With all of the options that today’s orchestras have, what is it that makes Historically Informed Performances so special?

Musical instruments have been evolving since they first appeared as part of civilization. Makers are forever seeking to improve the ways in which instruments are played, and this is as true nowadays for electronic as for acoustic instruments. Musicologists have revealed through research that if a musician uses an instrument from the period in which the music was written, or a copy of that instrument – for example a wooden flute from the time of Mozart – the resultant sound is very different from that of a modern flute made within the last 50 years. 

This is true for wind and brass, and also for strings, though in a very different way. Stringed instruments exist in two discrete parts: a sound producing source – the bow – and a source from which the sound is produced: a resonant wooden box.

The same is true for keyboards. Music written by Schubert, played on instruments he knew, reveals an enormous amount of information about timbre, melodic and rhythmic flow, and key changes. A modern piano, with all its refinements, tends to...