Klarinet Archive - Posting 001310.txt from 1999/01

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] The right notes
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 22:54:49 -0500

On Mon, 25 Jan 1999 08:39:21 -0600, kissingerjn@-----.EDU said:

> According to Chester (the publishers) they [Thea King and Georgina
> Dobree] put considerable effort into editing Poulenc's sonata for
> clarinet and piano, including examining the manuscript and early
> editions.

And Mark Charette said:

> Alessandro Carbonare has a few corrections to the published Sonata
> score listed at his Web site -
> http://perso.club-internet.fr/carbona/curiosINGOK.html

The truth about this is that the two versions -- namely, Thea King and
Georgina Dobree's version, on the one hand, and what appears on
Alessandro Carbonare's website, on the other -- are different.

You might think that what I had to say -- the amount of it, if nothing
else -- about Don Christensen's questioning whether it should be E or E#
in the Poulenc 2Sonata means that I would be very concerned about this
fact. But actually, I think it's worth being quite loose about the
variants in the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano.

The reason is that those differences are trivial, mostly to do with
which particular note in a chord you happen to wind up on. It's rather
like the way in which the qualities of eighteenth-century music can be
rather independent of the actual notes, so that a bit of embellishment
doesn't go amiss.

A change of one note to another that performs a different function might
make a big difference to a piece of music. I'd say that the E
natural/E# change in the 2Sonata is about half-way along the spectrum:
it makes a small but significant difference rather than a large one.
The difference is enough to make you think of, and play the passage a
bit differently if you change from one to the other, but not enough to
really alter the sense of the music. And neither of them is really
outside Poulenc's style.

What usually makes much more of a difference, though, is precisely an
understanding, as opposed to a misunderstanding, of the style. You can
phrase or bow an eighteenth-century tune -- say, the opening violin
melody of the first Allegro of Mozart's 39th Symphony -- in a number of
different, equally acceptable ways, and in fact Mozart writes this tune
phrased differently on its return. But this doesn't mean that Mozart
didn't care about how people phrased.

There is no inconsistency in playing something differently on its
return, or differently between different performances. That's after all
what ornamentation is all about, and we know they did that in the
eighteenth century. What would be wrong would be to play consistently,
but in a way that was contrary to the style, or to play a phrasing that
was the wrong *sort* of phrasing. And we should think about, and talk
about that a lot more, even if it's difficult to do it.

I'd say that when Alessandro says on his web page that the notes
published in later editions of Poulenc's printed parts -- those chosen
by Thea and Georgina to follow at least one of Poulenc's manuscripts --
are errors, or are *wrong*, then he's using a sense of the word 'wrong'
where, if you're wrong, it doesn't matter much. Poulenc may have
changed his mind a few times, thus generating the variants, but those
changes amounted to tweaks rather than major revisions. He was after
all a very ill man.

I tend to sigh when the subject comes up, and say, well, I think
Poulenc's original manuscript says this, but you play what you like.
(Make sure that you like what you play.) And, I further say, if you're
doing auditions for people you think might be silly about this sort of
thing, ask them first which version they'd like from you. (You wouldn't
believe how often this question comes up, or to what extent such fears
are sometimes justified. Or perhaps you would.)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

...... A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

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