MUSIC : Fiddling Around With Antiquated Instruments

The debate over playing music on original instruments was called a “hot issue” recently by the director of a Baroque music festival, in whose field the practice is proliferating.

Actually, the period-instrument movement has reached well beyond the Baroque era. You can now find orchestras--and recordings--that specialize in the music of Beethoven and even Berlioz played on instruments of those composers’ day.

Can Brahms and Wagner be far behind? Should they be?

Ami Porat, founding music director of the Mozart Camerata, does not think so.

“There were many physical handicaps in so-called original instruments, and using them results in too many artistic compromises,” Porat said in a recent phone interview. (Porat will conduct works of Mozart and Beethoven, among other composers, Saturday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach.)

The main problem with original instruments, Porat said, is “practicality.”

“Take the strings. So-called original instruments--meaning they’re set up and adjusted as they were 200 years ago--are at a great disadvantage in modern performance.

“The (Baroque) violin has gut strings, it has a low bridge, the angle of the neck is also lower. The bow is a different kind of bow, and it’s held way higher than the modern position. These violins didn’t have the range (of modern instruments) in the high register.”

Period winds and brass--natural horns and trumpets--likewise lacked “enough notes.”

Porat said good musicians rewrite notes in “every single Beethoven symphony,” to compensate for the limits of instruments from the composer’s day.

(According to Porat, conductor Felix Weingartner wrote a book on Beethoven’s symphonies, pointing out these “handicaps and their respective remedies.”)

Once valves were developed for the French horn, a single instrument could play in virtually any key, “whereas before,” Porat said, “the musician had to switch horns many times during a piece as the tonality demanded. Life was much harder.

“These are all handicaps that were properly discarded with the modernization of the instruments over time,” he added. “There is a very good reason why steel strings were installed. They produce a bigger sound and richer colors. Gut strings produce a much more limited palette of colors.”

Porat exempts such instrument-makers as Antonio Stradivari and his sons, however (although such instruments usually were later modified to accommodate steel strings).

“It is amazing,” he said, “that Stradivari, who was dealing with a tremendous amount of handicaps, would have built an instrument powerful enough to soar above an 80-piece Romantic orchestra.”

In addition, “pieces have to be played faster than normal to compensate for not having enough reverberation, not enough sound,” he said.

Of course, some might say that Porat ventures his own musical “heresies,” such as performing Romantic composer Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, or the Beethoven symphony on Saturday’s program, with his chamber-size orchestra. But he defends that practice on the ground of “balance between forces.”

“One must remember that the symphony orchestra of the 18th Century was the size that fit into an opera house pit, right around 40 players,” he said.

“Clarity of texture, transparency--those are superbly difficult points to attain. . . . With 30 strings, you can obtain a clarity of texture not possible with a greater number.”

As for resorting to the natural horns and trumpets and other period practices, Porat finds it “only interesting from a historical point of view.

“To me, this is a fad: ‘How can we create a new way of playing great masterpieces that will be marketable?’ which is where this idea seems to have come from, as far as I’m concerned.”

Ami Porat will conduct the Mozart Camerata in music of Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini and Henry Eccles at 8 p.m. on Saturday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 600 St. Andrews Road, in Newport Beach. Double bass Gary Karr will be the soloist. Tickets: $18. Information: (714) 252-8808.