 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Danny Boy
Date: 2006-09-10 20:19
For anyone who hasn't heard it, this week's CD Review on BBC Radio 3 is still available on listen again, and compares recordings of the Mozart Concerto.
www.bbc.co.uk/radio3
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Author: David Peacham
Date: 2006-09-10 21:18
For those of us with no broadband, can you give a quick summary of their conclusions?
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If there are so many people on this board unwilling or unable to have a civil and balanced discussion about important issues, then I shan't bother to post here any more.
To the great relief of many of you, no doubt.
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Author: LarryBocaner ★2017
Date: 2006-09-11 22:15
Ah perfidious Albion -- not one American represented in Stephen Johnson's lengthy BBC critique of a sizeable number of K622 recordings (except for Richard Stoltzman -- with the English Chamber Orchestra). No Marcellus, no Wright, no Shiffrin (my own favorite). And for some odd reason, no Tony Pay either!
In this stacked deck, the critic, with a few nods to Martin Frost and Jack Brymer, eventually swoons all over Thea King's remastered 1964 LP. Strange -- to me King's playing is earnest, if somewhat unpolished, but Mr. Johnson finds all sorts of metaphysical messages in her interpretation (that I bet even she didn't think of).
It did make for a fun listening half-hour and comfortably reinforced my disrespect for most music critics. He did make some good points though -- mainly about the clumsiness of the 1801 publication that I and the rest of the clarinet fraternity regarded as holy writ, until quite recently!
Post Edited (2006-09-12 03:49)
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Author: beejay
Date: 2006-09-13 07:32
I didn't get the program either, but wonder if you wouldn't mind summarizing what was meant by clumsiness. I had an opportunity to look at the original andre edition recently and hought it was anything but clumsy -- the clarinet part at least.
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2006-09-13 08:49
Thanks, but I clicked the link, and I don't see anything related to Mozart there, so I'm not sure what to do. There lots of links to listen to there but none say anything about Mozart (I even searched for Mozart on the page and it didn't find anything). Sorry if this is just something stupid I am missing......
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Author: David Peacham
Date: 2006-09-13 08:55
clarnibass: Click on listen again. Then click on CD Review, which is the name of the programme.
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If there are so many people on this board unwilling or unable to have a civil and balanced discussion about important issues, then I shan't bother to post here any more.
To the great relief of many of you, no doubt.
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2006-09-13 10:50
OK I listened to it, and I liked this show a lot. The Beethoven and Shostakovich symphonies before the show were also great!
I liked it mainly because of hearing all those versions of the concerto, none of them I heard before. I liked most of them, some I liked much more than others. The reviewer wasn't very interesting in my opinion. Since my first language is as different from English as can be, maybe it is just me, but doesn't the reviewer sound very strange? His accent, the way he pronounces words, etc.
I don't think it mattered at all that he didn't include more Americans. Most countries (including mine) didn't have even one player represented. It is an English reviewer, for an English radio station, so there is at least some logic to include mostly English players.
I care just as much about him not playing any version by a player from my country, as him not playing a version by a player from any other country. But either way I care very little because I think the amount of players from each country he included made sense in that specific context.
I also recommend the show about piano just after the Mozart concerto show. Some really great pieces played there, and the reviewer has some interesting things to say, and also the show after that with the violinist has very good music.
Post Edited (2006-09-13 10:57)
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Author: David Peacham
Date: 2006-09-13 12:15
clarnibass wrote: "doesn't the reviewer sound very strange?"
I don't recall what the reviewer sounds like, but with a name like Andrew McGregor he is probably Scottish. We can't understand them either.....
Yours from England.....
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If there are so many people on this board unwilling or unable to have a civil and balanced discussion about important issues, then I shan't bother to post here any more.
To the great relief of many of you, no doubt.
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Author: LarryBocaner ★2017
Date: 2006-09-13 13:26
Thanks, beejay, for asking me to clarify what I meant by the clumsiness of the Andre 1801 publication of the Mozart Concerto for non-basset clarinet.
Actually I borrowed the term from the BBC's Johnson, but it was a description that I had been groping for for some number of years!
By "clumsiness" I'm referring to the fact that, faced with passages that transcended the range of the normal clarinet, Andre chose to simply jump octaves. This had the effect of transforming Mozart's wonderful "rainbows" of sound into academic broken chords. Additionally, where Mozart was writing male/female operatic dialogues into the solo part, very often this aesthetic is compromised (or ignored) in Andre's hack job. Alberti bass passages in the low register were willy nilly transposed up one octave, sometimes for the sake of only one out-of-range note!
I don't necessarily think that one is obliged to have a basset clarinet to do justice to the K622 masterwork, but sometimes one has to read between the lines to try to reconstruct all of the genius in the Concerto. It is a tribute to the innate quality of this work that it has received such universal adulation for more than two centuries despite all of the editorial mangling that it has received! Christopher Hogwood told me that he has seen letters written by people who heard the Concerto performed by Stadler, and then after the 1801 publication, who thought the published piece was a counterfeit!
Nitai (clarnibass): if the premise of the show was merely to counsel the listeners to build their CD libraries with the best available British recordings I would not quibble about the Anglocentrism. And there were snippets played from Sabine Meyer, Martin Frost and one or two other Europeans
(Strangely, not Leister, Prinz, Carbonare). But the focus (and effusive praise) was clearly in the corner of Kell, Marriner, Brymer, King etc.)
David, the host of the show, but not the reviewer, was Andrew McGregor -- I don't think his Scottish burr (no doubt BBC laundered) was contagious to Stephen Johnson!
Cheerio, chaps!
Larry Bocaner
Post Edited (2006-09-13 13:33)
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2006-09-15 05:38
David Peacham wrote: "I don't recall what the reviewer sounds like, but with a name like Andrew McGregor he is probably Scottish. We can't understand them either....."
Actually I was able to understand almost everything he said, so I doubt he was scottish. Plus I heard Scottish accent before many times and it didn't sound like it, it was just an accent I've never heard before.
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Author: Pathik
Date: 2006-09-15 08:30
The reviewer was not Andrew McGregor, but somebody called Stephen Johnson, who is not Scottish at all, or at least doesn't sound like a Scotsman, but rather more like a very posh Queen's English kind of bloke. Very cultured, quite possibly.
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