Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-01-16 20:53
Eric wrote:
>> My guess is that Tony is familiar enough with my mind, by this point, to know what I meant by 'rubbish' in that context -- that I respect his opinion, yet feel secure enough in my own experience and knowledge of the subject at hand that I would still be comfortable with my conclusions on this particular matter.>>
I have one more thing to say about this.
It's that I'm NOT familiar with your mind, in this regard, because I find I cannot now put myself in your position.
I don't know whether the following analysis is accurate, but it's what I want to say.
When I was a young player, I 'fell in love' with what various players did. I remember falling in love with Kell's way with Mozart; I remember falling in love with Gervase de Peyer's strange attacks and vibrato; I remember falling in love with Jim Galway's scoops up to sustained vibrato notes from flat beginnings.
But when I became a more able practitioner, and could do these things for myself, my attitude changed. I began to see performer quirks as DECISIONS, and the question arose: Do I want to do these things? What might I get out of doing them? What are they FOR?
That meant I fell out of love with 'what players did'. Those things came to seem merely 'fashionable' -- like bell-bottom jeans in the 60s -- unless they interacted with what I took to be the substance of the music.
I had a conversation recently with a great friend of mine, Elgar Howarth, the conductor, composer, ex-trumpeter and ex-chairman of the RPO, who gave me my first job. At one point he said, the problem with you, Tony, is that you always start off playing music by looking at the score, and imagining what there is there, and then trying to make that happen when you and others play. You deal with people on the assumption that they do that too.
BUT, most people don't. They play music because: they like the sound of it, they can do it, they've heard someone else do it that impressed them, and want to do the same, they can get in the band, people think they're good...and so on.
BUT, I said, surely they SHOULD be doing what you described me as doing.
And he said, yes.....BUT THEY DON'T!!!
Working against that, which I think I should, I often say to students of mine that I want them to be THOUGHTFUL musicians. That doesn't mean that I don't want them to be FEELING musicians. But it's just as wrong to be totally emotional as it is wrong to be totally intellectual. (As Werner Erhard once remarked, "you're still half-assed no matter which cheek you have left.") Music is this wonderful blend of what we are as humans, both thinking AND feeling. Instinctual animals lack the 'thinking' bit, and so cannot attain what we can attain.
So, now, can I understand what you find appealing in Kell's Stravinsky?
No, because whatever it is must belong to a different world from the world I inhabit with regard to the Three Pieces. He simply doesn't sound to me, from the second movement onward, as though he's even playing THE WORK. Therefore, when people claim that what he does 'makes sense', or that they 'like' it, all I can do is to try to imagine what I might have felt BEFORE I GREW UP. And, I can't.
If you're a clarinet aficionado, you might be able to. But I take you to be a proper performer; so I can't see how you can take what I imagine to be your superficial 'loves' so seriously.
I myself know the Stravinsky pieces backwards and inside out. I've performed them hundreds of times; I think I know where they can be stretched without losing their identity; I know the times they've worked and the times they haven't worked. I rarely play them as well as they should be played, but sometimes I'm half-pleased with myself.
When I play them well, by my lights, of course some of what is good about the performance has been drawn from the example of people like Kell. BITS of what people do are often admirable: Kell's immediacy, Leister's sound, Ettlinger's elegance...they all contribute.
But I cannot accept Kell's intellectual betrayal of Stravinsky, and I'm still surprised you can.
The pieces need, as Stravinsky said, to sound like snapshots of improvisations, and that's a hard job to do effectively, one that I take myself to be constantly working towards. Nobody ever said to ME that I should record them while I was still master of them, and with all due respect to you and your teacher, I'd probably laugh if they did.
Actually, I DID once record them in half an hour, at half a day's notice, but I'm not proud of the result. (It was then used as part of the soundtrack of the winner of the Palme d'Or film 'The Legend of the Holy Drinker'; but the other Stravinsky ensemble pieces from the disc that were played without acknowledgement on the soundtrack are far superior.)
Tony
Post Edited (2013-01-17 00:44)
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