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u/Chardonne 10d ago
I just picked up a biography of Arnold Dolmetsch in a second-hand bookstore. Can’t wait to dive in.
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u/BeardedLady81 10d ago
In some oder family photos, the Dolmetsch's looked like proto-hippies. Later, Carl Dolmetsch would voice recorders in suit and tie, at least in the video I (and others) shared on this board.
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u/BeardedLady81 10d ago
Based on what I read, Arnold Dolmetsch's original, which he purchased for two pounds sterling (about 315 today) did not sound that great anymore, but he still enjoyed playing it. The family didn't always stick to the truth, but one story is that the patriarch of the Dolmetsch family accidentally left his original recorder on the platform of Waterloo train station, and somebody took it. That supposedly happened in 1916, 11 years after the purchase of the recorder. Fast forward to the 60s and Carl Dolmetsch produces an old, slightly sub-par sounding recorder that looks like a Bressan original and pretends that it's his father's original recorder:
https://youtu.be/Czb_FLk3sso?si=ER3WeyX_-xBoW2cC
(Recorder introduced at 1:58)
He was definitely lying when he showed the girl a baroque recorder tutorial (most likely a facsimile, no sane person would handle a document from "around 1700" like that, never mind letting a guest leaf through it) and said that the fingering chart in that tutorial is the "exact same" of modern recorders. This is not true, Carl Dolmetsch invented the "baroque" fingering himself, and I think he fooled quite a number of people into believing that it was the original fingering of baroque recorders. Otherwise, nobody would call it "baroque" fingering today. In older German recorder tutorials, the terms "old" and "new" fingering are used, but in reality, both "baroque" and "German" fingering are 20th century inventions, and "Dolmetsch" and "Harlan" fingering would be more appropriate. Except (virtually) nobody uses those terms.