Klarinet Archive - Posting 000815.txt from 2000/10

From: Oliver Seely <oliver@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Mozart and clarinet range -- an amateur's response.
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 15:38:57 -0400

At 11:47 AM 10/14/00 -0700, Dan wrote, in part:
>you have to be very careful, thoughtful, and knowledgeable
>to violate a lifelong practice of a composer. One cannot argue with
>that position.

While I can certainly appreciate a professional's need to be sensitive to
what an audience likes, and whether a particular interpretation will sell
CDs and certainly to try not to rile that life-form of retarded
evolutionary development, the critic, and moreover, not only do I agree
with Dan's last statement above, that not only will I not argue with it, I
will simply ignore it, because I have no need to worry about what critics
think of my interpretations, nor whether I shall sell any of my CDs or what
my audience likes. If I like my interpretation, if it pleases me to play a
work in any way I wish to play it, if it sounds good to me then so be it.
I shall continue not to worry about whether Mozart would have done it that
way, whether Dan would approve or whether anyone in the "tut-tut-tut" crowd
would say, "That's not the way it's supposed to be played, Oliver."

When I recently made a home-grown CD of the Kegelstatt trio by Ollie and
selected members of his Sili(con) Symphony (who else?) I assigned a
honky-tonk piano to the piano track. A clarinetist in band listened to it
and offered that we could get together later so that she could tell me what
to do in the future to make it "sound better." Imagine her surprise when I
told her that the interpretation was based on a performance one memorable
evening in a Gold Rush saloon along Highway 49 and that it made only good
horse sense to try to recapture the mood of the evening. I just about fell
off my horse laughing.

8-)

Oliver

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