Cliff Crego's blog, whitebark—
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10/12/13
o2o….’OLIVIE-OIL’ VIBRATO . . .
Filed under: General
Posted by: @ 12:31 pm

♫ COPLAND #Violin Son. (’68) w/ Isaac Stern
http://bit.ly/1gzNIXj A masterpiece of DIALOGUE,
performed w/ ugly Julliard ‘olive-oil’
vibrato

[NOTE: I’m just being overly critical, but only kind of: Stern
was a master, and a great mensch. But that’s not the point.
It’s about defending natural living sound, like one defends
natural living water. So, what I call O2V aka ‘olive-oil’ vibrato
is an incessant mechanical wobbling of the pitch or frequency
of a sound, in which the performer puts the same sauce on
all dishes. Even great talents like Hilary Hahn for some
unknown reason let their sound be corrupted w/ o2v…
Personally, it drives me straight out of any room, especially
when they are playing OLD (Bach) or NEW MUSIC (Stravinsky).
Every thing in between, they are far as I’m concerned free
to wobble away — call the WOBBLERS as a species — to
their heart’s content, because I don’t listen to this
imbalanced musical disaster of a period from 1750-1910
anyway. (Oh may Muses of Minor forgive Mozart for all his
ballroom prancing white-horses excess….) For me, natural
vocal sound always begins w/o vibrato; all else is nuance,
is inflection. The Baroque people get this. But then, they
only play OLD music anyway, so they’ve opted ipso facto
to be not relevant at all in the contemporary sense. But
more on that kind of imbalance of natural sound perhaps
another time….]

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