 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: jacobhardy25
Date: 2013-02-19 18:44
hi all. i just ordered the carl nielsen concerto i might be playing it for my last high school band concerto in june and i figured i should get it months ahead since it is such a monster piece. i was wondering any hints or tips anybody could give to me that i could use in my practice time? thank you in advance.
Jake Hardy
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Author: rmk54
Date: 2013-02-19 19:47
I think it is highly doubtful that there is a band arrangement of this piece.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2013-02-19 19:52
Certainly piano and snare.
The best tip I got was that much of the altissimo stuff is fake fingerings.
......................Paul Aviles
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Author: jacobhardy25
Date: 2013-02-20 18:34
well i thought that march april and may would be good enough (including a lot of practice on my own) for june.
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Author: rmk54
Date: 2013-02-20 21:09
I think you are in for quite a surprise.
You do know that the Nielsen is for Clarinet in A?
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Author: Alphie
Date: 2013-02-22 13:51
I think it's a good idea to have a backup plan B for june. As rmk54 said, you might be in for quite a surprise. This piece usually requires a minimum of one-two years of intense studying before having anything to show.
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Author: Ryan K
Date: 2013-02-22 15:52
I'm playing this on my senior recital for undergrad. Slow practice is your friend.
Ryan Karr
Dickinson College
Carlisle, PA
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Author: brycon
Date: 2013-02-22 19:45
Transpose the whole concerto to Bb clarinet and just leave out the low E's. Should be able to play the thing with only a couple weeks of practicing.
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Author: William
Date: 2013-02-23 22:28
The older I get, the more beautiful--and difficult--the Mozart Clarinet Concerto tends to get. All of those technical gymnastics Nielson wrote don't hold a candle to Mozarts melodic lines. Think about it.......
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Author: donald
Date: 2013-02-23 23:18
William- I know what you mean about the Mozart, but a friend of mine played the Nielsen for the first time a few years back and asked me for help. I've never performed it, but know it very well so kind of acted as a "guide" or advisor but stopped short of actually giving a "lesson". The bits my friend had trouble with were ALL melodic, and the more we looked into these issues the more we came to realise just how much "melodic" material there is... the technical gymnastics are what you notice, the more melodic material is what makes the piece WORK.
just my 2c
dn
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2013-02-24 04:49
There's always Nielsen's other clarinet piece, the Fantasy, which was written in his younger years. It's different from the concerto and rather short, but it's wonderful music.
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Author: Alexis
Date: 2013-02-24 09:07
Nielsen concerto doesn't have movements, at least not any that finish unambiguously.
Is this for public performance? Or is it just a test of ability? If the latter, fine. If the former, play something else.
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Author: Danny Boy
Date: 2013-02-24 15:21
I'm with Donald - William I think you're doing the Nielsen a massive disservice.
I was fortunate enough to be able to play the Nielsen a few years ago with orchestra and have just been booked to do it again, so I'm in the early stages of revisiting the work.
On the first occasion that I learnt it - I was 'set' the work as part of a course at music college and was given the piece mainly because the conductor involved wished to have an opportunity to give it an outing. I was positively frightened at the prospect thinking (as most probably would at the age of 25) of only the enormous technical battle I was going to have to undertake.
But, knowing I had plenty of time to prepare (which by the way OP was 18 months - that was in the end just about enough time, I think you've set yourself a near impossible goal here) I started researching, listening and discussing the work with professors and colleagues while also starting to get it into my fingers very steadily.
I was fortunate to be given some wonderful insight into the piece by my teachers of the time and I soon realised that the technical pyrotechnics of the work are very much secondary - a by-product of the music that is being produced rather than the other way round. I often here the piece played in a very angry fashion throughout, but actually that's only one of a thousand different emotions going on. Some of the lyricism found is absolutely on a par with that of Mozart. The reviewer of my performance called the work 'Mercurial' which is a word I had been searching for without knowing it the whole time I'd been learning it.
I highly recommend that anyone attempting to learn the piece listen to the 'subject' or 'inspiration' for the concerto Aage Oxenvad. While he never recorded the concerto he was involved with a recording of the Nielsen Wind Quintet - and there are some striking stylistic comparison to be drawn between particularly the 3rd movement of the quintet and the concerto.
This posting from our own board is worth a read...
http://www.woodwind.org/clarinet/Study/Nielsen.html
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Author: Danny Boy
Date: 2013-02-24 15:26
Oh - and have a listen to Niels Thomsen's version with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, it's fantastic - funnily enough he's Danish...
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Author: kdk
Date: 2013-02-24 19:41
Does this board have a link on the main Woodwind.org home page? I didn't know it existed. I used your hyperlink to get there and then can get back to the home page with the Home link, but I can't find a way to get from the home page to the Clarinet Study page (maybe I'm staring at it and don't see it).
Karl
Post Edited (2013-02-24 19:45)
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Author: Danny Boy
Date: 2013-02-24 22:26
I can't help there I'm afraid - I remembered it from before and google Oxenvad knowing there aren't too many pages on the man.
Thanks to whoever made my link clickable.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-02-25 13:33
I think the original poster may be overly intimidated by what is being written here.
I don't think the Nielsen is THAT technically demanding. It takes a lot to play the entire piece in concert with an orchestra, of course, but if he's only going to do a section of it with piano, that's another matter.
I think the main thing is to be 'taken' with the piece emotionally. I always found myself fascinated, right from an early age. Whereas, if your take on music is primarily genial, you'll probably find it a more difficult row to hoe.
It was the first piece I ever took to play to Gervase de Peyer as a young man of 22 or so. I think on that occasion I practised it fairly intensively for about a month. Of course, much depends on your current level of technical expertise, but young players nowadays are often technically really quite fluent.
I remember arguing here that the Mozart concerto was quite a poor audition piece for the first rounds of audition for major orchestral posts, and on one such occasion we replaced it with the first three pages of the Nielsen. I have to say that what one encounters quite routinely in orchestral tuttis can easily be technically significantly more demanding than those three pages, so it was a good way of separating the men from the boys (or the women from the girls).
Personally, I think of the Nielsen as our 'other' concerto masterpiece.
Tony
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2013-02-25 16:48
Just to say something about Jake's original question: in the Nielsen I found it natural to represent the passion in the piece by physical tension in my body -- but of course in complicated passages that's counterproductive to technical control.
So I found it useful to practise going BETWEEN bodily tension and bodily relaxation. First I played so that it FELT right; and then I played with deliberately relaxed and slow fingers -- but keeping the same dynamic and sound intensity as judged by my ears.
That made a big difference to the Nielsen; but it was a lesson that had application in much other music too.
The trouble with 'just playing everything relaxed' is that you can lose touch with an important aspect of your emotional instinct. I found it better to REPRESENT the tension physically and THEN choose not to have it be a part of my technique.
By the way, I said 'slow fingers' above, and I meant: EVEN IN SOME FAST PASSAGES. How that's possible was the subject of a much older thread that you can probably turn up using the Search function.
Tony
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