 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Simon Ubsdell
Date: 2020-09-30 01:28
Listening to Tony Pay's gorgeous recording of the 2nd Spohr Concerto with the London Sinfonietta, it's not just the amazing musicianship that I find so inspiring, it's the feeling of being present at a contemporaneous performance.
I love flamboyant "modern" playing of this concerto and Spohr generally, but there's something really magical about being transported into the history of the piece.
It suddenly makes so much more sense and you see the colours and subtleties of a unified whole.
It stops sounding like a virtuoso showstopper (as for instance when someone like Julian Bliss plays it, brilliantly of course) and it lives in its own right.
Audiences of course love something that sounds difficult but Tony Pay just makes this piece sound like actual music.
Maybe flashy concertos "should" sound difficult. I don't know. But it's amazing when they don't and something is revealed about the original intention.
That's all. I'll shut up now.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2020-09-30 05:24
I'd like to hear that. I've always had a vague feeling that that concerto and some other works by Spohr missed something in performance, or maybe I missed something in listening, despite the music seeming so promising. I enjoy listening, but it's sort of fragmented. It's clear the answer isn't in technical display, even though I do admire technical display at times (and when I practice that piece alone I enjoy the technical feel.)
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Author: Simon Ubsdell
Date: 2020-10-01 00:50
What's so revealing about the Tony Pay recording is not that it's not incredibly virtuoso playing, because it most certainly is.
It's that the virtuosic element seems irrelevant: it doesn't sound like that kind of music.
And it's because of that "irrelevance" that the distinctive character of the piece emerges.
There is a strange, melancholy darkness to Spohr that gets lost when you play the notes for maximum bravura effect.
I can't help thinking there's so much more genuine musical interest in the Spohr concertos than in the (to my mind) rather flaccid Weber concertos, where there never really seems to be anything particularly worth discovering below the shiny surface.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2020-10-01 22:05
Thank you Simon for your lovely endorsement. I agree that Spohr 1 and 2 are beautiful pieces, and I enjoyed revisiting this 41-year-old version of them for the first time in a few years.
Conductors always asked me to play 2 rather than 1; and though 2 is more of a technical nuisance for the soloist, I can see now, I think, why they did. It’s much more of a collaboration with the orchestra, and so more interesting for them. Indeed, if the recording of the Eb concerto has the quality you admire in your post, I think a large slice of the credit should go to the orchestra and David Atherton.
We were going on to record 3 and 4, but couldn’t in 1979 get hold of the orchestral material.
Tony
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