 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2016-06-20 22:16
Really fine. So much depends on the cellist, and Sol Gabetta does it heroically. Dejan Lazić is equally good.
The Brahms Trio presents almost insoluble balance problems. Gabetta has a really resonant cello and plays with the usual amount of vibrato, restrained a little. Still, Ottensamer's laid-back, elegant style just doesn't project enough
Mühlfeld was said to have played with a "big vibrato." I wish Ottensamer could have put in a little here to balance Gabetta, and I wish she had cut back, particularly on resolutions.
Still, as Dan says, lots of absolutely beautiful playing. It's as good as any recorded performance and demands to be listened to.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-06-21 01:24
Ken Shaw wrote:
>> Really fine. So much depends on the cellist, and Sol Gabetta does it heroically. Dejan Lazić is equally good.>>
I'd sort of agree with this. But what's wrong with this performance can't really be apportioned out to individual playing. If the GROUP doesn't sufficiently represent the music, then it's up to each player to adjust – or, alternatively, criticise the others so that THEY adjust – until the group DOES represent the music.
>> The Brahms Trio presents almost insoluble balance problems. Gabetta has a really resonant cello and plays with the usual amount of vibrato, restrained a little. Still, Ottensamer's laid-back, elegant style just doesn't project enough.>>
I don't think it's true that there are 'almost insoluble problems' in this piece. An insensitive pianist CAN overuse the power of a modern piano to cover the others; but this one certainly didn't. Using an earlier piano can help even more, of course.
What's wrong with the relationship between clarinet, 'cello and piano here is much to do with Ottensamer's inability, or unwillingness, to BEGIN his phrases. The piano can't NOT begin phrases, the 'cellist DOES begin her phrases; but he 'creeps in' all the time. There's never sufficient centre to it until later.
What that means is that, for example, the 'loving duets' in the slow movement lose all their power. HE needed to understand that – but had SHE understood that, she could have made it better.
Added to which, the 'across the bar' varieties of phrasing in the third movement, contrasted with the 'with the bar' varieties, go for nothing.
>> Mühlfeld was said to have played with a "big vibrato.">>
Only by an unattributed viola player in Brymer's book. This urban legend should either be properly substantiated or killed off.
Anyway, what do we care what he did apropos vibrato? What I'd be more interested in is how he approached the music.
>> I wish Ottensamer could have put in a little here to balance Gabetta, and I wish she had cut back, particularly on resolutions.>>
Yes, but only in the sense that it would have equalised them. I think that the equalisation should have gone far deeper, in that they should have understood the piece better. Doing more or less vibrato is just cosmetic.
>> Still, as Dan says, lots of absolutely beautiful playing. It's as good as any recorded performance and demands to be listened to.>>
I can't agree. I think it's an under-rehearsed 'undergraduate' performance by some excellent players who need to set their sights higher.
Tony
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Author: AAAClarinet
Date: 2016-06-21 04:54
I am in no way taking sides, just very interested.
Tony, in your opinion what are some of the better recordings of this piece. I try to listen to many interpretations of pieces and like to get other's opinions on the best to listen to.
AAAClarinet
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Author: Clarineteer
Date: 2016-06-21 09:35
I wonder whether Mr. Ottensamer lack of projection compared to Mr. Meyer is due to his choice of instrument. The Buffet R13 will perhaps project better which is what Mr. Meyer is playing.
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Author: patrica
Date: 2016-06-21 22:46
It is very interesting to read Tony's critical comments. Mr. Ottensamer always says Brahms is his favorite composer and as a native Viennese he must have been listening Brahms from his father and his father's orchestra since he was born. Therefore it is really interesting to hear someone commenting a principal of Berliner Phiharmoniker's "inability" to play this piece.
Post Edited (2016-06-21 22:47)
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2016-06-21 23:31
Brahms is hard to get "right" for me as a listener, sample of one. As opposed to, for example, Beethoven, whose music often seems to respond to a wide range of interpretive styles, Brahms seems to fall flat without some apparently rather particular phrasing or style being applied.
For decades I listened to piano recordings and got familiar with the piano compositions of Brahms (among others). I developed the impression that there are "Brahms pianists", those who really brought his music to life, and they aren't necessarily pianists otherwise highly ranked in my pantheon. They also aren't necessarily German or Austrian, and they also don't necessarily play particularly "beautifully", again, that being my personal evaluation. I never got the feeling there are "Beethoven pianists", or "Chopin pianists", though there definitely are "Liszt pianists" - a whole other animal. I did notice that good Brahms pianists seemed to really interpret Schumann well, though the converse doesn't seem to hold.
I enjoyed listening to the post linked performance; Ottensamer's playing is indeed beautiful, and he has my full respect. However, it feels like there's potentially something else to be expressed in this music. I think Tony has a good point.
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Author: Jeroen
Date: 2016-06-22 11:19
Dan Oberlin wrote:
> FWIW there is some discussion of Mühlfeld's vibrato, and of vibrato in
> general, at about 49:00 in a program on the Brahms trio at
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUIlOTl3VeM.
Thanks Dan, very interesting video. Nice to hear how vibrato really can contribute to the musical expression. I certainly will experiment more with vibrato in classical pieces.
Does remember me of a clarinet lesson in my youth. I had listened the whole week to recordings of Jan Morks (a jazz player that used a lot of vibrato) trying to copy his sound. After playing the first piece in lesson the teacher said: Did you notice that strange vibration in your sound? Of course I noticed it and I was actually proud of it. But he was not amused and said that 'we' clarinettists play without vibrato, except for some horrible English players... :-) Well, that was 20 years ago, when the difference between the international clarinet 'schools' were more pronounced than now.
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Author: dorjepismo ★2017
Date: 2016-06-22 21:15
"I wonder whether Mr. Ottensamer lack of projection compared to Mr. Meyer is due to his choice of instrument. The Buffet R13 will perhaps project better which is what Mr. Meyer is playing."
The instrument never held Leister back any. It's probably his choice. A lot of the Berlin players seem to emphasize blending and balancing over causing people in the audience to think, "man, that's really a great clarinet|oboe|bassoon." In this piece, he's really just not arguing as passionately for his music as Gabetta is. Lots of ways to be passionate besides vibrato, but that just doesn't seem to be where he wanted to be right then. In late Brahms, character is destiny.
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2016-06-23 01:56
dorjepismo- Andreas Ottensamer isn't playing on the same make of clarinet that Leister used.
However, I don't believe that the projection issue in this recording has to do with the model of clarinet.
A couple of years ago I heard Andreas's brother Daniel play a recital in Vienna. Whenever the pianist played anything louder than mezzoforte you couldn't hear the clarinet anymore. The clarinet sound was smooth, dark and pretty, but just didn't project, even into the small hall of the Musikverien. There were several Austrian clarinet players at the concert, so I asked in the intermission whether this muffled sound was typical of the current Viennese style. With disdain one of them answered: "No. The problem is the plastic reeds".
I believe this could be part of the problem here too. His sound (except in the very high register) just doesn't cut through. This is a typical disadvantage of the current fad of trying to get a "super dark sound" using a Kuckmeier/Legere combination. I don't think that if he played with loads of vibrato it would make a shred of difference to the lack of projection.
Tony's observation about "creeping in" is obviously also part of the problem.
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Author: patrica
Date: 2016-06-23 02:56
Hi Liquorice, maybe it is worthwhile to listen some old CDs produced by his father and other Viennese clarinettists when nobody was using plastic reeds. To my ear, it seems this is just a traditional sytle of Viennese school which asks the sound blend more with other instruments. Also I guess instruments could be a reason because most people are so used to the sound of French system instruments and never hear Viennese sytle instruments before. This is similar to people who hear Viennese horns and Viennese oboes at the first time. They tend to think the sound is somehow weird. I recently tried some (>10 from different brands) Viennese mouthpieces and very surprisingly, I even could not play a scale using any of them. The embourchure requirement is so different.
Post Edited (2016-06-23 03:10)
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-06-23 03:24
Thanks, Liquorice.
I suppose that I think that much of the job of expressing Brahms's music is to do with the representation of phrasing rhythms. These rhythms may coincide with the barline, or go against the barline.
To say that they are rhythms is to say that they are to do with beginnings – because rhythms are just beginnings occurring in time. In Brahms, we need to find in addition a VARIETY of beginnings – some attacks, some merely leanings on the first few notes of longer phrases – and then to match or contrast those beginnings with the beginnings of the other players according to the musical context.
This matching and contrasting is the responsibility of the group as a whole. If the group fails to do that, then they're just not worth taking seriously as a group – even though they may be able instrumentalists individually.
Tony
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Author: Jeroen
Date: 2016-06-23 11:43
Ken Shaw wrote:
> The Brahms Trio presents almost insoluble balance problems. Gabetta has a
> really resonant cello and plays with the usual amount of vibrato, restrained > a little. Still, Ottensamer's laid-back, elegant style just doesn't project
> enough.
Some years ago I heard Martin Frost playing this trio in a live concert. His compact and covered sound simply didn't stand up to the powerful cello and piano. It was the first time I heard Martin Frost live and I remember I was a little dissappointed then.
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Author: patrica
Date: 2016-06-23 14:56
Liquorice- thanks for the links. Since Ernst Ottensamer now also uses this combination, I wonder why they changed if it takes things into an undesirable direction? I only sometimes use some German models from Playnick and I would say the projection is actually very good. Please note there are a lot of models available from Playnick.
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Author: dorjepismo ★2017
Date: 2016-06-23 19:30
"Andreas Ottensamer isn't playing on the same make of clarinet that Leister used."
You're right, sorry! I was mesmerized by the wraparound register key. What make does he play? I only found that it is a wide Austrian bore.
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Author: seabreeze
Date: 2016-06-23 20:19
To hear the Brahms on a Wurlitzer brand Oehler clarinet (performed by Ottenstamer's colleague in Berlin, Wenzel Fuchs), listen to :
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Brahms%3A=clarinet+trio+a+moll+Wenzel+Fuchs.
The clarinet tone is still round and covered, but Fuchs is quite audible and forthright in his phrasal lead-ins. He also captures the "dreamy" ambiance of the music.
The balance among clarinet, cello, and piano is challenging but not insurmontable. I heard a well balanced rendition of the trio by Donald Montanaro. He played with a classic Buffet/Chedeville American "ring" tone and never got lost in the mix.
French clarinetist Vincent Penot in his YouTube performance with cellist Tatjana Vassilijeva doesn't seem to have any trouble staying above the water line either.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Brahms+Clarinet+Trio+-+Tatjana+Vassilijeva+-+Cello.
Fuchs, Montanaro, and Penot used no vibrato in their performances and didn't need to, but Romie de Guise-Langlois did make very good use of occassional and judicious vibrato as well as spinning out the most protean tone of any of these clarinetists (on her Yamaha SE clarinet).
Post Edited (2016-06-24 00:32)
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Author: patrica
Date: 2016-06-23 21:05
Does the clarinet really need to be staying above the water line? Is that only a matter of interpretation? Well, in my opinion, the roles of clarinet and cello are almost equal in this piece as they both play nearly the same amount of melodies. By contrast, in the quintet, clarinet becomes the leading role. Maybe as clarinet player, we always want to hear the clarinet part louder? It seems from op.114, op.115 to op.120, Brahms gradually realized the full potential of clarinet as a solo instrument.
Post Edited (2016-06-23 21:23)
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Author: dorjepismo ★2017
Date: 2016-06-23 21:18
The piano's nearly always above the water line--well, it _is_ the water line--so if the clarinet part is as important as it . . . Cellists can have the same problem as clarinetists with the piece, if they don't have a big sound. Ideally, you can put enough edge into the sound to make it audible without playing loud when you're not supposed to. Both Berliners are nice, but Ottensamer phrases longer, which I really like in Brahms, and Mozart too, for that matter.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2016-06-24 00:13
I'm going to repost something that Ken Shaw wrote mistakenly in the other thread, which was dedicated only to the evidence for the assertion that Mühlfeld had a big vibrato. I'll answer it briefly and sketchily, and then disappear.
Ken Shaw wrote:
>> I'll take the bait this once. I thought about the Brymer story carefully before mentioning it. I did so in the context of a discussion about the clarinet/cello balance in the Brahms Trio, and everyone (even Tony) agreed that it was a problem in the Ottensamer performance.
>> Although I'm nowhere close to Tony's playing level, I can hear problems as well as he can, and a big problem between Gabetta and Ottensamer was her continuous vibrato and his lack of it. Another big problem was Ottensamer's failure to play out where necessary, but the vibrato mismatch was certainly important.
>> Rather than calling names, let's talk about how to solve the balance problem in the Brahms Trio. I invite Tony to tell us about how he addressed the problem in his rehearsals and performances. >>
The short answer is, Ken does hear problems – but I hear DIFFERENT problems.
A very prevalent characteristic of this list is to reduce sophisticated distinctions to a lower level. Much of the thread about the Brahms Trio has been to do with the INSTRUMENTS that are being used. That's just nonsense: any good player knows that you choose instruments to do what you want. You're not their servant.
Then, there is the level that assumes that each of the players 'plays in a particular way'. So, there's a THING called, 'the clarinet part' and a thing called 'the 'cello part', and the players 'do whatever they do' to them. That is, play with vibrato, or not with vibrato, or louder or softer, or whatever.
What I'd say about that is that there is NO SUCH THING AS THE CLARINET PART, and NO SUCH THING AS THE 'CELLO PART – OR THE PIANO PART.
The music is rather, a mosaic of contributions to an overarching conception.
If the players understand that, then we as listeners MAY be drawn into that understanding too.
I have to say that, yet again, I am very disappointed by the level of many of the contributions here. You're so sure of yourselves.
There are a few presumptuous people here who think that I am underqualified, compared with the great current principals of the BPO, to comment on the performance by Ottensamer et al. But I've played Op 114 in concert around a couple of hundred times, and on occasion with 'cellists including Yo-Yo Ma, Mischa Maisky, Mario Brunello, Ivan Monighetti...and so on. I wouldn't claim that those performances were entirely satisfactory, because we were always struggling against this difficulty of unification that I've outlined above.
Anyway, here's my parting message. The music is a 'mosaic'. As Thea King once memorably said to a student playing a Brahms sonata: "You realise, don't you, that Brahms NEVER EVER SAW WHAT YOU HAVE IN FRONT OF YOU???"
The performers in question needed to understand that.
And, YOU LOT need to understand that.
Tony
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2016-06-24 01:28
Tony -
Please take the trouble to read my original posting. I wrote about many kinds of problems. I think that I was correct when I wrote that balance was the primary (though not the only) one, and that this was due largely to Gabetta's high energy tone, due in important part to her generous use of vibrato, and Ottensamer's non-vibrato, laid-back, low-energy style and tone.
You were of course right in pointing out numerous other problems, but I suggest that I pointed out the biggest one.
Thea King had a special talent for Brahms, which she played just right. Still, I don't understand your story. Are you saying that the Brahms sonatas weren't published in his lifetime? If so, so what? Brahms wrote them and knew very well what the notes were, without needing to look at the printed music.
I routinely read the Brahms sonatas from the piano/clarinet score to remind myself of the complex interchanges. I'm sure you do too, or at least run the piano part in your head. If that's not the point of your Thea King story, what is it?
By the way, I'm waiting for your discussion of how you deal with the balance problems in your own performances of the Brahms Trio.
Ken Shaw
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Author: dorjepismo ★2017
Date: 2016-06-24 02:53
I hope Tony doesn't really disappear. If you look at the Henle or Wiener Urtext Ausgabe editions, Brahms really did see something functionally close to that, after he'd written the piece. He saw the first edition proofs and hand-corrected them, and that's where the editions come from. They represent the closest we can come to touching his unified mosaic of the piece directly; we have to infer the rest through our experience, training and intuition, which is different for each of us. His conception of the piece might have constituted a unity, but I don't think that invalidates looking at "parts." Near the end of the fourth movement, you really can get a sense of individual voices, sometimes with different characters, struggling to be heard, and Brahms undoubtedly had at least two real people in mind--himself on piano--to fill those roles, to the extent that he didn't put in a lot of dynamics, assuming the performers would do the right thing with them. One view of the piece doesn't preclude the other. In fact, there might not be a lot of really great German music from Beethoven through Schoenberg that can be understood completely apart from the view of an individual voice struggling against, or at least contending with, something else. I doubt, though, that he would have played all those really detached 16ths to be followed by the same figure slurred on the clarinet, so Tony's probably right about the group not entirely doing it's job of getting things a little more compatible with one another.
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