ABSTRACT
Musicians who wish to take an historically-informed approach to performing music often find themselves without access to a suitable room for tracking, and in the absence of acoustically appropriate historic spaces, large churches have become favored venues for recording early music. This chapter focuses on the approach a group of recordists took not only to achieving a period-style interpretation of an early eighteenth-century cantata but also to locating that performance in an acoustic designed to give listeners the impression that they are sitting in the same small room as the performers. A discussion of the historic principles of interpretation used on a recording of Tomaso Albinoni’s “Amor, sorte, destino” by Studio Rhetorica precedes a consideration of the modern studio practices that were used to enhance the period interpretation of the music, particularly micing techniques, EQ and compression, and the creation of a reverberant environment that would simulate the small rooms in which the music was frequently performed in Albinoni’s time.
