Klarinet Archive - Posting 000154.txt from 2002/03

From: Daniel Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Stanford University Concert with Pay and Levin
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2002 12:05:29 -0500

Last evening at Stanford University, the Academy of Ancient Music played
an all Mozart program with Bob Levin doing the c minor piano concerto,
K. 491, an improvised fantasy based on themes from the audience, and the
concert rondo in D major, K. 382. The clarinet section had our
inimitable Tony Pay and Jane Booth.

It was a hell of an evening!!

For those who know the c minor concerto, the relationship between the
wind section and the solo piano is appreciated as a spectacular aspect
of Mozart's genius, and his use of clarinets in a variety of solo
passages is especially thrilling. Tony was improvising on his solo
passages as a left-hand/right-hand partner to Levin's improvisations.
It was quite an accomplishment on both their parts. To give you an idea
of just how much wind/piano dialogue there is in that work, the second
movement has only 4 measures of melody played by strings. The rest of
it is entirely winds -- often solo but also often in ensemble -- and
piano.

After the concert both Tony and Bob came to my house a for a coffee
klotch and I complimented Tony extensively on how beautifully he played.
He brought along his A basset clarinet which he will use today to play
K. 622 in Santa Barbara, and again in Palm Springs in a few days. Tony
also played on my new basset horn and was surprised at his reaction to a
modern instrument as contrasted with his very frequently used original
instrument basset horn.

Today the band moves on, though Levin is flying back to Boston for
lectures on jazz at Harvard.

As you are all aware, both Levin and I (and I think Tony, too) are
strong proponents of improvisation in music of this period. Levin was
asked for a brief comment in the program about the practice and this is
a short excerpt from what he wrote:

"Mozart's performances were designed to display his talents as
improviser, pianist, and composer (that is the order his contemporaries
assigned to his gifts). His piano concertos contain contrived chasms --
pauses he bridged with impulsive audacity -- the so-called cadenzas and
lead-ins. Further, Mozart left many passages in sketched or schematic
form, relying on the whims of live performance to fill in the specific
expressive content anew at each performance.

"In the 20th century, musicians have been trained to try piously to
observe the written testament of the composer. If the will of the
performer emerges, it is often through flamboyant disregard of those
instructions in order to use the composition as a mere vehicle for
self-aggrandizing display. Every performer and listener of classical
music has experienced the standard repertoire hundreds, even thousands,
of times more often than the composers who wrote these works, making it
ever harder to bring to them the daring of the work's initial effect.
The standardization of many of today's performances reflects all these
trends.

"Improvisation in Mozart's case requires an intensive character study of
the entire work from within, for a spontaneous elaboration of the
written text cannot be pasted onto the music surface. The
embellishments and improvised portions must heighten the portrayal of
the work's persona, not be a mere series of commonplace, banal
conventions (a trill here, a curlicue there. ... In light of [our
knowledge of Mozartean practices as deduced from evidence], it must be
said that many of today's performances contain passages executed in a
manner Mozart would have considered unacceptably incomplete."

[End of quote]

This is absolutely synonymous with comments I have made that suggest
that many performances and recordings of K. 622, even those made by
brilliant professionals, sound the same; i.e., you can unplug one great
soloist, plug in another and hardly notice the difference, so slavishly
has our attention been given solely to the text of the concerto and its
flawless execution, while almost none is given to the role of the
soloist as composer, being part and parcel of the creative process
through improvisatory playing. I suggest that, with few exception, we
hardly ever hear that work played in a spirit in which Mozart and his
contemporaries would have been comfortable. They might be dazzled by
our technique and execution, but their reaction might be, "Why are they
playing only what Mozart wrote down? Don't they understand that such
text is a beginning, and not an end?"

Anyway, it was an exciting night with the orchestra also playing the
Haffner Symphony and an encore of a march that was composed to precede
the symphony and which the musicians played as they walked in to begin
the concert. They also would play it as they walked out following the
concert.

--
***************************
** Dan Leeson **
** leeson0@-----.net **
***************************

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