Audiences gain new emotional access when ensembles use the instruments for which older scores were written. Two Proms this week will demonstrate how gut strings, natural horns and harpsichords do more than mimic the past; they change how works by Bach, Beethoven and others register in the present.
Arguments about vinyl and cassette nostalgia trade on a desire for imperfection, yet those media are objectively inferior carriers of sonic information. By contrast, the revival of historical instruments in classical music has long been driven by research into how earlier technologies and performance practices produced different expressive possibilities. Musicians and scholars from David Munrow in the 1970s to Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Nikolaus Harnoncourt turned that scholarship into public performance, expanding what chamber groups and symphony orchestras could offer listeners.
The physical differences matter. A harpsichord’s plucked sound dies away quickly in a way a modern grand piano’s sustaining strings do not. Older brass required mechanical adjustments to change key, and gut strings and period reeds present tuning and timbral behaviours modern instruments do not. Those constraints and colours compel different choices by performers: tempi, articulation, ensemble size and the use of vibrato all shift, and with them the dramatic thrust of the music.
Compare two recordings of the opening chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion to see the effect. A 1979 performance led by Karl Richter, with large Munich forces, presents the work as a monumental, immovable structure. A 2003 reading by Paul McCreesh with the Gabrieli Consort, performed at almost twice the speed and with one singer on each part, becomes immediate and intimate, an appeal to individual empathy rather than architectural grandeur. Those are not two versions of the same surface; they are two distinct experiences of meaning.
That distinction is why period performance is not mere retro affectation. As the pianist Vikingur Ólafsson has noted, the point is not to recreate exactly what composers heard in their lifetimes. Our ears and listening habits have changed. The value of historical instruments lies in the new, contemporary feelings they unlock, not in literal time travel. The forthcoming Proms performances will make that case directly, showing how older sonorities can sit squarely in modern artistic life rather than beside it as nostalgic curiosities.
Expect the conversation to continue as critics and audiences decide whether these historical soundworlds illuminate or simply alter familiar repertoire. For now, the musical payoff is practical: different instruments invite different performances, and different performances change what listeners hear and feel.
