High-definition Clarity: An Argument Contra

Justin Davidson, Newsday music critic and guest-blogger on Alex Ross's blog, The Rest Is Noise, lodges a complaint, and asks a question:

I'm growing increasingly irritated with all the high-definition conductors, who make symphonies sound the way football games look on those coveted vast, flat screens. Digital video gives everything that comes before the camera a relentless clarity.

[...]

It seems strange to criticize an orchestra for clarity, both because it is so difficult to achieve and because we have come to accept it as the standard of textual authenticity. According to current orthodoxy, since the composer took the trouble to write all those damned little squiggles into the score (and implied a whole lot more), the best performance is the one that makes audible as much of the filigree as possible. This is, in different guises, the principle that guides performers as ostensibly distinct as authentic performance practice gurus, minimalist burblers, and Boulez and his Boulezzini. But, really, what's so terrible about letting the edges of a chord bleed a bit, or letting some of those waves of fast fiddle notes gurgle indistinctly?

To which my answer would be: it depends.

This business is a windmill I've been tilting at for some years now; mostly as it pertains to the orchestral rendering of Wagner's music. The following excerpt from this post of mine of 29 August 2004 neatly sums up my argument:

[T]he very thing that makes Böhm's Wagner so unsatisfactory (because so completely un-Wagnerian) is the orchestral transparency and razor-edged precision on which he (Böhm) insists. Böhm, it seems, reads a Wagner score as if it were a score by Mozart (of which composer's music Böhm is a master interpreter), and nothing could be more perverse than that.

[...]

Wagner's musico-dramatic and symphonic contrapuntal genius is almost always realized in the massing, rarely in details of inner line, and Böhm's transparent and razor-edge-precise readings of Wagner wherein the revealing of inner line is prominent are therefore just plain wrong (i.e., un-Wagnerian). They're wrong because while precision and the revealing of inner line in the music of, say, Mozart or Beethoven is to reveal the very soul of the music, precision and the revealing of inner line in Wagner's music serves only to reveal how the sorcerer accomplished his magic. Not a good thing, not a good thing at all, as any self-respecting sorcerer will confirm.

Almost (but not quite) the very same could be said for the music of, say, Mahler, Bruckner, R. Strauss (for the most part), and other late-period Romantics. The same, however, could not be said for the music of, say, Haydn and Mozart, nor for the music of most Classical-period composers (including for this purpose, Beethoven). For that music, it seems to me, transparency and precision are sine qua non if one is to get down to and reveal what the music is about.

So, as concerns this business, as I've above remarked, it depends.