Weber, Concerto No. 1 (F minor): First movement

Hello everyone - 

Welcome back to the Repertoire Study Group! This week we're looking at the first movement of Weber's first clarinet concerto - I thought that this piece was too big and too important to try to do the whole concerto all at once, so I'm going to share with you three excerpts just from the first movement. (If everyone finds this useful - I will do the other two movements in two weeks, please let me know what you think in the comments below!)

This is a very, very challenging concerto but if you are a lower tonebase clarinet level I would recommend trying the first excerpt, it will be great for working on your clarino register and a pleasure to play this opening, singing melody by Weber! 😊

You can download the excerpts as attached as a PDF to this post - and of course you can download the whole concerto from IMSLP!

I've used three different recordings to show of these three excerpts, but there are so many incredible recordings of this work: which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!

First Excerpt: The Opening Melody (tonebase levels 5+)

https://youtu.be/4pqNu_36O8M?si=hYkJebSEAEzt5pgY&t=89

• The first excerpt presented here by Sharon Kam (whose tonebase course on the Weber Concertino is worth watching if you are learning any music by Weber, as a lot of her comments can be applied to all of his pieces) in this great video also has the clarinet part below so you can follow along.
• If you saw my livestream last month on "playing from nothing" you might remember that I talked about this piece and its first note and how the practice of learning to play "from nothing" will help you when it comes to articulating this note beautifully. (You can still watch it by going to the Livestreams tab on tonebase and checking out past livestreams!)
• con duolo means "with sorrow" - after this dramatic and dark orchestral opening (one of the great orchestral introductions to any concerto) we want the clarinet to be lyrical and keening, emphasising the sad refrain of this beautiful melody.
• We should have a really clear difference between that first opening B and the C in the fifth bar after D - this is not an "echo" of the opening, but something is building, and that accent is important, as are all of the little crescendo-decrescendos that come after for the phrasing of this. 
• That last staccato that we play is so important - I think it provides this hint that something new is coming, that the oncoming virtuosity of the rest of the concerto is on the way. It's somehow light but also foreboding. 

Second Excerpt: Some tricky triplets

https://youtu.be/_6-Eolox6yg?t=182

• I've used the wonderful Andreas Ottensamer here as the example - and I've also marked where he breathes in this triplet excerpt in blue - he has fantastic breath control and capacity and if you can't make it that far (very understandable) then I've also marked in the excerpt where you might sneak a small breath in brackets in blue. 
• Pay attention as well to how much rubato he uses as well, pausing ever so slightly on some of the accented notes, and how much shape this gives the music. Weber marks this forte espressivo and we don't want it to sound too much like a technical exercise.
• However this also requires control, and control means that we start by practicing this excerpt with our metronome - I would alternate practicing it in legato (and even in air sound) with practicing it with the marked articulations. Make sure that you can play it as a technical exercise so that the decisions you make musically later are made because they make the most musical sense, not because you're struggling with the line.

Third excerpt: The Recapitulation

• In this final excerpt, we have the 'recapitulation' - the moment in any classical concerto where the melody from the opening returns - and here it does so with an even more haunting and foreboding quality than before.
• This excerpt also includes some dominant 7th arpeggios on D for you to practice, going down and then back up again (what goes down must come up?). Really breathe through here, we want the notes at the bottom of our lowest register to sound just as powerful as the higher clarion notes and that means we need to push a little, as though we're doing a crescendo, when we go down the arpeggio. It really can't be too loud as we get to the end of this excerpt, you've got the orchestra behind you and a fff marking!