"Bit of a thin string tone", I said to S. "Wonder who's playing?"
A few minutes later a suspicion began to dawn.
"I bet it's Norrington and the Stuttgart orchestra. Where's the paper?"
The cat was sitting on it, as he does on just about any useful bit of paper, and looked most aggrieved to be moved.
"What did I say? It's Norrington and his no-vibrato wonders".
"I've been telling you that for the last two minutes", S said. "I heard a trailer for it earlier on".
"Did you?", I said, aware only that she had been talking and, excited about the possibility of being right about something, I had been ignoring her.
Either I was very lucky, or Sir Roger has contrived a sound for his orchestra which renders it utterly distinctive. I personally don't like it. I heard him playing Elgar a while back, and it felt as natural as wearing socks in the bath. But hats off to him. No vibrato is Norrington's USP, and he has made a career out of it, firstly with the classics, then on to Brahms and now, inevitably, Elgar and Mahler.
I don't like Norrington's conducting, but I have to acknowledge that he is very good at it. In comparison with some stick-wavers, Norrington's movements impart useful information about speed, volume, phrasing and articulation (compare him to some other toilers in the field: "How on earth do you cope when X is conducting?", I asked a friend in the Halle. "Oh we just don't watch when we have him", she said).
But back to vibrato. I have never studied the history of string playing, and I am not in a position to say that Sir Roger, who undoubtedly has, is wrong to get his orchestra to leave the vibrato out; only that I don't like the results. I have my own theory as to why vibrato was introduced, based on absolutely zero research but instead on quite a bit of playing experience, a theory which explains why playing the Romantics without it leaves me - and it must be said most other people - cold.
In the high Baroque we find that instrumental music is largely contrapuntal. That's to say that rather than music having a tune and accompaniment, it tends to be all tunes, or at least mostly tunes, woven together like a plait. Now if you have the tune, you can do phrasing. By phrasing a musician means altering the volume and weight of a melodic line to impart musical direction: the feeling that the line is going somewhere, and having got there, is going away again. Most phrases have a point of weight towards and away from which they move. To take the opening line of God Save the Queen as an example, the weight there would be on the first syllable of gracious; gracious in fact. Interestingly, if you were to speak the line aloud, the stress would be on Queen; but Haydn's tune imposes musical obligations strong enough to override natural speech rhythms. That's why the Messiah aria And We Like Sheep makes me laugh every time I hear it.
Now if you play a line without phrasing or vibrato it doesn't just sound "thin", the usual complaint about vibrato-less playing, it also sounds static. I think that if players didn't use vibrato until about a hundred years ago (the Norrington view, although many people disagree, feeling that the conductor has read his sources selectively), they must have had to work much harder at phrasing, because that was what made their music come alive. I think that in the pre-vibrato era, melodic lines were always either growing or waning.
How would the players have done this? By varying the speed and pressure of the bow. Volume is, to put it crudely, a coefficient of these two things. The harder you press the bow down (and the quicker you move it) the greater the volume produced. So in baroque music, where most people have a melodic line most of the time, the players look instinctively - and this can even be done sight-reading - for the high or low point in the line and aim for it.
Now as the 18th century matures and passes into the 19th, musical textures change. If there is a tune at all, it is more likely to be a tune with an accompaniment, that's to say a figuration, static or mobile, which provides chordal support for the melodic line. As a player with one of these supporting lines, it is much harder to know where the weight in the phrase (which you are not yourself playing) should lie. This is the crux of the difficulty, and in my view it's where vibrato comes from. Playing these passages, lacking on the face of it obvious opportunities for phrasing, imposes the need for animating them. Hence vibrato. Because if you do use vibrato, you don't have to work anything like as hard with the phrasing. Your line sounds pleasing even when it is static.
I didn't just find the Stuttgart orchestra's tone thin in Mahler; it also lacked direction (the problem was even worse with Elgar because the players didn't know the piece well). It isn't enough just to get rid of vibrato - you also have to re-educate the players in the necessity of phrasing with the bow. And in this late Romantic repertoire that means putting shape on every bar of the music, no matter how static the individual part.
Of course, this is all speculation. I am not a musical academic and I can't prove it. But here are a couple of bits of circumstantial evidence. The first is that in order to produce this ever waxing / waning tone, you need to move the bow quicker, which means you run out of bow sooner. That means fewer slurs for the players and much more bowing as-it-comes. Now look at old fiddle parts. There isn't much in the way of bowing. It looks as if slurs, where many notes are gathered together in one bow, start to arrive en masse when players discover that vibrato enables them to utilise a slower bow speed and that fewer bow changes are necessary.
Recently I found myself bowing a Handel Concerto Grosso from a 19th century edition for a performance without vibrato. The thing I did most was cross out slurs and write in hairpins, trying to get living players to do what their 18th century forebears would have done instinctively.
I'm not against no-vibrato performances in the right period. I love the English Concert's performances of Haydn symphonies. But it isn't enough to think that getting rid of vibrato alone is a good musical solution. What would be really interesting would be to see how a Baroque group managed with some romantic repertoire. What would the English Concert make of Elgar's Serenade for Strings?
The Norrington concert got five stars in the Guardian. Martin Kettle, the reviewer, described it as "quite simply, one of the most important symphonic concerts in a very long time", a statement in which pomposity jostles with hyperbole for the upper hand.
Kettle likes music a lot, but he is the chief leader writer, not an arts critic, and his musical qualifications are, so far as I know, approximately zero.
On the whole people should stick to their field of expertise. I have no current plans to pass judgement on the efforts of participants in the Tour de France, even though forty years ago I passed my cycling proficiency test.
