Klarinet Archive - Posting 000110.txt from 2009/10

From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Lorenzo Coppola plays K. 622
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:25:29 -0400

That was a good posting Oliver. To show you just how far we have come, it
was 1948 when the first suggestion was made the K. 622 as we knew and played
it diverges significantly from Mozart wrote. And the writer (Dazeley) said
that Mozart's clarinetist had an instrument that went down to low C.

Within a year, 10 technical papers appeared saying that Dazeley had a hole
in his head. There was no such thing, blah, blah, blah. And as recently as
when John Denman was teaching at the University, he and the professor of
musicology argued strongly against the idea of a clarinet with a low C
directly to my face. "Where is the evidence," they said.

And here we are today where one can buy such an instrument off the shelf.
And Coppola has one with a right angle bend at the bell, and with a bell
very similar to that of an English horn. That's progress of one sort or
another.

The fact that the cameraman focused on the second flutist had an advantage
for me. I didn't have to see Coppola bending and swooping and leaning and
twisting and lurching, stage movements that, for me, distract from the
performance.

Dan Leeson
dnleeson@-----.net
----- Original Message -----
From: "Oliver Seely" <oseely@-----.edu>
To: <klarinet@-----.org>
Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: [kl] Lorenzo Coppola plays K. 622

The cameraman's preoccupation with the brunette
flutist reminded me of the Youtube offering by
Nigel Kennedy of the Bach A minor Concerto at St.
Mary's Church in Dingle, Ireland. The cameraman
there had a thing for the first cellist, and the
viewer got long, loving, lingering shots of her
while Nigel was off screen sawing on his fiddle.

Most unfortunately, subsequent offerings of that
performance, or perhaps others in the same place,
were shot by another camera crew or maybe the raw
take was edited and the original doesn't seem to
be available any longer. In any case, the early
one I saw was disarmingly endearing. It seemed
also to be a 7-camera set-up. Coppola's was at
least a 4-camera, maybe 5-camera set-up. Some of
the stuff now appearing on the internet is
stunning. You won't be seeing Ollie and selected
members of his Sili(con) Symphony (shot with a
$69 camcorder) any time soon! 8-)

As for Coppola's basset clarinet, it would be
yummy to be able to play K.622 with runs from the
very lowest note to the highest without having to
retrace one's steps between octaves.Ya gotta love the internet!

Oliver

At 10:46 AM 10/9/2009, you wrote:
>Dan Leeson wrote:
> > But the performance was not without its problems. Right at the top of
> > the heap is the high g played in the final movement. There is no
> > authority for that note, and in no manuscript of Mozart does it appear.
> > It is simply a 20th century insertion that is of questionable presence.
> > I think the highest note that can be found in Mozart's autograph is the
> > high e (the fourth and fifth notes in the theme of the gran Partitta's
> > variations movements).
>
>Do we have any Mozart manuscript for that whole movement, let alone that
>note? I understand that you meant the note doesn't appear in any Mozart
>manuscript containing the clarinet. But since Mozart only wrote one
>clarinet concerto, and that for a very particular (and skilled)
>virtuoso, it doesn't seem reasonable to infer the wrongness of that note
>from what he wrote for clarinet in non-concertante works.
>
>On what basis do you say the note is a '20th-century addition'? An 1881
>Breitkopf & Härtel edition of the score certainly has that note in it:
>http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/29515
>... which, though almost 100 years after Mozart wrote the concerto, is
>still pre-20th-century. (Is anyone aware of any earlier editions of the
>score available online? Is the note in the first published score?)
>
>There's one other piece of evidence that this note is legit. Süssmayr's
>concerto movement for basset clarinet, written for Stadler, includes a
>run up the 4 octaves of the instrument, from bottom- to super-C:
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aigc9_m3wrY
>... which suggests at least that Stadler was quite capable of playing
>such high notes.
>
>Best wishes,
>
> -- Joe
>
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