Klarinet Archive - Posting 000273.txt from 2002/04

From: HatNYC62@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Yvonne Desportes
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 10:54:39 -0400

As some of you already know, the Daniel Bonade Clarinet Quartet has been
working on the music of Yvonne Desportes for our forthcoming debut cd. The cd
will contain 4 quartets by Mme. Desportes and 2 by Ferenc Farkas.

I bring this up because of some of the discussions we had recently regarding
intonation and other things. These pieces (we have already recorded the
French Suite and The Seasons and will be doing Normandie and the Suite
Italienne as time permits), although usually played by students, are really
really hard. There are sections where the chords change every 16th note and
those chords are stacked higher than the leaning tower of Piza. A perfect
example of a situation where a tuner will not help you play in tune!

In fact, playing these pieces in tune perfectly would require actually tuning
every change. It would take more hours to do that than we actually had time
to spend. You see, we only get together at most every two weeks. Scheduling
in spare time for three freelance musicians and one full time employee at New
York Life (who is also a superb clarinet player) is not easy, as you might
guess. We are "painting with a broad brush" if you will.

Rhythmically, there are lots of wonderful shifts between the subdivisions of
2,3,4,6 etc. These are important subdivisions of the beat that a good
musician must be able to shift between like gears. . .very important stuff.
It sounds easy to do, but on the fly with others in the group not doing the
same thing, it is tricky.

I have especially high praise for 'The Seasons.' It has really grown on me
during the time we have worked on it. It is a truly difficult work. All of
the parts have 'stuff', but the first clarinet part has it very very high!
Special kudos to Daniel Spitzer, who played first clarinet on this piece. He
is an amazing clarinet player with a huge, beautiful sound. I am happy that
some of you will get to hear his playing. "The Seasons" is actually a silly
piece in many ways, but I find it charming. "Spring, The Awakening of Nature"
has birds and insects and other miscellaneous sounds I am not sure of.
"Autumn, The Hunt" has hunting horns, horses, dogs and a fox all represented
in the music. It's hilarious! I still can't figure out whether they catch the
fox or not. You will have to listen, decide and vote.

For those of you with advanced students, you could do a lot worse than to
have your students learn these quartets. The first player(s) will have to be
very good in the upper registers and all will have to be (or quickly learn to
be) monster counters and listeners. I think that a group of college
undergraduates working hours daily on these pieces would benefit a great deal
in all areas of clarinet (and music) fundementals.

When I selected these pieces to record, I didn't really know them. I didn't
realize how hard they were! In retrospect, they were perfect choices for our
group to begin with. We started working on Sean Osborn's (wonderful) quartet
this weekend as well, and although it is quite difficult, it seems quite easy
in comparison to Desportes. Incidentally, our second cd (should we ever
finish this first one) will be Clarinetist COmposer 2 and will feature Sean's
quartet and will also have music by Jettel, Vinicio Meza and Jeanjean.

David Hattner, NYC
www.northbranchrecords.com

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