 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: GBK
Date: 2019-08-24 03:12
The Baermann cadenza is in the Henle edition.
...GBK
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2019-08-24 06:16
HOLY MACKEREL !!!!!!
Did he bet someone how fast he could play the fast passages?!!?
Normally there is some musicality lost when players do this.........he didn't really lose anything!
.............Paul Aviles
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2019-08-24 07:35
As quick and as clean as he plays, his sound interests me more. Excellent quality and control.
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Author: Ed
Date: 2019-08-26 00:47
There are places in here where it reminds me of the scene where Chico Marx is playing accompanied by an ensemble. At the end he picks up the tempo, beats them to the end and says "beat you that time!"
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2019-08-26 01:37
Not to be too critical of the clarinet ensemble backing him up, but they are NOT the Chicago Symphony. It would be great if Williamson did this with his orchestra.
I do want to add that despite the great playing I still believe that if you want to play "faster than God," find a piece that does that rather than impose a frantic feel on a piece that is not meant to be frantic.
Back in college a friend asked my opinion of two cadenzas for a Haydn Cello concerto. She was fond of the one that was more technical and had more of a Schoenberg feel to it. My assessment was that the classical style cadenza was far more appropriate and if she wanted to play a modern cadenza she should find a solo that went better with it. I don't recall her speaking to me again. But it's the same idea as the above scenario
.............Paul Aviles
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Author: GBK
Date: 2019-08-26 02:39
There is no doubt that Williamson is a great player, but this interpretation was downright awful. All of the great operatic qualities of Weber's music were lost for the pure sake of speed. I frankly had trouble even listening to the entire performance.
I'm surprised that John Bruce Yeh went along with these misguided tempos.
And the shoddy playing of the backing ensemble did him no favors, either.
...GBK
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2019-08-26 04:55
The speed per se doesn't bother me, but Williamson's expressive choices in general are different from how I hear this music "in my head", which is how I try to play it. While nothing bothered me greatly, his performance does seem to miss the freshness and exploratory quality I often associate with Weber's music. Weber did indeed put more notes in where he wanted to increase the effect of intensity, so Williamson, who takes the slower variations pretty fast, is certainly following that idea in the fast variations. It does seem a little disproportionate to my ears, but not quite like a stunt.
For artists who can play fast it's probably rather difficult for them not to, as they may sense and feel music at faster tempos in general. For other musicians not naturally so speedily inclined, who probably represent the majority, those tempos may contradict their own sense of the same music. Fast performances almost always get criticized in similar ways, despite their being in many cases highly expressive and musical as well as unusually fast. I'm thinking here mostly of certain artists and performances on piano and also some on violin, where fast playing seemed to automatically draw negative comments and even accusations of showing off. (Ha, there's sometimes the converse too, where unusually slow interpretations attract suppositions of technical deficiencies.)
Again, what interests me most is Williamson's strong, controlled, and even sound, not a lush or German sound, nor really a beautiful French one, but one of a type I rarely hear in recent years. From one of his other videos, Williamson uses a "hard" setup, a Vandoren #5 reed with a relatively open mouthpiece. Yet he plays with great control over a wide dynamic range, from whisper soft to bold and emphatic, all sounding even and exact and clean. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4teoC3OnEg
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