Klarinet Archive - Posting 000211.txt from 2007/05

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] R. Kell revisited
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 15:56:40 -0400

Part 2.
As I threatened, oops, I mean promised, here is some more reaction to the
Decca set of Reginald Kell recordings. I said I was going to split my
comments into three messages. I lied. I'm splitting them a bunch more
times and giving Mozart three messages of his own.

Kell's tone sounds better to me, less shrill, more resonant and more
compatible with the fellow musicians' tones, in the Mozart Trio in E-flat,
K. 498, with pianist Mieczslaw Horsowski and violist Lillian Fuchs (1950,
again from Decca LP DL 9543). This piece is recorded as a real trio, not
as clarinet with accompaniment. The amount of vibrato Kell uses in Mozart
sounds reasonable to me. He uses Bb clarinet and has a few intonation
problems, particularly on sustained notes above the staff, for instance at
bar 38-40, 72-3, 101-3, etc..

I don't hear those problems on the same notes in the Allegretto, but that's
where Fuchs sounds a little sloppy, most noticible after 353 in both
repeats. Kell's drowned out at bar 37-38. I hear something odd at the
beginning of bar 85, where Kell holds his note as long as Fuchs holds hers.
They're in 6/8 and in my score, his note is an eighth note and hers is a
full bar. Maybe there's something wrong with the score I'm using, the 1967
reprint Schirmer edition (the one with the misprint in the viola part 9
bars after Q, i.e. bar 280--if you've written in the bar numbers that this
edition hasn't got!--where the multi-bar rest hasn't got a 2 over it),
edited by Adamowski in 1920. If Kell is right and this edition is wrong,
I'd like to correct my copy. Should the clarinet hold that note?

All of the musicians start their trills unprepared on the principal note,
most exposed in the piano at bar 336 and in the clarinet at bar 112, where
Kell's trill drops down to g at the top of the staff from c above the
staff. There is no appoggiatura in the Adamowski score for either of those
examples (among others). Is the score in error? My piano teacher, Artur
Eisler, taught me that, in the absence of any other written ornamentation,
I should always prepare trills from above for Mozart and all earlier
earlier composers. According to Grove's, Hummel, who as a child studied
with Mozart for about two years, was the first to argue in favor of
sometimes beginning the trill unprepared on the principal instead of
preparing it from the auxilliary note a half or whole step above, and
Hummel states explicitly that *all* of his prececessors, presumably
including Mozart, began their trills from above if no appoggiatura or other
figure indicated otherwise.

Some of Kell's phrasing gets a bit extreme for my taste--at 379 and 380,
for instance, when he flips up to the eighth notes above the staff, they're
almost inaudible. Aside from the things I've already mentioned, in a few
places, Horsowski skips an acciaccatura (446, for instance, though he plays
the one at 423) and there was one place near the end of the Allegretto
where he may have skipped an appoggiatura (although I forgot to go back and
check and can't do it now because I'm being held down by a certain cat
who's had enough outrage for one day). Those might represent tiny
finger-slips (Horsowski is phenomenally accurate) or differences of opinion
with the score, not differences between editions. Except as noted, the
musicians follow the Adamowski score so closely, even including the phrase
markings, that I suspect it's the score they used.

Lelia Loban
"Mozart should have composed 'Faust.'"
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Conversations with Eckermann," 1827

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