Anthony Newman Bach performance

Make of this what you will:

What is the harpsichord?

Supposedly his obsession with velocity comes from his learned research, according to a lengthy comment. I don’t accept it.

Years ago I got A. Newman’s lavishly printed and bound book “Bach and the Baroque”, 2nd ed. 1995.
While reading it I found so many shortcomings that I left it aside.
Just to show a gross conceptual and historical error:

p.128 “The Realization of Ornaments. Trills should be played on the beat and for the most part from the upper note. Almost all important Baroque and Classical sources give trills as beginning from the upper note. Slurred trills are begun on the main tone”.

The above is correct, of course. However, it is followed by this:
“A good, reliable, and simple rule to follow about trills is: trill from the upper note unless the note before the trill is the upper note”.
This is WRONG: he should have added “and a slur connects the preceding note to the note with the trill, or else to the trill sign”.

p. 129 “Quick trills … are played like triplets off the main tone.”.
This of course is in contradiction with every single Baroque source I am aware of.
He quotes for this C.P.E. Bach: WRONG again. CPE in his several examples only suppresses the upper auxiliary if the preceding note is the same and there is a connecting slur (i.e. in coincidence with Baroque sources.)

He confirms his misconception with the puzzling sentence “or if there is implied slurring” shortly afterwards.

p. 111. “Bach and Inequality … Bach is said to have played in “legato” style, …” . No source from JSBach milieu or from his sons supports anything like this. AFAIK it is just one of the fantasies by Forkel.

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IIRC, Newman’s pedal harpsichord was made by Eric Herz. There is a photo of Newman playing it in the Zuckerbook. I heard him play the newly installed Kern organ in the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in NYC years ago. The room and organ have both been altered since then, but at that time the acoustic was as dead as a doornail, and the organ did not have a very attractive sound. Newman’s playing was supersonic, as usual. I agree that it is not to my taste, and I have no idea why he plays that way. Perhaps because he can?

I clearly remember, about 40 years ago, recording Newman’s version of Charles Ives’ variations on ‘America’ onto cassette tape as it was broadcast on the radio. (How crude that seems now – not to mention that back then New York City had two classical radio stations, which published monthly listings so you would know in advance what was going to be programmed.) Of course Newman played the variations extremely fast, but even so they became one of my favorite pieces. I have always suspected that Newman, like some others, played fast just because he could.

I was in college studying the pipe organ when Tony splashed onto the scene. Of course we were all agog at his tempos, but also found his articulation to be refreshing. (Our instructor had gotten some of the new religion, but we were still playing Bach from the Dupre editions, with fingerings provided to make legato at all times.)
About those tempos: Michael Barone, the host (for 50+ years!) of the public radio show PipeDreams interviewed Tony ten years ago or so, and asked him about this after playing one of the hair-raising early lps. Tony then talked about his youthful exuberance, and how he had come to more sedate tempos as he aged. So Barone played Tony’s recent recording of the same piece for comparison. It was just as fast.

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I was in college, too, when I first DIDN’T hear Tony Newman play. He was performing the complete Bach WTC Bk 1 at the Mannes College of Music, but I had a collegium rehearsal that evening elsewhere. I was sure that I could at least hear the end of the concert if I rushed back to school after the rehearsal. Which I did. And I was there earlier than I hoped. But even with an intermission, the concert was long over by the time I arrived!

Speaking of which, his recording of the Bach Brandenburgs is a complete hoot and a great party record. The BB1 has very loud organ continuo that sounds like a calliope. He has the players play a profusion of “ornaments” that he wrote for many movements, and the ornaments he writes for BB3 are too thought out and don’t sound like ornaments, much less Bach. In BB4 he has the idea of having the solo violin play the passagework of Bach’s harpsichord concerto arrangement of the same piece - kind of negating the idea that Bach reconceived the original violin passagework to make it more idiomatic for the harpsichord. Etc etc etc…

The recording was done with period instruments, but he did them in NY City on New Years Eve for years with modern instruments. His “solution” for BB2 where the modern piccolo trumpet way too loud comparatively for the recorder violin and oboe was to recast the recorder part for modern piccolo flute. Of course the range is up an octave and the combination sounded ludicrous. I was tuning the harpsichord for the concert, so I was able to ask him if he was having the players play all the ornaments from the recording, and he said very happily that “I have even more ornaments than on the CDs!”

I recall a performance by Newman of Bach’s Clavierübung Dritter Theyl in the late 60s. He played faster than you could turn the pages. The whole thing was {mercifully} over in just over an hour.
Dale

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In the mid 80es Tony recorded on the Hill & Tyre Magnum Opus (3 manuals 16‘8‘8‘8‘4‘) . Yes, dazzling is his key achievement, but he missed out on too much of Bachs musical content. Tony seemed constantly subchallenged, even when we went to the movies between recording sessions. He couldn‘t just watch one movie at a time but switched between two pictures all the time… So far I don‘t think I’ve ever again heard the Italian concerto in the same speed.
Dietrich

Having played all JSBach with traditional fingerings, I only found difficulties to play at speed two works:
1- The Triple Concerto, arguably a late mid-18th century transcription, based on a Prelude and Fugue by Bach that was surely not meant to be played very fast.
2- The Italian Concerto, 3rd movement. In my opinion it was by no means meant to be played as fast as they do today. “Presto” is meant to avoid a slow tempo because it is written in quavers instead of semiquavers. Most recordings (including the one by otherwise excellent Scott Ross), due to their excessive tempo, fail to reproduce carefully the fastidious two-voice detail Bach prescribed in the right hand bars 17-22 and similar passages.

Baroque musicians just did not play fast movements that fast. This has been established by scholars decades ago.

Before streaming, how did one watch two movies at one time?

“how did one watch two movies at one time?” by flicking between TV channels, I presume- not good for the old telly. I first encountered this irritating habit when house-sharing in the 80s. It was a new thing then.

He said they went to the movies, not TV. I’m intrigued. Altogether fascinating to learn about this player.

Tony did in fact walk in and out of the studio so he could watch the movie next door as well…

Thank you, Claudio. This is just according to my “feeling” or taste! I had expressed that earlier in a post, —though not with respect to movement III of the Italian Concerto. But that is how I feel when I play it.
Wolfgang

| CDV Claudio Di Veroli
May 16 |

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Having played all JSBach with traditional fingerings, I only found difficulties to play at speed two works:
1- The Triple Concerto, arguably a late mid-18th century transcription, based on a Prelude and Fugue by Bach that was surely not meant to be played very fast.
2- The Italian Concerto, 3rd movement. In my opinion it was by no means meant to be played as fast as they do today. “Presto” is meant to avoid a slow tempo because it is written in quavers instead of semiquavers. Most recordings (including the one by otherwise excellent Scott Ross), due to their excessive tempo, fail to reproduce carefully the fastidious two-voice detail Bach prescribed in the right hand bars 17-22 and similar passages.

Baroque musicians just did not play fast movements that fast. This has been established by scholars decades ago.


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Wolfgang G. Knauss
Theodore von Karman Professor of
Aeronautics and Applied Mechanics, emeritus
California Institute of Technology
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