Klarinet Archive - Posting 000175.txt from 2007/05

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] R. Kell revisited
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 10:36:00 -0400


I'm glad to see Kevin Fay bring up this subject again.
Tony Pay wrote,
>BTW, I'll get around to saying more about these recordings
at some point.>

I've been stalling around, waiting for Tony to expand his commentary, but
meanwhile, here goes (FWIW from an amateur). If I sent my notes all at
once, the length would annoy you. Therefore I'm breaking them into three
sections and will annoy you by degrees.

Technically, this set is an excellent job of cleaning up records half a
century old. Evidently, Reginald Kell was Mr. Reliable in the studio.
There's nothing here to remind me that during his career, recording
sessions included far fewer re-takes than today and record production
involved fewer splices and engineering clean-ups.

The booklet includes four surrealistic, Cubist-influenced Kell pictures of
music, from 1978-1979, nearly three decades after he made these recordings.
His style is highly detailed and geometric. These colored drawings look
completely different from the way he interprets music, but there's one
point of similiarity: Precision. (I mean precision in the way he plays
what he intends to play, not precision in following the composer's score.)
He plays here with greater technical facility and consistently fewer
goof-ups than average and most of these recordings include similarly
reliable musicians as partners. Thus, some of the good news is that we
modern listeners, spoiled rotten by today's heavy-duty post-production
engineering, don't have to sit there wincing over lots of wrong notes or
ensemble derailments. Instead, we can sit there wincing over some of
Kell's choices. I think it's an uneven set, musically.

Most of the time, Kell's vibrato doesn't bother me, but a lot of what I
hear in those recordings isn't just vibrato. It's "notey-ness"--mouthing
the note, bending the pitch on it a little bit, along with a crescendo
followed by a decrescendo on that one note: waAAOOow. It's a common
technique in jazz and swing (often produced by moving the instrument or
"stirring the pot" with it), and appropriate / traditional for jazz, but
I'm not used to hearing it in pre-20th century music.

In the liner notes, Norman C. Nelson writes, " . . . Kell's playing
emulated the human voice . . . . " And how! When Kell combines notey
playing with a lot of vibrato and exaggerated phrasing, I hear a speechlike
quality I can only describe as slangy. It reminds me of the mid-20th
century downtown Chicago accent in a lot of old black-and-white gangster
movies. Instead of Boris Karloff intoning, "Look deep into my eyes," we've
got Jimmy Cagney, up on the Hortonsphere, yelling, "Made it, Ma! Top of the
world!" Works for me in "White Heat." Not so much in Handel.

Kevin Fay wrote,
>>While much has been written about Kell's use
>>of vibrato, I think the big shocker ws his tone
>>quality. Many American clarinetists would
>>wrinkle their nose at the "buzziness" in his
>>tone in the chalumeau, for example. It would
>>be labled a "bad" tone, of which nothing of any
>>beauty could be made with.

Though Kell's tone varies a great deal from one performance to another, I
agree that he often sounds the way you describe. If I'd only heard Kell's
transcriptions of Handel, I'd wonder why he's renowned for tone, because he
sounds astonishingly shrill and hooty to me in the Handel recordings. I'm
not against transcriptions per se (these take extreme liberties with the
originals), but Kell's Romantic phrasing, with loads of rubato and vibrato,
sounds excessive in the Handel, with staccato that sounds like jazz
staccato. He puts a big chuff on the beginning of the staccato note
(almost slap-tongue sometimes) and often it sounds as if he's huffing
instead of using steady air support. It's distracting. He doesn't have to
do that. He plays differently elsewhere. What makes him think it's a good
idea here?

I'm in the process of making a note-by-note comparison between editions of
the Mozart concerto by Breitkopf & Hartel ed. for Clarinet in A, edited by
Henri Kling, copyright 1987, and the International ed. for Bb Clarinet by
Reginald Kell, copyright 1959, and comparing Kell's edition with his
performance. Kell and Kling transcribed for piano and clarinet so that the
Bb clarinet player plays the same written notes as the player of clarinet
in A. Thus, it's easy, though time- consuming, to compare the notation
from the clarinet parts. I got only one hit in the archives for a search
on "Kell Kling Mozart" and it didn't refer to a discussion of the
differences--but if anybody knows where to find such a discussion, please
save me from myself. In the meantime, suffice that I'm finding a lot of
differences between Kell's edition and Kling's. I've been looking at pitch
and duration--without even trying to log the differences in phrasing marks
that occur in nearly every bar.

More later.

Lelia Loban
Republicans for Voldemort
>;)

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