Alex Ross on cadenzas

"The art of embellishment — improvising cadenzas, adding ornaments, taking other opportunities for creativity in performance — is a hot topic in classical music these days. For generations, conservatories preached absolute fidelity to the score: do what the composer wrote and nothing more. The problem is that the scores of prior eras can leave quite a bit to the performer’s imagination, and the earlier the piece the sparser the notation. Modern musicians specializing in the Renaissance and the Baroque have led the way in looking beyond the printed page: the great viol player Jordi Savall improvises heavily in his appearances with Hespèrion XXI, and Richard Egarr, in a new recording of Handel’s organ concertos, responds imaginatively to passages marked 'ad libitum.' … [Robert] Levin, the Harvard-based musician who for decades has been the chief guru of classical improvisation, believes that performances need to cultivate risk and surprise. Otherwise, he says, music becomes 'gymnastics with the affectation of emotional content' — a phrase that sums up uncomfortably large tracts of modern music-making" ("Musical Events," New Yorker, 8/31/09).