Richard Taruskin (1945–2022)

It’s rather dispiriting to read today Professor Taruskin’s fomenting from some forty years ago in response to some recordings of Historically-Informed Performances. I’ve just been rereading some essays of his relating to recordings of Bach released around that time: the gamba suites recreated on cello and modern concert grand and suchlike.

Prof. Taruskin is clearly intelligent, which makes it all the sadder to see this intelligence misdirected. Taruskin is a polemicist and delights in show more firing off diatribes condemning some or other aspects of HIP. He regularly employs strawman arguments, ascribing to the performers some position – a position for which there’s no evidence – and then proceeds to demolish with verbal fireworks that imagined position.
Ah, it’s so vitiating. And misguided.
“There’s none so blind as those that will not see.”

It reminds me of Karajan and the Berlin Phil, when they recorded Bach orchestral suites in the 1960s. These performances were aural confectionery, the aural equivalent of Mozart balls. Delightful if that’s what you’re longing for. ("What Bach would have wanted had he only heard the Berlin Philharmonic ...”)
In the same breath we can recall the Karajan/Berlin Phil recordings of the Brahms symphonies from the 1980s. So sterile, so missing the point, but of course historically interesting as a record of a (hopefully moribund) performance tradition. show less

A collection of essays from two decades of criticism by the author. This work is both intellectual stimulating and enjoyable in its depth and variety. I enjoyed the passion of this critic throughout the volume.

This was one my music history texts at university. A bit dry, but still interesting.

nice collection of history documents from the medieval period to... uh... i dunno, i only read up to the baroque. Used for Music History courses under Dr. Burkholder at Indiana University