Klarinet Archive - Posting 000223.txt from 1999/11

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Re: Mozart as an audition piece
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1999 12:40:12 -0500

On Sat, 6 Nov 1999 10:30:29 -0600 (CST), el2@-----.edu said:

[snip]

> 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.

Well, I don't want to beat this to death, and perhaps all our points
have already been made, but my main sticking point isn't really the
above.

My *main* sticking point is that what I want an orchestral player to do,
and arguably what I want a *player* to do, is to play what's written.

That's not to say that there aren't other sorts of things that they need
to do prior to that, like make the music live (rhyming with 'give'), pay
attention to what else is going on, and so on. But fundamentally you
don't want the sort of player who can't appreciate the notation, and who
thinks that what's there is some sort of 'clue' as to how they might
*change* it.

The trouble with the Mozart is that you can't reliably assess from their
performance whether or not they can do that -- unless you can, of
course, and in the case of a player like that, it doesn't matter very
much what they play.

I totally agree with you about obscure works, and avant-garde works, by
the way.

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

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