In a recent lecture to the Royal Philharmonic Society, Nicholas Kenyon, BBC Proms director, said there was "no worthwhile, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating and musically adventurous performance going on today that has not been touched by the period instrument movement".
Well! That's a sweeping statement. Given the power Kenyon wields on behalf of one of the world's most influential promoters of classical music, it deserves to be examined.
A longtime early music enthusiast, Kenyon was effectively dismissing the work of a whole raft of respected musicians, mostly from outside the Anglo-Saxon world, who do not bow to the altar of period style - among them Daniel Barenboim, Christian Thielemann, Valery Gergiev, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Colin Davis.
Kenyon went further. Citing the New York Philharmonic's appointment of Lorin Maazel as its next music director, he said orchestras that did not choose conductors versed in period style were "quickly back(ing) themselves into a musical siding".
On the surface, Kenyon was merely acknowledging the transformation of the period movement from fringe pressure group to leading arbiter of taste. It has reached the stage where period specialists such as John Eliot Gardiner now regularly conduct that most traditional of orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic. When Simon Rattle takes up his post at the Berlin Philharmonic next year, his first guest will be William Christie. In September, Roger Norrington will become the first conductor to apply period principles to Mahler - a composer as much of the 20th century as the 19th. The record industry, desperate for new "product", has been a pivotal player in this revolution.
Few of today's big music organisations refuse to acknowledge period style, even if they do not take it completely on board. Kenyon, however, raises it to the status of ideology. If a performance is period-informed, it must be on the road to musical truth. Anyone who does not conform is ipso facto out of touch, and the resulting performance cannot be "worthwhile".
Such ayatollah-like pronouncements mask all sorts of fallacies about how far the period movement can take us. Period specialists are the first to acknowledge there is no way we can delve into the minds of 18th- or 19th-century composers, or know the exact sounds they wanted or heard. We can question accumulated performance tradition, with its mistakes and accretions, and compare it to whatever documentary evidence remains of the composer's time. That is the principle at the heart of the period movement. From there onwards, it is pure conjecture on the interpreter's part.
This explains the growing diversity of period styles and, over the past decade or so, the progressive blurring of lines between period and modern performance practice. If there is no such thing as a "correct" way, everyone can claim a slice of the truth. That makes it all the more important to distinguish between performances that probe the core of the music, and those that command attention merely by addressing questions of style and technique.
Too often it is a case of the emperor's new clothes: reduce the strings, quicken the tempo, accentuate individual wind voices and hey presto! you have a period-informed performance. No one has the courage to say that many historically aware per-formances have no clothes: they're lifeless - or, in the case of Rattle's Fidelio this summer at Glyndebourne, horribly loud and myopic. They are like that because there is too much emphasis on surface style and not enough on what the music is actually saying.
The period movement has elevated interpreters who would not stand a chance of advancement if it weren't for their association with stylistic novelty. I have heard just as much boring Haydn from Christopher Hogwood, tight-bottomed Rameau from Nicholas McGegan and sloppy Gluck from Jean-Claude Malgoire, as Kenyon claims to have heard "creamy" Mozart from Bohm and Levine.
As for his excoriation of "second-hand Beethoven", there has been nothing more second-hand in the past year than Claudio Abbado's attempt to graft period awareness on to the Berlin Philharmonic. The fact that their Beethoven did not sound "muddy" or "bombastic" has not given it an alternative validity to Karajan's performances (which were neither muddy nor bombastic). All it did was try to superimpose today's fashion on yesterday's tradition.
I am sick of reading, as I did after the Rattle Fidelio, that this or that original instrument performance "stripped away ... centuries of grime". The only achievement of such performances is to substitute one supposition and one stylistic orthodoxy for another. That is why the word "authenticity" is meaningless. There was no conductor in Handel or Mozart's time. Almost all of the music they played was written by their contemporaries. Halls, technical standards, cultural perceptions were totally different. As Nikolaus Harnoncourt says, "the only authentic performance of a work is the performance of the composer himself, and it has nothing to do with instruments".
The period movement is a re-action to the walls of sound developed by western musical tradition from around the 1920s. That sound, covering everything from Bach to Brahms, corresponded to the bigger view of our universe promoted by intellectual movements of the early 20th century. It became standard because a big sound is impressive - louder, more ample, better blended - and it attracts more attention than a squeaky little utterance. Furtwangler favoured it; so did Stokowski, whose only justification for using plush strings in Bach was "I like it". Karajan's Berlin sound, enhanced by mid-20th century advances in electronic reproduction, brought that school to its ultimate conclusion. It became almost too beautiful, too grandiose - earning associations with megalomania on one hand, Disney on the other.
To claim we are going back to what the composer wrote is merely to go to a different extreme. It is a change of fashion, nothing more - from the cult of sound to the cult of style. Most of the music produced in the 18th and 19th centuries was played in an expedient way, depending on the resources available. It was not an ideal in the composer's mind. It was what they had, and the composers themselves were probably dissatisfied with it. Otherwise, they would not have spearheaded the improvement of instruments and developed new sounds - dissatisfaction being the engine of progress.
A musical score is merely a point of departure. Its success in performance depends on the conviction of the interpreter, on why he or she is playing it, rather than on adherence to a style. The criteria for interpreting classical music are strenuous enough, in terms of rhythm, harmony and structure, without laying down further restrictions on the type and number of instruments. Great performers want to break barriers, not set them. That is what motivated composers in the first place.
It is not surprising that Kenyon, Rattle and other ideologues of the period approach - most of them Englishmen of the postwar generation - should deny the central importance of the 19th-century Austro-German musical legacy: this is the very repertory where they have least to say. When you limit music to calculable means - metronome marks and the type and number of instruments - you limit its suggestive power. What this music needs in performance is flexibility, subtlety, introspection - the opposite of the brusque personality of a Gardiner, reared in the baroque, or the hyper-active conducting style of a Rattle, reared in Mahler and the 20th century.
For the greatest interpreters, the dominant concern is neither a modern nor period orchestra. What interests them is "the way". It is a mystic thing - the way one finds to oneself and to the world. It means searching and sometimes finding. It is an attempt to make a personal discovery, to get as close as possible to the music and to bring that experience to the listener
- without being prejudicial about other ways. Harnoncourt has never let stylistic awareness limit his vision of the music. Neither has Charles Mackerras.
Kenyon cites Bernard Haitink's "electrifying" Beethoven Seven at last year's Proms as "an absolute model of what an up-to-date modern Beethoven performance could be, a performance that had absorbed some of the best insights of the period instrument movement while remaining resolutely crafted out of the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic". What strange logic! The "electrifying" quality had nothing to do with any imagined period insights and everything to do with the fact that Haitink is a damn good Beethoven interpreter, and was able on this occasion to unlock a visceral quality in the Berliners' playing.
The fads and fashions of the period movement say more about our own period than about any other - about our technological preoccupation with "fidelity" as the key to musical truth, about the loss of direction in western musical tradition and the consequent need to cannibalise and reconstitute the past. From my own observation, there are plenty of worthwhile, thoughtful, intellectually stimulating and musically adventurous performances going on today that have nothing to do with the period instrument movement. Long may they continue to inspire us.