 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: studioline
Date: 2009-05-21 10:01
Recommended recordings?
I'm sure there's been previous posts on this, but for my convenience if anyone would like to post I'd appreciate.
I already have
Richard Stoltzman
Richard Hosford
Sharom Kam
Laur Arden
Benny Goodman
Daniel Sanford-Casey
Sabine Meyer
Jean-Francois Verdier
I'll be playing this myself soon so hence my interest of more recordings.
Also, I've read there is a version which may have been Copland's original, before slight alterations for Benny Goodman, has this been published?
Many thanks in advance
Stuart Eminson
www.stuarteminson.com
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-05-21 10:30
Gary Gray has been recommended elsewhere on the board - it was the second recording of it I heard and I remember it very fondly but a little indistinctly.
Charles Neidich's version on Chandos is of the 'original'. The alterations weren't all that slight in fact. At precisely the moment where the published version loses temperature a bit with just sparse arpeggios in the middle register, the sketch version goes off, with the same D-majoring in quavers but all the way to top A really rather often. ![[hot]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/hot.gif) And there are plenty more notes in general around and above top C.
I'm also curious as to whether the sketch version as Neidich plays it has been published. But you can browse the sketches at the Library of Congress website:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=copland&fileName=sket/sket0030/sket0030page.db&itemLink=S?ammem/coplandbib:@field(NUMBER+@od1(copland+sket0030))
The gliss at the end was at one stage planned to go another octave higher! ![[right]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie8.gif)
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Author: Neal Raskin
Date: 2009-05-21 12:40
My favorite is Jon Manasse. Its on the album "Manasse Plays Three Clarinet Concertos." He performs it with the Slovac Radio Symphony Orchestra.
www.youtube.com/nmraskin
www.musicedforall.com
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-05-21 14:40
I was actually a little bit disappointed by Neidich's recording, although it does answer some questions about what Copland originally wrote and why Copland revised the Concerto.
The additional arpeggios appear to me to be an attempt by Copland to capture a sparkly pianistic effect in the clarinet. Neidich probably does about as well as anyone can on this (he's truly an incredible player), but it's still not that pretty. Neidich gets all the notes out (which is better than I could do, for certain), but it seems that he does so at the expense of intonation and tone quality.
And *as written*, what was "too difficult for Benny Goodman" is still too difficult, even for Neidich--it appears he is forced to add slurs to these arpeggios, even though Copland's manuscript (p. 113 of the above-posted URL) has them written tongued.
As for the excursions into the upper reaches of the altissimo register, I don't think those add much to the piece, and even Neidich has trouble keeping those notes stable when he has to sustain them near the end of the piece (much as Goodman had similar trouble with the revised version's sustained altissimo notes [which were lower]).
I can't really fault Neidich for these things--all these passages that were taken out of the Copland Concerto were taken out because they are simply too difficult for the instrument. Neidich has unbelievable technical abilities, so if he sounds like he's struggling with it, it probably really is too hard, and Copland's decision to revise the Concerto and only publish the revised version was clearly a sensible one.
My main criticism of Neidich himself in this recording is that he takes some liberties with swinging notes and adding glisses that were not part of Copland's score. So on the one hand, he's calling this the "original version" of the Copland Concerto, while on the other hand parts of it are actually original to Neidich, not Copland. Also, he duplicates some of the peculiarities of Goodman's recording of this piece, which conflict with what's written. In that respect, we still don't get to hear the "original Copland" as Copland first imagined it while in Rio de Janeiro.
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Author: HudsonAD
Date: 2009-05-21 15:03
Please check out Robert Spring's recording with the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra - I promise you will enjoy it!
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-05-21 20:57
mrn:
To be pedantic, though, the high arpeggios aren't exactly 'written tongued' in the sketch, they're written without a specified articulation - so one could say that adding a couple of slurs is certainly a closer approximation to that than the version which was finally published.
Brilliant player as Neidich is, and wonderful it is that he brought out a version which captures the somewhat utopian clarinet writing of Copland's preliminary version, I hope I'm not going too far out of line if I suggest that stability at the very top of the range (at least, on the evidence of the recording) isn't where Neidich's playing is absolutely state-of-the-art - there are players around who can punch out top C, C# and D a lot more convincingly than he manages on the recording, and with a tone that matches the notes just below.
I would really hope that the preliminary version continues to have a life of its own and doesn't stop with a single recording. I wish Copland had published it in a form of his original vision he was happy with plus an ossia for the real world, rather than us having to conjecture now what he might have written for today's players...
Let's not forget, perhaps, that there's another of our concertos which wasn't published in its original form (not because no one could play it - but because only one person could and he already had the dots) and whose original form is now lost forever.
What wouldn't we give now to know exactly what notes Mozart had written?
Post Edited (2009-05-21 20:58)
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