Oh dear, but he's an irritating chap and some of his nonsense does fairly scream out of the page. He points out that orchestral playing and solo playing require different approaches and then attempts to extrapolate conclusions regarding orchestral sound from a perusal of the Enescu Third Sonata, his excuse being the folk-derived idiom of the sonata and 'the simple reason that the folk tradition was far closer to the way that string players behaved in centuries past than it is today'.
He takes the Baroque notion of vibrato as an ornament and then says that since Baroque musicians trilled everywhere they must have vibrated everywhere too as what they apparently went in for was 'strikingly dense agglomerations of musical clutter... “Good taste” has not been synonymous with “less” at all times in human history, and we can be sure that if vibrato was indeed considered an ornament in baroque music, it was used to the hilt'.
And most annoyingly of all, at every turn he reminds us that he's not a scholar. As if one mightn't have noticed already. Which means that time and time again he quotes something from a treatise implying vibrato might have been a sparingly-applied thing and 'rebuts' it with something like 'The artistic ideals of a select few, or the theory on paper, are seldom the reality of the working many. Flesch’s recollections are in fact a less-than-precise mish-mash of “how much” (Joachim, Thomson, Sarasate) and “how often” (Kreisler, Ysaye).'
He pretends to be finding evidence in the scores and yet ploughs on through Brahms and others with nothing more than their use of espressivo markings and his own equation of expression with vibrato as an argument. His first composer who mentions the word 'vibrato' is Liszt. But not in his orchestral pieces... in the
piano music! Ah, but that's soon twisted round to his side of the ledger: 'when it comes to the orchestra, no additional urging is necessary because the timbre is already present'.
This intriguing albeit speculative theory adds further fuel to the notion that as the 19th
century went on, and composers marked their scores with increasing specificity,
orchestras naturally adapted to their demands by making some type of “continuous
vibrato” a sort of timbral “blank canvas.” There were simply many more passages that
required espressivo phrasing than there were moments that did not. The scores cited
above couldn’t be plainer in this regard. At this point in musical history it hardly mattered
if vibrato was or was not self-consciously “continuous;” the audible result as far as the
orchestra was concerned, if the composer’s directions were followed, would be much the
same either way.
Hang on, then. Doesn't that mean that when Sibelius or Elgar or Strauss or Wagner actually
request vibrato it's the exception proving that the rule is that you don't use it all the time? No. Of course not. That would only be the case in a world where logic prevailed and thus has no place in Hurwitz's universe.
It's all just one big question-begging session. If you assume expression and tonal beauty equate to vibrato then of course you won't have any problem finding a call for vibrato everywhere you look. It's that very assumption that's, sorry, unhistorical and unimaginative. Time I did something more useful.
