 The Clarinet BBoard
|
Author: AAAClarinet
Date: 2013-09-10 05:00
A friend let me borrow a clarinet that she wants to get some play time. It is a Leblanc with a cursive L and 200 marked above the G Leblanc Paris logo. sn# 47521. can anyone please give me some info on this clarinet. She got it at an auction site. thank you for any replies.
AAAClarinet
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: donald
Date: 2013-09-10 07:11
It's an L200. Stanley Drucker endorsed these, if i remember correctly, though whether he actually performed on one is another matter... I knew a very fine player who got one in the 1980s and a week later performed a concerto on it. I've also play tested one more reccently that was hideously out of tune. The one you have may be a very fine clarinet, or may not be (as you can say of any brand/model) but is almost certainly better than most student instruments.
dn
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: rtmyth
Date: 2013-09-10 14:10
I had an L300, unplayable because of tuning- Vito bored them out and ruined them. I bought it based on Drucker's ad, later to hear he did not play them in performance.
richard smith
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: Jack Kissinger
Date: 2013-09-10 20:41
According to the serial number list I have, her clarinet was made in 1976. The L200 comes from a line of clarinets Leblanc started in the 1970's (L7, L70, L27, L200, L300 and a quick search turned up a couple of posts that say the line continued with the LX and the LX2000). When they were in production, they were generally Leblanc's top-of-the-line professional models.
Use the search function for this site to search for "L200" (without the quotes) both on the bulletin board and the Klarinet Mailing List Archives. You should get a lot of hits, some with useful information, some perhaps not. Also, for posts about the L7, et. al. line, try "L7 L27" without the quotes.
Best regards,
jnk
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: donald
Date: 2013-09-10 20:45
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember that the L300s in USA were re-bored by Vito, but they'd only just started doing this- so the L200s might not have been? I seem to remember Lee Gibson saying/writing that the L200 came to the market "as Leblanc intended"
dn
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: sonicbang
Date: 2013-09-10 21:00
I have read the whole story of the Leblanc factory from a number of sources. As I remember the reason for reboring was the long shipping time from Europe to the USA. While the instruments were on the ship, stored without temperature and humidity control, most of them was badly warped and become unplayable when arrived to their destination. Reboring was a poor attempt to restore them to playing condition.
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: sonicbang
Date: 2013-09-10 21:09
I have read the whole story of the Leblanc factory from a number of sources. As I remember the reason for reboring was the long shipping time from Europe to the USA. While the instruments were on the ship, stored without temperature and humidity control, most of them was badly warped and become unplayable when arrived to their destination. Reboring was a poor attempt to restore them to playing condition.
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: Chris P
Date: 2013-09-10 21:26
A lot of brand new Noblets were unplayable when they reached retailers in the UK as well. Leblancs among other makes suffered from binding tenons within the first few months of being bought, but this is to be expected with any wooden instrument.
But what I especially didn't like about Leblancs was the tenon recesses which had a ridged and greatly domed recess (which can be machined flat), but that's not anywhere as near as bad as those horrendous wavy tenon slots Buffet use.
Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
Author: SteveG_CT
Date: 2013-09-11 07:42
sonicbang wrote:
> I have read the whole story of the Leblanc factory from a
> number of sources. As I remember the reason for reboring was
> the long shipping time from Europe to the USA. While the
> instruments were on the ship, stored without temperature and
> humidity control, most of them was badly warped and become
> unplayable when arrived to their destination. Reboring was a
> poor attempt to restore them to playing condition.
>
I've seen many explanations for why the reboring procedure was done. Tom Ridenour, who was a former chief clarinet designer for Leblanc, said that Vito Pascucci would customarily rebore clarinets up to a 15mm bore because he believed that small bore clarinets were a passing trend and that players really wanted large bore clarinets that played with a bigger sound. He seems to suggest that Vito made the claim that the bores had shrunk during shipping to justify his reboring project.
http://clarinetcorner.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/its-really-a-big-bore/
|
|
Reply To Message
|
|
The Clarinet Pages
|
 |
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
