A “clean” and accurate score is a starting point, but it will present familiar questions for the player or singer preparing a performance.
These can be either directly related to the notation, such as those concerned with articulation, dynamics, ornamentation or temple and so on, or depend on an understanding of the music in its wider historical context.
Performance questions addressed through the latter can generate controversy, since they sometimes place the position of the composer as controlling agent through the score into question.
Sophie Mahar’s and Alberto Sanna’s article about preparing a performance of Alessandro Scarlatti’s St John Passion earlier this year addresses several issues of the second type, including how the liturgical purpose of the piece affects its performance as concert music and how the surviving parts suggest the numbers of performers involved in Scarlatti’s lifetime.
Their interpretive decisions, based on a continuing assessment of all available source materials, differs in several respects from those that were chosen by earlier editors and performers of the work.
(Andrew Wolley, 2019)