Author: John Peacock
Date: 2019-06-04 12:36
There's more to German playing than using an Oehler system. I've heard it said that German players are increasingy using mouthpieces that are more similar to the Boehm world - i.e. much more open lays compared to the very closed things that used to be traditional. You can see this trend exemplified in a mouthpiece like the Vandoren B40D, which is marketed as suitable for either kind of instrument. I have a Uebel Oehler from the 1950s, and the mouthpiece on that is indeed utterly different from the B40D. If you compare, say, the clarinet playing on Furtwangler's BPO recordings from the 1950s with a modern Oehler player like Blaz Sparovec (the recent Nielsen competition winner), you would be hard pressed to place them in a common school. A top professional friend of mine commented that he admired Sparovec's playing but initially had completely missed the fact he was using Oehlers. So I think you can argue that convergence of sound is happening universally, not just within different schools of Boehm playing.
|
|