Reviewing the Performance

 I know so little of the culinary arts arts that I once argued that surely recipes are just like experiments in third form Chemistry and that as long as everybody follows them accurately they will surely turn out the same whether it is the Galloping Gourmet, Delia Smith, Raymond Blanc or Fanny Craddock doing it.

It was obviously not the case but I couldn't see why not. I was well aware that neither cookery or fashion were my areas of expertise and was told that when it came to poetry I'd do better but it later turned out I was wrong about that, too.

The score of a piece of music tells the players which notes to play and a metronome marking can stipulate the precise tempo so surely all performances by competent musicians are going to sound the same. Except that recordings of the same piece can vary in length by a few minutes and, if they did all the sound the same Saturday mornings wouldn't have Record Review.

I have half a dozen recordings of the Couperin Lecons de Tenebres and Spem in Alium and more than one of several others and now, I really should have known, two complete Entführungs, many of them different for understanable reasons but when I heard a piece on the radio at the weekend and looked up what it was, I found I had a recording of it already.

It was the last part of Bach's Coffee Cantata, BWV 211. The Naxos disc was the first CD I ever bought but it hasn't been played for years because when one has Nathalie Stutzmann singing Bach cantatas that's what one plays. But I listened to the Naxos disc and heard nothing that sounded like what I'd heard on the wireless, which was Emma Kirkby and Christopher Hogwood being authentic and 'period' rather than making Bach sound C19th. It makes a difference. While one would like the Complete Cantatas, 72 discs is more than are likely to get played, realistically, and so I'll have Kirkby/Hogwood Coffee and Peasant because it doesn't half make a difference.

One can't help but listen to the music if one hasn't heard it before but if you have then it becomes more about what the performance does with the music.