Tempo Irritations

I spent some time listening to various recordings of King David this morning.  Not the entirety of the Oratorio, as it's an hour, but portions of it.  Many of the recordings take tempos that are not what Honegger marked.  Now, if a tempo is marked 100 and someone takes it at 106, fine.  When the tempo is marked 80 and the conductor takes it at 60- if they only do that once or twice, what do I care?  But when they take it 60 when it's marked 80, 96 when it's 72, 50 when it's marked 76... then it's as if they don't trust the composer's tempo markings.  And fine, conductors can do what they want.  But I disagree with many of the choices.  Maybe when I'm older and more experienced I will be less stodgy in my desire to follow what's written in the music.  To be honest, when I am older and more experienced I will probably have changed my mind about a lot of things, and especially in relation to conducting.  I will probably reread this entry and shake my head at how naive or unthoughtful I am being.  That's okay.  It's all a journey.

I was going to stay at Polly's until 11:30 today, but I think I'm going to go home and go for a run.  I may then conduct a little more.  And then I will think about the Brahms piece I am writing about in my thesis.  I am at the point where I want to start writing about the harmonic analysis of the piece.  I could do it now, but I'd like to spend more time listening to, singing through, and understanding the structure. I might even Schenkerian analyze it.  For some people, they think it's a waste of time.  For me, it gave me a structure in which to understand the whole of the piece at a macro level.  I couldn't do it so succinctly before.