Klarinet Archive - Posting 000239.txt from 2000/08

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] My memory did not deceive me after all
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:26:51 -0400

I'll be changing residences in another week, moving in with my S.O. at a
house down on the Jersey Shore. And of course it was NOW that my ex
decided I HAD to have all my vinyl recordings back...stuff I began
accumulating from about 1956. Ahem.

Whatever the agenda at work, going through the bags has yielded some real
treasures I'd forgotten I owned: Landowska's complete 1958 recording of The
Well-Tempered Clavier, several Toscanini opera and orchestral
recordings...Weingartner conducting a glorious Pastorale with the NY
Philharmonic circa 1936...and the famous and oft-discussed Philadelphia
Orchestra "First Chair" recording on which Gigliotti plays the Weber
Concertino. For years I walked around with the memory of that being the
best recording of the piece I'd ever heard. I played it again tonight,
even though there are some incredibly scratchy spots and places where I had
to move the tone arm because it got stuck in a groove. For all that...I
was right. It IS the most incredible recording of the piece I've ever
heard. Of the two ("only TWO, Ken???) I own on CD, Neidich's is
technically brilliant and cold to the touch; Shifrin gets closer but
there's something I can't define that isn't there. Gigliotti had it all:
technique, and a passion for the music that still makes the hairs on my
arms stand up. I think the term is "fire in the belly."

Sure, the recording is shot: I got it in 1958 and I played it to death, it
was my introduction to what you can do with a clarinet. By the time it was
unlistenable (or almost), it was out of print. I recall people here
talking to Gigliotti at ICA gatherings about lobbying SONY to reissue the
two First Chair recordings (doesn't he play the Premiere Rhapsodie on the
second?); and I indeed wrote to SONY and asked in my most respectful manner
that they consider doing so. What I got back was exactly nothing, not even
an acknowledgement.

I realize the classical end of the music business is in big trouble in an
age that values megabucks above all else, and where A&R seems to be managed
by a bunch of guys who would be better-placed in some dot-com computer
startup. I don't know who else on Klarinet or in the ICA (I joined
recently myself) has knocked on SONY's doors about these legendary
performances (I mean, William Kinkaid? Marcel Tabeteau?), but perhaps there
is SOME way to exert influence on whatever powers exist...from within the
present orchestra management itself...from Gigliotti himself.... How does
one replace the irreplaceable?

Ken
----------------------------
Kenneth Wolman http://www.rio-cardoner.com
"...perhaps we really complete those we love, fulfill their finally
unchanging essence, when they're gone from us, when we take into ourselves
their portions of them still available to us, to acknowledge them more
perfectly, more purely, and do homage to the fugitive, protean forms of
love of, and love from."--C.K. Williams, "Misgivings"

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