Memory Cornodibassetto

Travel with Corno di Bassetto?

[This is the iPad version. For the full version click CornodiBassettto Full on the side panel]

My first love was the Spitfire which was normal when I was a kid. I still remember actually touching one!!!

I loved walking into London from my home in Sudbury Town, Wembley. I must have walked every inch of London while much of it was in ruins.

I seem to have done a lot of jobs – Making glass radio fronts – Selling silk in Oxford Street – Blue Coating in Butlins – Running an Amusement Arcade – Making and Selling Toffee Popcorn -Teaching Film Studies – tutoring anything else – Peripatetic woodwind teaching – Cathedral Lay Clerking – Playing in a Mecca Big Band – Gigging on saxophone and clarinet – Playing operatics – Guiding French people around London (and losing them!!!) and anything else that would earn money.

Unfortunately, I wasted my teenage years learning military things although I admit that I did enjoy riding around Germany on a tank with British soldiers – doing impossible rock climbs – leading survival courses – gigging around with my Jazz band – doing personal gigs where the band would push me up into the dorm window after midnight. I even won the ‘Wavell Prize’ for “Initiative” after I wrote up all my escapist activities!!

Eventually I studied Physics and Mathematics and briefly became a Theoretical Physicist. Then I saw the light of day and did another degree course – this time in Music Composition.

With a desperate need to actually earn some money, instead of doing music research, I had to take a job with the Arts Council of Great Britain, then Cardiff University followed by a music job in Australia and a Mathematics job in England.

Then, after the most terrible part of my life “so far”, I was unfortunately set free to travel . . . . .

Why, you ask, should anyone call their blog page “Corno di Bassetto”?

Well, the truth is that all the other other more mundane instruments of the orchestra had been taken. I was surprised to find that the “Corno di Bassetto” name was still not claimed in this corner of the world wide web.

Most of us only know the Corno di Bassetto from that sad opening to Mozart’s Requiem. Why did Mozart choose these instruments? The obvious answer is that their sounds can be truly “sad” and I think most conductors draw this feature out in performance.

But I like to think that, if Mozart had any premonition of his own eventual death, he would anticipate missing his friends including Anton Stadler for whom he had written this Corno di Bassetto obligato in Titus, “La Clemenza di Tito”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ldo4LV56RU

After writing this obligato, Mozart completed a concerto for Anton Stadler which was also originally begun as a concerto for Corno di Bassetto.

Mozart changed this to a Concerto for Bassett Clarinet, in which form we have only recently had the privilege of hearing it. But of course, he also wrote a wonderful Bassett Clarinet obligato in ‘La Clemenza di Tito’. Here we see Claudio conducting

Cecilia Bartoli in the aria “Parto, Parto, Ma Tu Ben Mio” featuring the Bassett Clarinet playing of Sabine Meyer. I should add that, when I first heard this in the Estates Theatre in Prague where Anton Stadler first performed this obligato conducted by Mozart, the clarinet came though very clearly against the voice. (With recordings, we are alas subject to the wiles of the sound engineer!!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaKX21earkk

So why not hear the Slow Movement and the Rondo for Bassett clarinet which Mozart also wrote for Anton Stadler? You can see here how much longer is Sabine Mayer’s Bassett Clarinet compared with the length of the A Clarinet we have been used to seeing in the concert hall for this concerto.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccl-_nneMPE

As a musician and erstwhile music critic, I was very aware that the name ‘Corno di Bassetto’ had been used by George Bernard Shaw. Apart from his often strange controversial and weird utterances, some of his more piercing observations live with us today.

Would you believe that I have actually trod the boards once in my life with a very small part in “St Joan”? It was Graham Green who prepared the screen version of Shaw’s play. . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAaj4gBQSOg

Another film from a Shaw stage play is ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ELYjU7qvI

We have all probably heard of ‘Pygmalion’ later known in another adaption as “My Fair Lady”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx41QSl2EM8

Other works by GBS include ‘Man and Superman’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFrL1VLJY6E

‘Candida’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2SLPfTrQrs

. . . . and ‘The Arms and the Man’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4FchU7tumI

This is why anyone using the name ‘Corno di Bassetto’ must pay homage to GBS.