However, I found the Elgar concerto recording made by W.H. Squire in 1930 very interesting. In Harrison’s performance (1928) an often use of audible shiftings disappear. On the contrary,Squire uses really a lot of portamenti throughout the piece. The reason could be that Squire was 59 years old in that moment, while Harrison was 36 years old. This might suggest that the older generation was still using more portamenti, while it was simultaneously disappearing in younger generations.
My conclusions after this process of analyzing these early recordings were the following. First, I realized that portamento didn’t stop being an important expressive tool, it was just used less and less audibly as time went on. This means that portamento was a representative tool of the period but we can find differences of his use over time through these early recordings. On the other hand, vibrato use doesn’t show a clear change over the time span of the early recordings studied, probably because it merely was part of the individual voice of every cellist. However, the clearest change over that time span can be found in flexibility of tempo. There are some recordings that really show the romantic habits that have been previously mentioned. Hollman and Bokor are great examples of the use of tempo rubato. At points of high tension they speed up the tempo and get louder. On the other hand, they slow down during lyrical passages. Additionally, the use of tempo rubato generally relates to the use of portamento and vibrato on these recordings
Second, I also realized that early recordings might show that a more modernist kind of stylistic awareness existed in the 19th century, because I found differences of approach in some recordings which I associate with the composer of the piece in question. A good example is the Haydn D major Concerto recording by Guilhermina Suggia, where she uses light and more vocal portamenti, which are in the service of the musical context as we understand it today. Similarly, vibrato is less used in the Kol Nidrei recording and only on important notes.However, there is still so much evidence of players performing for instance, Bach, with heavy portamento and vibrato like Klengel’s recording.
Lastly, throughout these early recordings I observed gaps with the textual evidence because, as can be expected, every cellist had their own way of giving expression to the music through portamento, vibrato, tempo flexibility and articulation. That’s why I believe that sources shouldn’t be read from a dogmatic point of view. Early recording evidence shows that neither right, nor wrong, exist. As Neal Peres Da Costa observes:
The comparison between written texts and early recordings often produced striking contradictions. Many texts fail to discuss the practices in question, or provide only cursory remarks about them. And where more detailed descriptions exist, they do not convey many significant features that can be heard on the recordings. (Peres Da Costa, 2001:430)
Nevertheless, taking into consideration changes in the instruments used, such as endpin incorporation, I posed a new question: how may this impact the use of these expressive devices? It is obvious that the endpin changed the vertical position of the cello, however I suspect that early endpins were so short that perhaps the introduction of this device wasn’t a determining factor in the eradication of certain romantic expressive devices.
Beatrice Harrison playing Cello concerto by Elgar with NSO and Elgar conducting. Studio recording, London, 23.III & 13.VI.1928