Word: eighteenth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO the Bach Society was organized to perforn chamber music primarily of the eighteenth century. Over the years their emphasis and preference have drifted to other styles. Last Sunday afternoon they showed themselves to be best at the music for which they were originally formed. The closing work of their program, the Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, is often considered the finest example of concerto grosso writing. More often than not, its balance of concertino and ripieno forces is distorted to the point that the harpsichord and flute are never heard, the oboe, rarely, and the trumpet always...
...situation in which the otherwise sophisticated leaders of the country's leading University employ, in all good faith, a line of defence that is as old as the British abolition controversy and as morally creaky as a restored slave ship in a naval museum. As early as the eighteenth century the more sophisticated defenders of West Indian slavery were arguing that although slavery was an evil and, as such, to be condemned (in much the same way that the President today condemns Portuguese colonialism) Englishmen should nonetheless maintain slavery and continue to invest in sugar or "brown gold" (as Harvard...
There has been a quiet revolution in the performance of baroque music the past few years. Through the '50's and early '60's, as mountains of eighteenth-century manuscripts were unearthed, audiences were exposed to essentially romantic interpretations of old music (as pre-1800 composition is often called). More recently scholarly work in the difficult field of performance practice has made possible the production of a sound closer to the original medium than ever before...
...most striking difference between the Concentus Musicus and other orchestras is the quality of sound: this group is completely different. The reason is the instruments: all are originals or reconstructions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century instruments. The strings have a far brighter sound, richer in harmonics than their modern counterparts. The string choir resembles a group of soloists rather than the modern symphony's big, anonymous cushion of sound. The woodwinds are changed from the way we know them: the oboes and bassoons, like the strings, are sharper and brighter; the flute is much softer. The brass is an entirely...
...innocent record-buyers. One friend of mine became so disgusted with original instruments (on an admittedly poor Fireworks recording) that he refuses to consider another purchase of the sort. The Concentus Musicus is the answer to this dilemma: they provide the technical perfection of modern instruments with the eighteenth-century sound...