Klarinet Archive - Posting 000222.txt from 1999/11

From: "Edwin V. Lacy" <el2@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Re: Mozart as an audition piece
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1999 11:30:29 -0500

On Fri, 5 Nov 1999, Tony Pay wrote:

> > [.......] But, our reasons for choosing Mozart include the
> > fact that listening to how a player handles various aspects of the
> > music of Mozart, one can make an excellent assessment of many of the
> > player's attributes - how rhythmic they are, their tone quality and
> > intonation, how refined their technique is, etc.
>
> But surely you must agree that there are other pieces that would allow
> you to do this.

Yes, certainly there are. For example, to see how well the player's
technique is developed, one could ask for any one of the Weber peices.
To assess tone quality and musicality, the Brahms sonatas would serve
well, as would the Schumann Fantasy Pieces. The list could go on. But
still, for my purposes, there is nothing better than Mozart to demonstrate
a broad range of aspects of a player's skills and abilities.

As I have tried to understand your position on this, it seems that perhaps
one of your main sticking points regarding the Mozart is that there are
many ideas about how to interpret it, how to address such questions as
ornamentation, improvisation, articulation patterns, etc. In response, I
would say that for our purposes, none of those questions are the central
issue. One could pay a lot of attention to a given performance and
possibly make decisions or at least educated guesses about which edition
the player is using, and perhaps even who the auditioner's teacher might
have been or what school of thought has influenced the interpretation. To
me, while all that is very important in a recital or public performance,
in an audition, those issues are not particularly germane.

Certainly, I want to emphasize that we don't try to base our entire
decision about the player's suitability for an orchestral or teaching
position solely on the basis of the performance of one piece of music.
Still, this one piece can go a long way toward "separating the wheat from
the chaff."

Quite a few years ago, before we adopted the practice of specifying
Mozart, I remember on several occasions listening to auditions by players
who would choose some avant garde work, or something quite obscure, and
being perplexed about how to evaluate that person's abilities. I always
feel more assured about making that difficult and important decision after
hearing how the person deals with Mozart.

Ed Lacy
el2@-----.edu

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