Hello Again Brahms...

Hello again,
 It's been a while since we last posted - in the interim there've been all sorts of discussions about social media and length & types of posts. We reckon 140 characters has it's place, and so does targeted posting & viewing, but for good old fashioned detail & depth, you can't go past a blog. So here we are again.
You can catch up with what we've been up to 2012-2014 on Twitter here: @IronwoodEns
and on Facebook here: Ironwood

We are right at the end of 2014's season, and our public concerts finished with a blast of a season working with The Song Company on JS Bach's B Minor Mass. But we are not quite done yet - one of the most detailed projects of the last 3-4 years has been developing our work in nineteenth century history performance, specifically the 'german school' surrounding Brahms, Joachim, Clara Schumann, Fanny Davies and others. We still have half a recording to do before Christmas - Brahm's rather monumental G Minor Piano Quartet, which we are recording with Neal Peres Da Costa's brand newly made copy of Brahms own favourite Streicher piano of 1868. The copy was made by Paul McNulty - and you can see more of it in construction here Flickr McNultyMusic

With this project Ironwood has completed two highly successful tours of the USA (2012&2014) - where Stanford University Archive of Recorded Sound acclaimed us as 'world leaders in nineteenth century performance practice' - and where we had the opportunity to play in the Yale Collection of Instruments with yet another 1860's Erard; in upstate New York for Pegasus Early Music Series where Malcolm Bilson very kindly lent his 1830's Simon piano (incredibly informative as to how Brahms as a young man may have heard his piano playing); in Colorado working with the students at UC, Boulder, and previously in New York for the American Brahms Society's 2012 conference.

 We've also played in Musica Viva Australia's Chamber Music Festival & in the Melbourne Recital Centre - where lots of people remarked that they 'understood' Brahms for the first time, with our application of these re-discovered performance practices of tempo modification, rhythmic alteration, arpeggiation, dislocation of the bass from the treble, portamento, and a narrower more 'shimmery' vibrato. Really interesting to hear how people perceive this nineteenth century chamber music, and how these performance practices possibly allow it to be heard/received differently.

 So now we're going in to the studio at ABC Classics to record these works. Exciting, and somewhat daunting. It's one thing to try and recreate the sounds of Brahms & Joachim live on stage, and quite another to commit them to a permanent recording. At the Stanford conference "Reactions to the Record" , we were privy to all sorts of discussions about this period of music - amongst some of the first to be recorded by mechanical means on piano roll and on wax cylinder - being a three 'type' artefact - a performance, a recording & a score; all of them important for the research and reconstruction of performance practices. Different to the reconstruction of the 18th c - for which recording did not yet exist. Neal Peres Da Costa (our keyboard player)'s book "Off the Record" (OUP:NY:2012) deals with this if you'd like to read further; and Robin Wilson, our resident string expert on this period, will have his PhD thesis published at some point in the next few years (USYD, if anyone wants to request online). We're incredibly lucky to have these guys researching here in Australia, and even better applying it to performance and teaching.

 More reports on this recording as we go - next week..Time to go and sleep before another day of practice and admin... Nicole x