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In Reply to: RE: The rest of the competitors from Round 2, Stage 1 posted by Chris from Lafayette on June 24, 2015 at 16:05:57
I'm following your report with interest, though I probably won't listen to any of the competitors myself until the very end.
Off topic, but apropos of your comment at the end on HIP and vibrato, I thought you and others here would be amused, or maybe annoyed, by the article below about vibrato and the classical clarinet and in classical music generally.
Don't you wish Richard Mühlfeld had lived long enough to record the Brahms clarinet quintet? OK, back to the piano competition.
Follow Ups:
Hi rbolaw - nice article. Rusinek is a fine player, and the Pittsburgh Symphony is easily one of the top ten in the world now. The article is also perfectly correct when it talks about how vibrato was not really used much at all in orchestral playing until the 20th century. It is used more often in classical solo playing than the article implies, however. Many players will use a very small amount for solo playing, but not orchestral playing.
One of my teachers was the long time principal horn of the San Francisco Symphony, Dave Krehbiel. In lieu of vibrato, he developed what he called a hand shimmer - he would wiggle his fingers inside the bell while playing, which would put just a little bit of shimmer in his sound during such solos as the one in the opening of the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, for instance. He did it better than anyone else, but some of his students, myself included, have used it occasionally.
About the only brass sections in the world who still use vibrato are in Russia and Eastern Europe, though even there it is fast disappearing. I do agree, as do just about all US wind players, that a great tone does not need vibrato - it should only be a sparingly used "special effect," if you will. If a player needs it to sound good, that is a problem.
Thanks for all that, very interesting. There are two other clarinetists who used vibrato, though in very different ways, well worth checking out if you haven't already: Jacques Lancelot and David Oppenheim. Lancelot long performed and recorded in a woodwind quintet with Jean-Pierre Rampal. He can also be heard to great effect in the Brahms sonatas with Annie D'Arco and in the Brahms quintet with the Amadeus Quartet.
Oppenheim was a close friend of Leonard Bernstein and was the dedicatee of his Clarinet Sonata. He headed Columbia Records' classical Masterworks Division in the 50s, and recorded the Stravinsky Octet and Soldiers' Tale with Stravinsky conducting, and the Brahms and Mozart quintets with the Budapest Quartet.
Madeline and I heard all six of the Mozart performances from yesterday and three from today (although we heard only the tail end of Geniusas' K. 466), and we've modified our predictions for the final round a bit, especially in view of Sergey Redkin's indifferent performance of the earlier A-major Concerto (No. 12, K. 414), so we both demoted him off of our top six lists:
Lucas Debargue (France - Yamaha)
Lukas Geniusas (Russia/Lithuania - Steinway)
Daniel Kharitonov (Russia - Steinway)
George Li (USA - Steinway)
Dmitry Masleev (Russia - Steinway) - he hasn't played yet, but we're assuming he does OK with his Mozart K. 466
For the sixth spot, we disagreed. Madeline is picking Maria Mazo (Germany - Fazioli), while I'm going with Ilya Rashkovskiy (Russia - Yamaha). I'm hearing Julia's K. 488 as I write this. Gawd, she's terrible - so many thoughtless mistakes and so much uneven tone production!
One nice thing about the Mozart Concerto round is that the competition used TWO orchestras. One was the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, which, as I mentioned yesterday, has allowed the string non-vibrato affectation to become part of its corporate sound. The other is the Moscow Soloists Chamber Ensemble, which plays with a more pleasing sonority which includes the use of vibrato. Unfortunately, this latter orchestra is not as agile as the MCO, and they're often sluggish and late. Their conductor, Ayrton Desimpelaere (a boy-babe, as Madeline points out!), seems very tentative as well. That's an extra burden for the pianists who played with this orchestra.
Julia has just finished now, so there are three left in the Mozart concerto stage of Round 2.
We're keeping to our predictions that we made above.
One big disaster occurred near the end of the exposition of the K. 467 ("Elvira Madigan") Concerto, as played by Mikhail Turpanov (who else?). Turpanov had a big memory slip and was floundering for a few seconds. Somehow, he weaseled out of it and the orchestra came in at the right time, avoiding a pause (re-start) in the performance. Kudos to the orchestra! (And it just confirmed Turpanov's place on the bottom of the list of competitors in this round as far as we're concerned.)
Also, we feel very strongly about the following four candidates, and we'll state that if they don't get in to the finals, then something is very wrong:
Lucas Debargue (France - Yamaha)
Lukas Geniusas (Russia/Lithuania - Steinway)
Daniel Kharitonov (Russia - Steinway)
George Li (USA - Steinway)
One last thing: although I hated the non-vibrato playing of the strings of the MCO, at least they did have a lot of babes in that orchestra - love the concert-mistress (and the intensity of her expressions), and the second oboist was a cutie too (a bit like Madeline when she was that age!).
So if you'll indulge me so I can crow a bit, here are the piano finalists, just announced a couple of minutes ago, in the Tchaikovsky Competition:
Lucas Debargue (France - Yamaha)
Lukas Geniusas (Russia/Lithuania - Steinway)
Daniel Kharitonov (Russia - Steinway)
George Li (USA - Steinway)
Dmitry Masleev (Russia - Steinway)
Sergey Redkin (Russia - Yamaha)
So. . . as you can see, both Madeline and I called five of the six correctly. And the sixth finalist, Redkin, was actually on both of our lists too until we demoted him after his Mozart performance. (I guess his Mozart performance was less of a determinant as far as the jury was concerned - or maybe they just thought he played the Mozart better than we did.) In a way, this was an easy one to call, since four of the competitors were clearly superior to the rest of the field. It was only the fifth and sixth positions that were open to more "interpretation" and argumentation.
In the finale, the competitors will play two concertos, one of which has to be by Tchaikovsky (only the first or second - the third is not allowed), and five of the six finalists will be playing the Tchaikovsky No. 1, with Geniusas playing No. 2. There are two days of rest now, with the final round revving up on Sunday.
I'm not listening to five Tchaik 1s, even if the concertmistress is a babe. I leave the rest in your and Madeline's capable hands, and am confident you will produce a good report after it's done.
Not sure if I'm looking forward to it myself! ;-)
BTW, I did read your linked article (above) about clarinet vibrato, and, yes, it WAS interesting. The only thing I would add is that clarinet vibrato has been a feature of the special woodwind sound of (for instance) the Czech Philharmonic, I think, ever since the days of Talich (certainly since the days of Ancerl!). And listeners have prized this tone quality of the orchestra for as long as I've been aware of it. For instance, when cellist Julian Lloyd Weber and Philips arranged to make a recording of the Dvorak Concerto with the CzPO, and arrived for scouting and first rehearsals, the conductor at that time, Vaclav Neumann, told Weber and the engineer that they might have to get used to the sound of the woodwinds, compared to those in other orchestras. Weber answered, "We love those woodwinds - that's why we're here!"
And finally,regarding babe concertmistresses, I don't think the MCO will be used for the "big gun" concertos in the final round. Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll have an orchestra with a babe concertmistress AND vibrato! ;-)
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