album release 1.16.26
In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Karl Goldmark’s landmark opera, The American Romantics present
The Queen of Sheba Suite, featuring new chamber orchestra arrangements of prominent ballets, choruses, and arias from the opera.
About Us
The American Romantics
The American Romantics are dedicated to the performance of Romantic-Era music through research into the performances practices of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For more information, click here.
The Conductor on Early Film: Coordinating Romantic-Era Expression
Video Presentation
Presented by AR Principal Conductor Kevin Sherwin, given at:
University of Oxford: Transforming C19 HIP (TCHIP) Conference
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Historical Performance Conference
The advent of the motion picture camera in the 1880s enabled the creation of films that revealed the musical interaction between romantic-era conductors and their orchestras. These video documents especially convey the gestural style that conductors relied on to enable particular stylistic elements of the period, such as tempo rubato, in a consistent and reliable manner.
This presentation will explore, discuss, analyze, and provide historical film samples that exhibit characteristics linked to nineteenth-century performance practices of Romantic-era repertoire. These early films of orchestral performance show conductors using distinctive gestural styles to lead orchestras with a decisively coordinated flexibility of tempo, intricate synchronization of agogic accents, and audible portamento. The highlighted conductors will include Leo Blech, Willem Mengelberg, Arthur Nikitsch, Dean Dixon, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Erich Kleiber. The featured orchestras will include the Royal Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Berlin State Opera Orchestra.
Furthermore, the presentation will discuss how such visual representations link to written accounts on orchestral performance practice of the late nineteenth century, including “On Conducting” by Richard Wagner and “Brahms in the Meiningen Tradition,” edited by Walter Blume, as well as more recent research on Romantic-era performance practice by scholars such as Robert Philip and Clive Brown. In this way, these examples of historical footage serve as distinctive resources that can contribute to the revitalization of orchestral aesthetics and performance practices during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.