 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: graham
Date: 2009-09-09 12:44
It seems from some web searching that this may be the earliest or one of the earliest examples of a recorded clarinettist. Samples can be down loaded from a site called "The Acoustic Era - Clarinet Recordings Vol 1". I have done a bit of listening and it raises a concern.
My concern is as to the validity of the recordings. I should say that many of those which do not involve Tuson do sound old enough to be what they say there are. There is one track of Charles Draper which I know already and is recognisably the correct performance. But the Tuson material sounds just like an electric era recording, not something from the late 19th or early 20th century. In fact it sounds like it could be a tape era recording.
Does anyone have any other information on this performer and his contemporaries?
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-09-09 15:46
I found the site you are referring to:
http://www.northpacificmusic.com/AcousticEra.html
I recognize the Georges Grisez Weber recording as one that was played during a radio interview with Harold Wright shortly before his death.
The Tuson recordings appear to come from an old cylinder recording, as indicated on this page (where you can download them in their entirety, apparently):
http://www.archive.org/details/WilliamTuson-01-10
Incidentally, is it just me or are some of these old timers "rhythmically challenged?" I listened to the Draper clip and he seems to rush so severely at times that the orchestra struggles to keep up with him. Same thing with Grisez's Weber 2 recording. It just surprises me to hear two musicians with such illustrious professional careers play like that. Have standards of musicianship really improved that much in 100 or so years?
Post Edited (2009-09-09 15:56)
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Author: graham
Date: 2009-09-09 16:35
Thanks mrn; but don't you find the sound on the Tuson recordings unconvincing (i.e. too recent)?
Draper's rushing Concertino is pretty famous. He seems to have regarded it as a show-stopper that would impress the audience the more reckless it sounded. Draper was a showman at heart. I don't think he beleived that the Weber warranted any greater respect.
I have a tape of him doing most of the Concertino with piano. The recording quality is very dim, but he seems to have been just a little calmer, but still irreverent.
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-09-09 16:54
graham wrote:
> Thanks mrn; but don't you find the sound on the Tuson
> recordings unconvincing (i.e. too recent)?
They do seem to be of pretty high quality, especially compared to the others.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-09-22 23:16
Mike wrote:
>> Incidentally, is it just me or are some of these old timers "rhythmically challenged?" I listened to the Draper clip and he seems to rush so severely at times that the orchestra struggles to keep up with him. Same thing with Grisez's Weber 2 recording. It just surprises me to hear two musicians with such illustrious professional careers play like that. Have standards of musicianship really improved that much in 100 or so years?>>
The degree to which what we want to call 'rushing' was a feature of performances at that time is very striking, and quite frightening to modern ears. If you want to be even more frightened, see:
Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1920-1950 (Cambridge University Press 1992), ISBN 0-521-23528-6
and
Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Yale University Press 2004), ISBN 0-300-10246-1
...both by Robert Philip.
Tony
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-09-23 18:38
Tony Pay wrote:
> The degree to which what we want to call 'rushing' was a
> feature of performances at that time is very striking, and
> quite frightening to modern ears. If you want to be even more
> frightened, see:
That's fascinating. I wonder how far back in time people played like that--if that was just an early 20th century phenomenon that coincided with the advent of recordings or if it was really a long-standing practice of the romantic era. Did Muhlfeld play Brahms' music like that, for instance? (which is a little hard for me to fathom, given the intricacy of much of Brahms' music and the fact that Brahms is so closely associated with his classical predecessors--but then again, I wouldn't have imagined anyone playing Weber like Draper and Grisez, either!)
It makes me also wonder if this "out of control" sort of playing might have helped fuel, in a reactionary sense, the neoclassical movement's return to rationalism. It certainly seems to explain why Stravinsky felt such a need to issue strict instructions in his Three Pieces to follow his tempos and markings, for instance.
Thanks for the Robert Philip references. I will have to check those out--I should be able to obtain them through interlibrary loan.
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Author: graham
Date: 2009-09-24 08:18
You can listen to Draper's 1917 recording of extracts of the Brahms Quintet to get an idea of how he dealt with Brahms. It is only a handful of years later than his Concertino. In the Brahms, he does not play flat out or rush. He and the quartet are fluid with the tempi, and at one point he adds a whole beat which is not there (and which he did again in the 1928 full recording), but for the most part such fluid traditions in playing the piece have survived into the modern period. His later Mozart recordings (two quintets in the 1920s) show no sign on rushing. His 1928 Schubert Shepherd is again fluid and rhapsodical but far from rushing.
So it seems to me that he just viewed the Concertino as a salon piece, and did not give it the respect he gave Brahms et al.
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