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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The Clarinet BBoard
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