Klarinet Archive - Posting 000454.txt from 2010/09

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Improvising in Mozart's clarinet music
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:00:58 -0400

On 09/17/2010 09:39 AM, Diego Casadei wrote:
> Few years ago I heard Carbonare playing Mozart's concerto with a a
> basset clarinet under the direction of Abbado. The conductor insisted
> quite a lot on adding (moderate) variations whenever a phrase was
> repeated, and Carbonare did it. The biggest impact was indeed in the
> slow movement, in which repetitions are several (but the orchestra never
> added variations) and improvisations can take more time to develop.

I meant to write a note on that, because someone made a comment a few
threads back (tongue-in-cheek, I think) to the extent that one shouldn't
even be allowed to approach the Adagio until after one's first mid-life
crisis.

... whereas I think that for me, now, the Adagio is in many ways the
most playful and child-like parts of the concerto.

There's a big temptation, because it's called an Adagio, to try and take
it as slow as possible -- I thought of it like that, for a long, long
time, and was very resistant to attempts to persuade me to play it
faster, and I didn't like recordings where it _was_ played fast. And
when you do play it very, very slowly it becomes quite serious and
profound, and that in turn makes it quite difficult to add
improvisations because improvisation by its nature brings a chaotic
element that doesn't really go with that kind of serious profundity.

Anyway, a few years ago I was at a performance in London by Tony Pay,
conducted by Charles MacKerras, where the Adagio was taken far, far
faster than I'd anticipated -- in my memory at least, fast to the point
where it was possible to have some ambiguity between the bar having 3
beats or 1 beat. And _that_ suddenly changed things -- suddenly the
movement became very playful and full of little flashing sparks of life,
and in that context improvisation -- little joyful flowerings of
creativity -- makes perfect sense and adds to the result.

I don't really know what I thought of the movement as being "about"
before. I guess I would have said that -- taken very slow -- it has
something of a character of deep longing and also a kind of nobility and
grandeur, the wise old king thinking back on his life or something like
that. (These days I don't think wise old kings really exist. Any king
with any real measure of power, however kind they appear in person,
usually has some nasty little bastard with a torture chamber somewhere
underneath them busy tormenting and terrifying people in order to _keep_
that power.)

_Now_ an image I have in mind is of a parent playing with a little
child, taking joy and wonder in their every little gesture, full of
amazement as they watch the baby discovering new experiences and
learning -- as babies do -- things which as adults we forget that we
ever even _needed_ to learn, and amazed by their own capacity to spark
amazement and fascination and activity in this little creature with even
the simplest gesture ... and maybe the ending is the end of a "perfect"
such day, watching the baby go off to sleep peacefully with all the
day's new discoveries still swimming around inside his head.

It's still profound, but in a very different way, that's full of play
and creativity.
_______________________________________________
Klarinet mailing list
Klarinet@-----.com
To do darn near anything to your subscription, go to:
http://klarinet-list.serve-music.com