A recent reviewer of
a collection played by one of Wanda
Landowska’s last pupils declared that
"Landowska’s reissued recordings
act as stern warnings to all would-be
harpsichordists" and talked of
"the monstrous anachronisms Landowska
favoured". That the musician who
did most to pioneer the modern revival
of the harpsichord should now be regarded,
in some quarters, as "a stern warning"
to her would-be successors, an object
lesson in what not to do, and should
be viewed, as worthy of mockery, is
a sad state of affairs.
Of course, her playing
fails most of the tests of modern ‘historically
informed’ performance on the harpsichord.
Of course, the instrument she favoured,
a two-manual Pleyel with a cast-iron
frame, pedals and a sixteen-foot stop
was quite unlike those on which most
of her repertoire would originally have
been performed. Of course, her frequent
changes of registration strike us as
excessive in the light of current ‘historically-informed’
styles of harpsichord playing. Of course,
her use of ornamentation now strikes
us as altogether inappropriate, historically
speaking. Of course, her use of rubato
strongly inclines to the romantic. And
yet …
However ‘inauthentic’
her playing may be in one sense, it
surely has ‘authenticity’ of another
sort and has it to a high degree. One
of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions
of the adjective ‘authentic’ is as a
description of that which is "real,
actual, genuine" as opposed to
pretended. Almost everywhere Landowska’s
playing persuades one of its profound
sincerity, of its coherence as a genuine,
individual vision of what the music
means.
The rhythmic drive
and clarity of her playing; a determination
to do justice to what she perceives
as the underlying passions of the music;
her sheer love of the potentials of
the instrument to which she was so committed;
all this gives an unmistakably personal
quality to her playing. There is a danger
that everything begins to sound like
Landowska – that there aren’t sufficient
stylistic distinctions between the various
composers she performs. But it isn’t
a danger to which she too often falls
victim.
In any case, on the
CD under review quite a lot of the music
is, in effect, Landowska’s. The
CD gathers the contents (all but a performance
of Bach’s Prelude, Fugue and Allegro
in E flat, which is scheduled for
inclusion on a later Naxos CD) of two
LPs: A Treasury of Harpsichord Music(released
1957) and Landowska Plays
for Paderewski (1951). The
second of these was reissued in 1956
as Dances of Poland and includes
many transcriptions (and one composition)
by Landowska, of music originally written
for lute or piano, in the performing
of which she allows full rein to her
fascination with her instrument’s range
of colours. Purists will find some of
the effects outrageous! Jonathan Summers’
sleeve notes quote her observation that
"the harpsichord, reservoir of
sharp colours, flute, strings, nasal
oboes, bagpipes, contrabass, is the
ideal instrument to render folk music.
You will hear it in The Hop,
the most authentic, the most striking
mazurka that ever existed". And
certainly one does! The folk elements
in Oginski’s polonaises originally written
for piano (and in the Chopin Mazurka!)
are given their fair share of "nasal
oboes" and "sharp colours"
as performed on Landowska’s harpsichord.
She is clearly much attracted by the
music of her native Poland and there
is an air of patriotic affirmation,
of loving nostalgia, to much of her
playing. So much so that she quite misses
the mockery in the ‘Polish airs’ of
Rameau and Couperin.
The first half of the
CD’s programme (corresponding to A
Treasury of Harpsichord Music) contains
some wonderfully disciplined and energetic
playing. The fleetness and sureness
of her fingering in Handel’s Harmonious
Blacksmith is remarkable; in the
first of the Scarlatti sonatas the controlled
rhythmic power is very impressive; her
reading of Mozart’s Minuet (K.
355) is hypnotic. In the Vivaldi transcription
of Bach, the sheer fun of the opening
allegro is succeeded by a beautiful
responsiveness to the melodic line of
the larghetto.
No would-be harpsichordist
of our own day is likely to take Landowska
as his or her model. That isn’t, though,
to say that she might not have things
to teach us and pleasures to give us.
We need only think of her as dangerous
example if we think her way of playing
is likely to ‘mislead’ her successors
into abandoning most of what modern
scholarship has taught them, which it
obviously isn’t. Surely we are not faced
with mutually exclusive alternatives
between which, as listeners, we must
choose. If we can enjoy Stokowski’s
arrangements of Bach as well as performances
informed by modern scholarship and played
on period instruments – and surely we
can and should – then it is hard to
see why we can’t find a place for Landowska’s
intelligent, idiosyncratic readings
of the music she so loved. There are
many kinds of truths to be found in
Bach, Scarlatti etc and hers is one
of them.
Glyn Pursglove
see also review
by Jonathan Woolf