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Re: David Shifrin, B40 type mouthpiece

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2014-10-27 05:01

It's interesting to read the impressions people have of his sound. I have two of my own.

I had the opportunity to play second to him years ago in a concert in Philadelphia. I'm not certain when, but it was, I think just after he left the Cleveland Orchestra, maybe the following season. He was playing at the time on a Pyne mouthpiece (don't know the facing) and I don't think for a couple of reasons that he was playing on a 10G. He had, as I heard him from the seat next to him, a very wide, round, slightly foggy almost saxophone-like sound. It was interesting to listen to although it wasn't my taste in clarinet tone (then or now. No matter - he was principal and I was 2nd).

My wife and I heard him play in Philadelphia a few years ago in the Perelman Theater, a small room and stage inside the Kimmel Center, which also houses Verizon Hall where the Philadelphia Orchestra plays. Our seats were first row practically in the center, which in that hall is almost underneath the soloist. If he had stood a little closer to the edge of the stage apron his bell might have dripped on me. So I was again close to him. The sound I heard that afternoon was almost diametrically opposite what I had heard all those years earlier. The sound was clean, firm with maybe even a little of what most of you call "brightness." No fog, no saxophone, just very clean, at times almost hard clarinet tone. I'm certain the hall's acoustic burnished the tone some, so that it probably sounded much more mellow and gentle in the back rows. But the surprising point for me was the difference between the sounds of the relatively young and the more mature player.

Did he change his equipment to produce the change in sound? Well, he was not likely to get the sax-like sound of 40 years ago on a 10G, and he probably would have been hard pressed to force the sound of 2010 out of a Pyne mouthpiece. But I'd bet his equipment choices followed his change of concept, not the other way around. You first develop an idea and then look for equipment that best facilitates the realization of that idea.

Karl

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