 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2004-07-21 19:29
I've been to three excellent concerts in the last few days.
On July 19, the Washington Square Chamber Orchestra (scheduled to play outside, but driven to a local church by rain) did Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Overture on Hebrew Themes, and the Janacek Capriccio. It was a tiny group (one string player on a part), and Larry Guy was the clarinetist. Everyone was outstanding, and Larry put on an amazing show. If you haven't heard him, grab any opportunity.
Then, a recital at Mannes (tix only $20) by Marc-Andre Hamelin -- no clarinet, but a great performer. He did two late Beethoven piano sonatas, #30 and 31 (Op. 109 and 110), Schumann Papillons and Liszt, Apres une Lecture du Dante. He's a mesmerizing player, with no limit to his technique or sonority, and the Mannes hall is ideal. It holds only about 300 and has fine acoustics. For an encore, he played the entire Beethoven Sonata # 32 (Op. 111). This has to be the best concert I've been to for a long time. The Mannes concerts are a great, undiscovered New York City secret -- mostly free, or at nominal cost.
Finally, on July 17, we went to a concert called Mozart, Weber and the Clarinet. The Aston Magna Quartet (Daniel Stepner, Nancy Wilson, David Miller, Loretta O'Sullivan) is about as good as there is for period instrument performances, and Eric Hoeprich is, of course, in a class by himself. After a pleasant but slightly dull opening, a quartet by Georges Onslow, they did the Weber Quintet and the Mozart Quintet.
For the Weber, Eric played a 10 key Bb classical instrument he made, and it seemed to be completely without effort. All the fast passages were rippling and clean, and the slow ones were singing and almost operatic.
For the Mozart, he played his own basset A clarinet, built after the Riga sketch. Like Steve Fox's instrument http://www.sfoxclarinets.com/Stadler.html, it's a basic 5-key instrument with 4 thumb keys for the extension. He didn't take every possible opportunity to use the extended notes, and I liked his choices very much. Most important, the instrument worked perfectly with the strings, balancing and trading off phrases in a way that modern instruments simply can't accomplish.
The performance was in St. James Church in Great Barrington, MA -- a stone building with beautiful acoustics. In the Mozart slow movement, the sounds woke up a small bird outside the window, which gave a fine obbligato. Less fine were a couple of motorcyclists.
The entire concert was at A-430, which Eric said is now the consensus pitch for period instrument performances of music from the classical period.
He let me handle his instruments after the concert. I think I could get used to them. The basset A clarinet is not that much bigger than a regular A clarinet, and is noticeably lighter than a modern instrument, since it's made of boxwood. By the way, he used a neck strap with it.
The concert will be repeated on January 6, 2005 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and on January 9 at the Frick Collection in New York. Everyone should run to get tickets. (The Frick concerts are also recorded and broadcast on WNYC on Saturday nights at 8:00 pm. I'll have my tape recorder ready.)
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Bigno16
Date: 2004-07-21 20:24
Why A-430?
(Perhaps a dumb question and I just can't think, but enlighten me.)
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Author: Don Poulsen
Date: 2004-07-21 21:25
Just a wild guess, but if the instruments were built with A intended to be 430 Hz, it would be best to tune them to this same note to get the best intonation throughout the ranges of the instruments. If the instruments were constructed with a differently pitched A in mind, I would think that it would be best to use that pitch as I doubt most listeners would pick up on or care about what standard was used, as long as it was consistent.
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2004-07-21 22:02
Bigno16 -
Pitch has varied a lot over the years. Most wind instruments from the baroque period are at around A-410, though in France it was as low as 392 (a full step below 440) and in Italy as high as 440.
Few baroque wind instruments do well at 440, and string instruments with shorter baroque necks and gut strings also aren't comfortable there. While there are some good modern recorders at 440, those at 415 are much better, and oboists tell me that no oboe maker has been able to make a baroque oboe that works at 440.
Modern players of baroque instruments have settled on A-415, which is convenient because it is one-half step below 440. This lets you use modern tuning forks and build harpsichords with keyboards that slide from side to side the width of one string and thus play at either 440 or 415. It's necessarily a compromise, first of all because the old instruments are all over the place, and second because in the baroque period they used unequal temperament, so a harpsichord tuned at 415 will sound bad at 440. Baroque flutes can be made with "corps de rechange" -- left-hand joints of various lengths -- which let them play at multiple pitches, and baroque oboes and bassoons can move the pitch around by reed adjustments. However, for acoustic reasons, corps de rechange for recorders don't work well. Since the recorder was prominent in the early music revival, this was another reason for the players of historical instruments to settle on a particular pitch.
By Mozart's time, pitch had risen to 425 or 430 (depending on where you were). Once again, it was necessary for modern players to compromise on a pitch. The movement toward using classical instruments began in London, and most of the players are still there. Tony Pay has said that he and Alan Hacker needed to set a compromise pitch. Also, the string players had to be a bit above 415, both to match Mozart's pitch and because the string instruments of that time had been altered so that they worked best at a higher pitch. For a while, it was 425 or 427, but Eric Hoeprich told me that 430 is now the established classical pitch, and all the makers of reproduction instruments use it.
More than you may have wanted to know, but that's the way it happened.
Best regards.
Ken Shaw
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-07-22 02:20
Ken ... those last 4 or 5 Beethoven sonatas are works I can't live without ... especially the horrendously difficult "Hammerklavier" ...
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