Bach Double Violin Concerto - mechanical (acoustic) recording - Finale with cadenza

Following on from their modern-technology recording of the Bach ‘Double’ violin concerto in a late nineteenth-century style and including Hellmesberger’s cadenza, David Milsom and Maria Nikolaeva recorded the finale by the mechanical/acoustic process, joined this time by David’s wife, Ruth Milsom, at the piano.

David began to make mechanical recordings in 2020, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, and resumed this activity in 2021, with international early recordings authority, Dr Inja Stanovic. Milsom and Stanovic recorded an album of solo violin, solo piano, and violin and piano items on their pathfinding album, ‘Austro-German Revivals’ (PR02), published by David’s University of Huddersfield-based recording label, Pennine Records, in 2022 (https://unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/30/).

Making new mechanical recordings has become an established and important part of academic performance research. A very large amount of scholarship is based on the study of historical recordings. The main attraction for researchers lies in the styles and practices of historically important – and distant – figures, such as Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). This work has contributed greatly to David’s academic expertise and is important to many of his most well-known publications, including his Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin Performance (Ashgate, 2003), and more recently his Romantic Violin Performing Practices – A Handbook (Boydell, 2020). But the limited time span, frequency response, and in general terms the audibility of the aural data of recordings made before the adoption of the electric microphone (1925) especially, have cast doubts on the extent to which such recordings can be used seriously as tools of study; or, at the least, they need carefully putting into context to be understood.

The opportunity for living players to experience using this technology, and to find out for themselves and be able to document exactly what adaptations are needed to make a successful recording is of obvious significance; the relationship (correlation or difference) between concert-hall playing and studio recording playing is particularly enlightening. Further, players such as David – who pioneered attempts to emulate historical performing styles of players such as Joseph Joachim and Arnold Rosé – are able to test their emulations by comparing their own acoustic recordings with the ‘originals’ made under similar conditions.

This project, therefore, put David’s student Maria at the forefront of performance research as, very probably, the youngest player to make a mechanical recording for a century. With David’s expert advice and in collaboration, Maria and David made cuts to the movement so that a truncated version would fit two 10-inch ‘sides’, as required by the apparatus at Duncan Miller’s studio (happily, also in Sheffield – no insignificant matter, as the number of acoustic recording engineers worldwide can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Miller is of international renown). In the session, as the photographs show, David and Maria had to maintain positions extremely close to the recording horns. Playing needed to be consistently very robust and clear, and Maria was at a disadvantage in this respect, given that her horn also had to capture the sound of an upright piano played both loudly and clearly by Ruth (with its outer panels removed, as was the practice a century and more ago in these conditions). Further, all three players had to rely upon instinct and their natural ensemble affinity, as they had to perform without the usual visual contact – violinists unable to face each other, and back-to-back with the pianist!

They opted to record the cadenza complete, which makes for striking and direct comparison with the electric recording made nearly six months earlier. This process allows for no editing whatsoever, making the results even more of an achievement. The project will be the subject of academic study via the Early Recordings Association. 78rpm discs of the project have been made, enabling the recordings to be heard on equipment for which they were designed.

A future project is planned to make a mechanical string quartet recording (about which no technical particulars survive), in a quartet led by Maria, involving WRE members David Milsom, Charlotte Kenyon, and performer-scholar cellist Dr George Kennaway, who also has prior experience in mechanical recording experiments.