Author: Loree BF51
Date: 2012-04-13 01:26
I’m afraid that I disagree with you in your use and interpretation of the youtube video of Francois Leleux. Before I wrote this, I took the precaution of watching and listening very hard to this video, so that I had a real good grasp of it. First, his sound was a lot better than I expected, being fairly smooth. The part of his playing that I didn’t care for was his application of vibrato. In the Schumann A major Romance example, it seems that a lot of the time, he is applying vibrato to notes that are not the most important in the melodic line. In a way it is almost like starting a tone out straight and then letting the vibrato come in a couple seconds later, except here, it’s being applied to a moving line and by the time the vibrato occurs, the important notes have gone by. Now, you may say that this is nit-picking to the nth-degree and that this is only a short excerpt, not the whole of the Mozart Concerto, but I would look at what notes in the melody should be emphasized and which ones shouldn’t be.
Now, regarding what he says about reeds, what I hear is, “I do a “V”---------- and I don’t like to use too much time.” Well, when you make reeds with a French-type, short-scrape, you don’t have to spend much time scraping reeds, for goodness sake!
I find it hard to believe that he continues to use a shaper tip (“fascion” (sic?)), Rigoutat, early #2, with one ear broken off. This happened to my teacher and while I wouldn’t have wanted to be there at the time, this very negative event, lead directly and quickly to the development of the Brannen shaper tips. If this hadn’t happened to him, we may never have had this very positive outcome.
In a similar way, because of the fact that Stokowski demanded a different sound from Tabuteau, this lead to the long-scrape reed with it’s several different sections which requires much more knife work. Because we feel that it produces a more agreeable sound, I don’t think we should apologize for having to put in the additional time that it takes to get that sound. Regards.
R. Still former student
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