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Traditional instrumentation question

Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2006-02-01 14:01

On the way into work this morning I heard a portion of Mendelssohn's Overture to Fingal's Cave (a.k.a. "The Hebrides"), on the one classical music station in Washington DC (contrary to Lelia Loban's report in an earlier thread, it hasn't shut down, it just changed frequency a few hundred kilohertz).

I didn't get to hear the credits so I don't know who was performing, but the performance was clearly a "period instruments" job, with strings, oboe and flutes playing 'senza vibrato' and the group overall sounding smaller in size.

What really irked me was that the tempos seemed too fast and the overall pitch level sounded too high --- as if they used the old Top-4- radio trick of spinning the turntable 5% faster to make the songs go quicker and the sound "brighter".

Then I got to wondering whether the orchestra was perhaps tuned to the old "high pitch" (HP) standard of A-455 or thereabouts. Any of you folks who have played 'period' performances, can you comment?

As an aside, I thought the performance sounded awful -- not because of the skill of the performers (which was clearly of a very high level), but because of all the aforementioned 'period performance' aspects. Like a high school orchestra on a caffeine buzz.

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