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Re: College Auditions

Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2013-08-06 15:07

The first movement of Spohr #1 was the contest piece at the Clarinet Congress several years ago. The concerto has several sections where the orchestra [piano] has the theme and the clarinet responds to it, for example in the full score at http://imslp.org/wiki/Clarinet_Concerto_No.1,_Op.26_%28Spohr,_Louis%29, p. 5, second system and again at letter B. At letter D, the clarinetist is at most the lesser of two equals. And especially, the low-register noodling in the first two systems of p. 8 must be barely there, with the virtuoso flourishes emerging as decorations.

Without exception every contestant played noodling as the solo and treated the theme as the accompaniment -- exactly the opposite of what they should have done.

I'm sure that the audition judges continued the movement through that section to discover whether the contestants knew to pull back and let the melody take center stage.

That's why you can't learn a solo by practicing from the clarinet part. You need to know everything that's going on, and working from at least the piano reduction is essential.

Far too few players think about the difference between Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptstimme. As I've written, my favorite example is in the last movement of the Mozart Quintet, the first variation, where you must weave a nearly inaudible "spider's web" around the melody in the two violins and then the viola and cello.

Ken Shaw

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