Klarinet Archive - Posting 000154.txt from 2002/02

From: Daniel Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Grace notes, slow movement, K. 622
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 10:16:12 -0500

I was all done with my comments until I read Tony Pay's insightful
remarks about "consistency." It is an absolutely valid point and one
worth examination.

When I edited the wind serenades for the NMA, I noticed that Mozart
would phrase or articulate otherwise identical passages in two or more
completely different ways. And so my initial reaction was to make
everything uniform; i.e., if you slur that theme at location A, you damn
well better not articulate it differently at location B.

So my thought was that Mozart was indifferent to these important issues
and he needed me to straighten him out. Ah the stupidities of youthful
editors! I even wrote an article about how dumb I was on this issue and
it is somewhere in the Clarinet magazine of about 20 or more years ago.

The bottom line is that his constant reworking of the articulation and
phrasing of certain melodic passages seems to be deliberate, not one of
indifference. And the editor who straightens out all these differences
is not doing Mozart any favors whatsoever. In fact, he is diminishing
his creativity by putting all phrases into one shape when, in fact, they
may take on many shapes.

The whole subject brought me to a crisis of identity because I realized
that I had been made into an automaton by the Romantic era which DID
believe in uniformity of phrasing from presentation to presentation.
And this very idea even continues to this day where performers work very
hard to make every performance a perfect copy of its predecessor.

I played on a concert where Radu Lupu did K. 467 three times over three
nights. Now Lupu is a classy player. And after the first performance
(which I could listen to because there are no clarinets in that work), I
went mad over how wonderfully he played. But the next night, he did the
work EXACTLY the same way, as he did on the third night. Then I went
and bought his recording of the work and it was a cookie cutter copy of
what I had heard the previous three nights.

That was some learning experience of what not to do!!
--
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** Dan Leeson **
** leeson0@-----.net **
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