Klarinet Archive - Posting 000588.txt from 1998/07

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Mark Bradley and the Mozart concerto
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 11:44:26 -0400

Despite my affection for the work, I suggest you select another piece.
There are political and psychological considerations that vitiate against
it. Let me give you a few.

Your audience of judges will have heard hundreds of people playing the work
as their audition pieces (over a number of years). Thus, they have exhausted
ears. I once judged a competition in which 20 people played the Weber
concertino and after the first five, I was deaf to anything the player did.
If you look as the statistics of such events you will find that most of
the winners of such competitions are within the first 5-10 players. People
playing late find it difficult to impress the judges.

Second, the judges have their own preconception about how that piece goes
and some of them may hold the opinion that whatever differs from their
perspective of the piece is deficient. It is a sad commentary, but, in my
opinion, true. So if you attempt to be imaginative with ornamentation
or articulation, you can be perceived as a smarty pants rather than a serious
student. In effect, some of the judges will not have grown with that piece,
but remain stunted in their perspective of it from the 1950s or even earlier.

Third, there are no reliable editions because there is no autograph on which
to base a reliable edition. Thus every edition has not what Mozart wrote,
but what they editor likes to play when s/he plays it.

On this piece everyone is an expert. But in fact, hardly anyone you play
for has the slightest idea of how the piece goes.

All of this puts you at a serious disadvantage.

A fourth consideration is that the Bellison edition is for B-flat clarinet.
And if I were judging anyone's play of the work, I would be very harsh if
they played it in the wrong key, which is what you must to in the Bellison
edition. It winds up in concert B-flat instead of concert A.

The Bellison edition has another disadvantage. It is phrased in a very
romantic fashion with long slurs. Now maybe Mozart wrote it that way,
but we shall never know and it is highly unlikely that he did. Bellison
liked it that way so he edited it that way.

This gives rise to a completely different subject that we really must
discuss someday. What does an editor of a work do? Does s/he create
the work as the composer wrote it or does s/he created the work as
s/he thinks the composer really meant, whatever that is.

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Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
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