Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2019-09-05 12:28
More suggestive for me than either of the Henle solo parts is to consider what is happening at this point in the music. We’ve just had a wonderful declamatory passage, doubtless written to showcase Baermann’s powerful and expressive sound, and now we’re in a much more intimate register.
I sometimes suggest to myself that the bit beginning on the high Bb represents an orator king giving his vision to his country (including the military in bar 9:-) But then, he has to explain himself to the children, which he does in a very intimate manner. In Weber’s manuscript, this triplet passage beginning on the throat Bb has no dynamic or articulation marks at all, to begin with, seeming to me to argue for a very simple approach.
The first marking occurs on the third beat of the fifth bar of the section, over which Ab Weber writes an accent, corresponding to the added tension of the harmony in the strings. If you mess about with beat 3 of bars two and four as in the editions, you destroy the power of this nuance.
There’s more to say about how harmonic considerations affect choice of articulation later, too. Without going into too much detail, you can identify appoggiaturas in the solo line that give opportunities for nuance: in bar 9 for example, where triplets 2&3, 4&5 can profitably be slurred together as appoggiaturas customarily were in the style.
This approach sets the stage for the much more playful Baermann cadenza – which he was quite right to suggest including in my opinion, contrary to some purists.
Tony
|
|
The Clarinet BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
