Make Your Performance
'You',
In The 'Edition' of
'You'!
You have left the
quiet place within, where you work at your pace and your personal expression.
The tense, compact concern with ornaments, exact cadenzas, and exact phrasing of
your particular solo’s published edition reveals a concentration on what your
critics are going to think----what your former teachers would mark wrong.
Throw away all those 'tapes' of your old teachers and critics!
Remember this:
Mozart wrote almost no
ornaments, phrasing, or cadenzas into his original parts, --- scores.
In his era, those
were improvised by the soloists, changing sometimes with every performance,
slightly or radically. Ornaments now accepted in popular editions were added by
the editors; the phrasing and accepted cadenzas were also chosen by the
editors; in the time of Mozart, cadenzas were the ad lib solos for the artist,
changing with every performance. Many contemporary young classical
artists are now adopting this practice.
I mention all this to
let you adopt the attitude that all ornaments, phrasing, and cadenzas are not
written in stone-are in fact arbitrary;
you can change, add,
or skip a few,
as Jean-Pierre Rampal
and Galway amply did in their Bach Sonata recordings.
Martin Frost is a
young Classical clarinet soloist, much touted by critics, that is very
subjective and liberal in his ornamental and cadenza selections. Eddie
Daniels has a recent Copland Clarinet Concerto Youtube performance, where in he
improvises 90% of the cadenza, completely foreign to Copland's original written
material.
So don't concentrate
on the ornaments, phrasing, and editorially added detail, but rather on what
Mozart, or any other composer invented;---YOUR take on what they meant in their
voluptuous melodic materials
and structures. This is what will
be heard and savored by all in your performance, friends, audience, critics,
each and all. (Make coordinated phrasing of the motifs as they are
repeated and developed in all parts of the piece, especially in the development
sections.)
I'm
just trying to relax and convince all performers, that this is your
performance, not the editors 'clone version'; take the materials as you will
and express your music.
Sincerely,
Errol
Weiss Schlabach
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