The virtuoso clarinet jack brymer biography
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Famous Players
Clarinet players from Stadler to Fröst
There are and were a lot of excellent and popular clarinet players and ensembles, and it is not simple to give you a list of the "best known" or "the best". You find a list of the ones that I found were/are important in their time.
Quite often the clarinet players influenced composers directly - this wasn't always just a professional relationship only, but often a friendship. It helped both: The musician needed new and popular pieces to play, and the composer benefited from finding out what a player could do with the instrument. Most composers then and today play the piano and maybe one other instrument, the more they know about the characteristics of the instruments, the better they can set music for them. You find a lot of such relationships between composer and player: Stamitz and Joseph Beer, Mozart and Stadler, Spohr and Hermstedt, Weber and Baermann, Brahms and Mühlfeld, as well as Benny Goodman who worked together wi
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Program: Clarinettist Jack Brymer
"The ability to play the clarinet is the ability to overcome the imperfections of the instrument. There's no such thing as a perfect clarinet, never was and never will be."
Since its invention in Germany more than 300 years ago, the mellow clarinet has enjoyed a storied history. A versatile instrument, it manifested in just about every genre in the 20th century, and played a major role in the evolution of jazz.
Sir Jack Brymer OBE, the doyen of 20th century British clarinettists, whom The Times dubbed “the leading clarinettist of his generation, perhaps of the century,” had a less than perfect clarinet when he started playing aged five!
Self-taught and a school teacher in Croydon initially, Brymer struggled for 13 years, with a sharp-pitch A clarinet, with a bit sawn off in the school woodwork room! Later as a professional orchestral musician, he’d claim the struggle was worth it. He could solve almost every problem he enco
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