Klarinet Archive - Posting 000260.txt from 2007/05

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] R. Kell, Part 4 (was: [kl] R. Kell revisited)
Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 14:11:39 -0400

Part 4
Mozart Quintet in A, K. K. 581 (1951, from Decca LP DL 9600), with the Fine
Arts String Quartet. Kell plays clarinet in A. My score is
Barenreiter-Ausgabe 4711, editor uncredited, copyrighted 1958 (after this
recording was made) and renewed in 1986.

I like this recording but can't say I'm bug-eyed wild over it. Kell's
playing sounds phenomenally accurate and the quartet's only slightly less
so; but the balance could be better (possibly the engineer's fault).
Though the clarinet clearly is the lead instrument in this composition,
it's the lead in the sense that the first violin leads a quartet, not in
the sense that a soloist leads a concerto. In this recording, when Kell
has the melody, he's often too far forward, with the strings not just
playing accompaniment but buried. When a string player has the melody,
usually that person is too far forward, as well, with everyone else buried.
I'd like to hear more of the harmony.

Also, the acoustic of the entire recording is on the shrill side. That's
not just due to the age of the recording showing. The quartet scratches
into the strings pretty hard with the bows. For my taste, Kell's tone
quality sounds more attractive and more conventional for Mozart most of the
time than the quartet's, but I prefer the mellower tone he used in the
concerto. The net result is that these instruments don't resonate much
with each other. The crescendos and decrescendos don't ebb and flow
inexorably together as if they were pulled and pushed by a tide stronger
than themselves. This is gentle, amiable music and the group is right not
to play it as if it were a late Beethoven quartet, full of storm and
ferocity, but still.... Between that somewhat harsh, thin tone quality and
the imbalance, this group doesn't quite give me the impression of intense
communication between the musicians that my favorite ensemble playing has.

My only big beef with this performance is that the musicians ignore the
repeats in the first movement. They do take all the rest of the repeats.
Not taking the repeats in the first movement messes up the symmetry. I
disagree with the notion that classical clarinet players should never use
vibrato and I'm not bothered by the moderate vibrato Kell uses here most of
the time. The ensemble's rubato sounds appropriate to me in the outer
movements. In the second movement, the phrasing, particularly Kell's,
sounds just a bit exaggerated, notey and sentimental for my taste. I don't
see this as a big problem here, though, the way it is in the Handel
transcriptions.

As in Kell's other two Mozart recordings in this set, he plays his trills
unprepared from the principal notes, not from the auxilliary note above.
The strings also play unprepared trills. In some places in this piece,
playing the trill from the principal is correct: in bar I-74, for instance,
Kell's notes are 8ths, c, b, a, g, g-trill, then 16ths f#, g, then 8ths a,
f#. I think that putting the trill on the g following g in the same octave
means that the preceding g does prepare the trill: therefore, the clarinet
should do exactly as he does do, by starting the trill on the principal.
Similarly, in I-182-I-184, Mozart explicitly prepares all of those trills
except the first one from below, with the 16th notes, and Kell is right to
start the trills on the principal. What would you professional players do
with the first trill in that set, the one that's not prepared from below?
Play it from above or play it from the principal, as well, for symmetry?
In all the places where there's no such preparation written into the score,
I think that the trill should start from the auxilliary note above and that
most of the unprepared trills in the recording are anachronistic for Mozart.

I Allegro
At I-99-110, and again at I-185-188, Kell plays all the 8th notes (no
phrase marks in the Barenreiter ed.) as very short staccatos--too short for
my taste.

I-155-160, this phrasing is a strong example of the notey-ness I mentioned
above. It's the exaggerated, "slangy" phrasing I mentioned in a previous
message about the set generally and Handel in particular.

II Larghetto
II-9, where he has a quarter note followed by a quarter rest, he holds that
quarter note nearly all the way through the rest.

II-15, II-30, Kell's vibrato does go a bit billy-goaty once in a while....

III Allegretto con Variazioni-Adagio-Allegro
Var. IV, middle section, Kell *honks* those low f's and g's! Since he
doesn't honk those notes elsewhere, clearly he honks here by choice, not
due to an equipment problem. The odd noises pull me right out of the mood
of the music for these few bars.

Last bar of the Adagio, Kell plays the fermata without ornamentation. The
Barenreiter edition has a footnote from the fermata to a suggested eingang,
written out. Is Kell correct or is this edition correct?

Oddly enough, the more I study these scores and try to write about Kell's
Mozart, the less I think I know about Mozart and the more questions I have!

Lelia Loban
"Poor accompanists are admittedly numerous enough, but there are very few
good ones, for today everyone wants to be the soloist."
--Leopold Mozart, "Versuch einer gruendlichen Violinschule," 1756

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