J.S. Bach Showdown 🎻 ft. Hilary Hahn, Rachel Podger, Heifetz & Milstein 

Hilary Hahn!

You

Ray Chen or Hilary Hahn

In baroque playing, they vibrate but very little.

sigiswald kuijken

I admire the way Ray incorporated the clip himself, rather than let some wiseass in the Comments point it out 🙂

​@@zainab58dang bro my bad didn't know I wasn't allowed to make a lighthearted joke, it's almost like people sometimes comment before finishing the video 😊

I remember 😂

@@flatmars7072 I can only say that you have somehow entirely misinterpreted my comment.

I remember the twoset video

Where can we watch the whole performance though? Can’t find the video Ray uses on yt :(

Recording a perfect Chacconne at âge of 17… just incredible.

​@@gerriedegeitenmelker4278

Yes, watch her practise clip, so much to learn

I’m with you on Szeryng.

Yeah Szeryng’s Bach is far better than Heifetz or Milstein for me

Y E S

Du bist nicht zufällig in Mannheim im Januar? Da darf auch ich Ray erleben😊.

exposure instead of exposition?

@@shahx1010 you're right, exposure. thanks!!!

In the end, who cares for historical accuracy. It's all about how a performance affects you and that's not dependent on a particular approach to accuracy. Personally, I can't stand the snobbery and arrogance of some of the people who advocate for historically informed performances as if it was somehow immoral to play Bach with vibrato. Never mind the fact that even in Baroque times, people likely used way more vibrato than so-called historically informed performers nowadays. The evidence for performance styles in those days is way less conclusive than some people claim. In fact there are some books by violin teachers back then who advocate for a constant slight vibrato because the violin is supposed to emulate the human singing voice which has a natural vibrato. Ultimately, it's a matter of taste. I like some of the more moderate historically informed performances and I appreciate hearing the sound of the old instruments and playing techniques. But to me at least, hearing violinists play music without any vibrato at all is a bit ridiculous. Why get rid of an excellent expressive tool? And it gets even more ridiculous when you listen to Roger Norrington's recordings of Mahler (!) without vibrato because Norrington believes that vibrato was invented in 1920 which is just insane.

I’m a historically informed performance junkie, so I’ll confess a natural bias here towards baroque at the outset. But I’ll offer the opinion that baroque equipment sounds better in person to a greater degree than classical equipment.

Not sure why RU-vid won’t let me edit my own post, …. I’m keep trying to add: I think classical equipment comes across more easily in recordings. The excitement of baroque equipment needs really careful sound engineering to come across, but you can be lazier with the classical. So the earlier set up instruments are at a disadvantage.

I have a copy of the treatise on keyboard playing by C. P. E. Bach and he laments the inability of keyboard instruments to do vibrato like singers and string players. Of course, we all know who his teacher was. Since I read that, I have felt like the quantitative elimination of all traces of vibrato in baroque and earlier performance is misguided...