Our performance of the St Matthew Passion<\/i> was at ‘baroque pitch’ i.e. a semitone low. I found this hard to get used to, and have been trying to work out why, given that in 2012 and 2013 I performed Messiah<\/i> at baroque pitch without being at all bothered. Apart from that almost everything I’ve sung recently has been at A=440.<\/p>\n
Is it that I am more familiar with the Messiah<\/i>, use the score less (and in performance not at all), so there is no ‘travel sickness’ from seeing notes that aren’t the ones I’m singing? Was it because that I learned the Passion a few years ago in a very physically engaged way, and so there is a physical memory of what the notes feel like? Is it because I’ve done more performances of the Handel at baroque pitch (although I struggle to think which of the 20-odd I’ve sung these would have been)? Or has my sense of pitch got keener in the last couple of years (there’s some evidence for this)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our performance of the St Matthew Passion was at ‘baroque pitch’ i.e. a semitone low. I found this hard to get used to, and have been trying to work out why, given that in 2012 and 2013 I performed Messiah … Continue reading