Again about Mozart in C minor: Ever since my son has taken up natural horn I have been deeply aware of the impact of that instrument on the sound of specific tonalities. In last night's concerto performance he was playing one of the two horn parts and I paid almost as much attention to those parts as to the piano--perhaps even more, I confess.
The concerto is in C minor, the horns in E-flat--the natural horns, that is, the instruments he heard in making the orchestration. E-flat, the powerful fundamental of the horn in that key, is not the tonic tone. A pianist hearing that power coming not from the tonic would have a different "take" on the piece, inevitably, it seems to me.
In the rush to get all tones and all tonalities to be uniform modern instrument design has made certain things completely incomprehensible, except to the curious artist willing to confess to problems that usually go unidentified because they manifest as malaise and we are trained to pay no attention to any form of discomfort.
I cannot help but wonder how different the pianist's interpretation would have been if she had heard this imbalance, which is all too smoothly disguised with modern instruments.
