Klarinet Archive - Posting 000196.txt from 2007/05

From: "=?iso-8859-1?Q?sarah=20elbaz?=" <sarah@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] R. Kell revisited
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 16:22:32 -0400


> -------Original Message-------
> From: Tony Pay <tony.p@-----.org>
> Subject: Re: [kl] R. Kell revisited
> Sent: 23 May '07 08:59
>
.
>
> A strong positive quality of Kell's is that, like a good singer, his
> BEGINNINGS are very often well-executed.  The sound 'vibrates' right from the
> beginning -- it's very real, and good in that sense.  It means that music
> that needs to be 'spoken' receives good service from him, and is part of the
> reason why his playing is often said to be vocal.

Two of my teachers used to talk a lot about beginnings.
One was my first teacher Yaacov Barnea [ Barnea was a student of Yona Ettlinger(Yona was his only teacher). He was assistent principle of the Israel Phil for 43 years ]
The first thing that I heard from him was : The sound never begins- it continues. He had a whole philosophy about that and, of course, never used the tongue to begin the sound.

The second one was Mitchell Lurie who said : everything MUST have a beginning! (Mitchell used to talk about the end of the sound too.)

Interestingly, both players have something similar in their musical personality: they are extremely sensitive to rhythm and timming but at the same time takea lot of freedom with rubato, especially Barnea.
I hear the same thing in Kell's playing.

Today I listened again to Kell's Brahms Quintet with the Busch Quartet (I don't have the new set). I find that the first movement is very convincing (even though I dont like many things that kell is doing there) especially because they play Allegro. In most of the recordings and live performances that I heard, this movement is played too slowly.
In the second movement, besides the fact that after two phrases I started to feel sea-sick from the endless glissando of Adolf Busch, I was very surprised that Kell used the same sound quality and dynamic range that he used in the first movement, and didn't match 'con sord ' of the strings.

Sarah

>
> Funnily enough, I was reminded of it just the other day by hearing a similar
> mastery of 'beginnings' from Nat King Cole.  Here, there is no lack of
> smoothness of attack -- but no lack of assertiveness either.
>
> Tony
> --
>
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