The Clarinet BBoard

The Clarinet BBoard The C4 standard

New Topic | Go to Top | Go to Topic | Search | Help/Rules | Smileys/Notes | Log In

Previous Message | Next Message

Re: "Covered" tone?

Author: John Peacock
Date: 2018-01-14 21:05

In case there should be any doubt, I generally admire Leister as an artist, and the smooth dense sound he makes on his Sutermeister recording is something that it would be wonderful to be able to achieve whenever desired. Possibly one might choose not to play like that all the time, but the question is whether you are capable of doing so. For me, the clarinet has a natural desire to sound thin, brittle and very un-Leister-like unless you watch it like a hawk. On a good day, with the right mouthpiece and a reed that has been through a rigorous selection process, I might feel that I'm getting the upper hand in this fight - but it's sufficiently hard that a clear victor like Leister deserves to be celebrated.

Nevertheless, I do think his playing of the Sutermeister isn't beyond criticism. And this isn't a question of what style of playing one prefers, with me being an "excitement seeker" - it's just about fidelity to the text. If you look at what's written, you will see dynamics ranging from pppp to fff, together with extreme accents such as sffz. So the player is instructed to explore the extremes of what the instrument can deliver: from almost inaudibly quiet to as lound as you can play (surely accepting that the tone must become at least a little strident in the latter case). But if you were given a blank part and invited to write down the dynamics based on Leister's performance, you'd barely cover mp to f. It's this restricted range that makes the performance lack excitement.

So the interesting question is whether Leister plays in this way because he has some subtle musical justification for ignoring the composer's clear instructions, or because the setup that delivers his creamy sound makes it hard to achieve big dynamic contrasts. On the latter issue, I lack the necessary experience with German instruments, but I would indeed say that some French setups have this problem. e.g. I own a B40 mouthpiece and like the smooth sound it delivers - but I never settled on it because of dynamic range problems. I emphasise that this is a distinct issue from projection, which is about audibility of different tone colours in the context of other players - this is just about being able to play really loud or quiet with ease, and whether this ability is correlated with the basic tone quality.

Reply To Message | Avail. Forums | Flat View

Newer Topic | Older Topic

Topics