Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2019-12-31 19:07
The discomfort that some people feel when playing, say, Weber I from an unadorned text (the B&H edition by Eric Simon, for example) is related to the discomfort those people may feel playing Mozart from the Bärenreiter NMA. The discomfort comes from the feeling that 'something is missing'.
But actually, nothing is missing.
What is present, though UNWRITTEN, is the conventional structure of the written barlines and the written phrasemarks, acting sometimes together and sometimes in competition. How you modulate that structure gives each performance an individuality and expressivity. The notations of hairpins, accents, added dynamics and so on cannot capture that style, which is why Mozart (though he had a pen:-) mostly did not use them.
I've gone into this elsewhere: see Phrasing in Contention.
This realisation of how phrasing and bar-structure work informs how we play 'the Bärmann edition' too. Then, that edition supplies suggestions for embellishment without compromising the underlying structure.
So the Bärmann edition doesn't represent 'how Bärmann played', when we look at it with our unreconstructed modern eyes. It represents rather what he added to an already existing style that persisted in how players of the time were accustomed to read the music.
Tony
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The Clarinet BBoard
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