John Eliot Gardiner on the limitations of the printed score

Wow! A whole page about a classical musician in today's International Herald Tribune !

Keeping Bach in His Blood, by Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim, April 9th 2013

.... The watershed goes back to the 1920s, when instrument technology changed and continuous vibrato became the norm. Around the same time, the freedom of the interpreter began to be curtailed by composers demanding exact adherence to an ever-more-precisely notated text.

"It represents the absolute break of the tradition from Monteverdi to early Stravinsky, whereby the interpreter has freedom to use gesture and rhetoric and passion to articulate, vary and embellish what's written down, Mr Gardiner said. "If you think about it, the written page of music is so limiting".

...

MK: or, as someone else has said, "Music creates notation. Notation does not create music."

Anton Rubinstein

A transcription of words by (possibly) the greatest pianist after Liszt:
"the purpose of art is to uplift and spiritualise, not necessarily to entertain... art is aristocratic, not democratic... music demands a consecration, a cultus in the temple to which only the initiated are admitted: she demands to be the chosen of the elect, to possess somewhat of the mysterious".
Rubinstein demanded that pupils learn to sing, for without an understanding of breathing and phrasing, piano playing degenerates into mere fingerwork.

acknowledgements to Larry Sitsky, "Anton Rubinstein" pp18-22

Sofronitsky and Rachmaninoff

I cannot resist sharing more comments by these wonderful artists about the nature of musical inspiration and soufulness:

First of all, a performance requires a will. A will- meaning to want a lot, to want more than you have now, more than you can give. For me the entire effort is strengthening the will. Here is all: rhythm, sound, emotion. Rhythm should be soulful. The whole piece should live, breathe, move as protoplasm. I play-and one part is alive, full of breath, and another part nearby may be dead because the live rhythmic flow is broken. Rachmaninoff, for instance, could create a rhythmic pulse that was unfailingly alive. He had the enormous artistic will of a genius. He had a greater will than any of the modern pianists. The same with Anton Rubinstein... [who] had an enormous will for hearing, for rhythmic life. And another point, most important: the more emotionally you play, the better, but this emotionality should be hidden, hidden as in a shell. When I come on stage now, I have «seven shells» under my tuxedo, and despite this I feel naked. So, I need fourteen shells. I have to wish to play so well, live so fully, as to die and still feel as if I have not played. I have nothing to do with this.

http://www.sofronitsky.com/publications/publication-03.html

Rachmaninoff said:
"Real inspiration must come from within: nothing from outside can help. The best in poetry, the greatest of painting, the sublimest of nature cannot produce any worthwhile result if the divine spark of creative faculty is lacking within the artist….
[the listener] should] “paint for themselves what the music most suggests"