifics.
>> Yeah.
>> And then some composers are, have layered it
to adjust for balance, and acoustics, and things like that.
>> Yeah.
>> And today we're kind of postmodern wild, wild, west.
Where some composers do one.
>> Right.
>> And some composers do the other.
And we have to figure out, well which approach did they take?
>> Yeah.
>> Or which approach makes more sense?
>> Yeah.
>> I often had players.
Who in terms of taking things relatively who will say ask for a dynamic but I have
mezzo forte written so okay it's relative to what other folks around you are doing.
It's not a specific decibel level that they have to achieve.
You mentioned in terms of earlier on how in baroque, perhaps sparser dynamics.
Denser dynamics.
Would you agree that even when there are sparser dynamics, there are some dynamic
margins that are applied within there, that we might even add to the parts.
>> I, I, absolutely.
>> For performance.
>> Absolutely, performance practice.
I think it would be ridiculous to say that Bach intended
this whole 20 bars to be played at an uninflected forte.
No.
Or piano.
Whatever the case may be.
We have to use our musical judgment and taste to make the pieces come alive.
Shaping the lines, and this means a lot of extra work on the part of the conductor.
We have to almost create an interpretation.
We have to edit, and we put things in the parts.
We'll actually write dynamics in and say I want piano here.
I want a crescendo leading back to this forte.
We study performance practice of the period.
And of course, there's been a lot of research
on that in the last 50 years or so.
Lot of period instrument groups out there, that we
can listen to on recordings and see what they do.
And there's some incredibly inventive performances out there of
music by Vivaldi and Corelli and Bach and Handle and.
But for a modern group to do that stuff and to do it convincingly, you
have to do a lot of research, a lot of work, and a lot of editing.
Not only on dynamics, but on articulation, also.
And, what's going to be shorter.
What's going to be longer.
Should we really slur these or not.
So, it's, it's a bigger challenge.
There's more work to be done on that
earlier music because less is given on the page.
>> Yeah, it's not that the music
is less expressive, the notation is less expressive.
>> Exactly, yeah.