Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Make Your Performance 'You', In The 'Edition' of 'You'!



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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