Dave,
You wrote:
"I read your post above to my wife, Becky, and watched as she nodded in complete agreement with everything you said."
Becky is obviously a woman of superior intelligence and highly refined musical sensibilities and understanding. You are a lucky man.
Also:
"Ok, I've beaten metaphors to death, so I'll stop now :)"
Actually, I kinda dug that. I never thought of musical performance in terms of its similarity to misshapen produce---although I'll admit to having been in a few performances where I expected some to come flying at me at any moment!
My apologies for running your clearly focused thread down a tangential rabbit hole (how's that for mixing metaphors!), but I'd like to ask your opinion of something that I have wondered about for years:
When I was a kid putting together my collection of essential orchestral LPs, one of my first purchases was The Planets, a fairly new (at that time) recording by the LA Phil with Zubin Mehta, IIRC. SInce then, I have heard many renditions of this chestnut, but none quite like that LP. I realize now that they must have employed some of the production methods of Hollywood sound tracks, for which, again to the best of my recollection, they were roundly criticised. All I know is that every version I've heard since has left me a little flat. That agitated 16th-note thing in the violins and woodwinds while the brass and percussion are on a sustained note crescendoing to fff near the end of Mars...on this record you could by-God hear it; on every other version it's blurred in the first few bars and inaudible in the rest. That spot in Uranus where the whole orchestra honks out the 4-note theme in unison and then the low stuff comes thundering in...on my record there was abso-freaking-lutely NO DOUBT that a pipe organ had joined the party! Turn it up to 11 (as I was wont to do) and you could feel it in your guts. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.* Well, time went on and I learned the error of my ways. That over-the-top sweetening was gauche and inappropriate. The best orchestral recording is the most accurate one. The composer's original intention...etc, etc, blah, blah, blah. But I can't get over my immature thinking that my old record was the way The Planets was supposed to sound. I mean, what did the Chorale Symphony sound like to Beethoven? Do you think he heard hand horns (the axe of his day) playing every note out of the overtone series stopped or half-stopped? Or did he hear Epic Horns? Did he hear the spindly piano of his day playing the Emperor Concerto or did it sound in his head like a 9-foot Steinway? (Or something even more powerful?) What do you, as a composer, think?
Tom
*Disclaimer: Although this story is true to the best of my recollection, it may well be that every detail I have included is utter balderdash. This was a long time ago. It does, however, illustrate what I'm asking, whether it is a product of my addled brain or based in some way on reality. TC