Mozart clarinet concerto & Jos d"Hondt

Started by otterhouse, September 30, 2008, 12:08:56 AM

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otterhouse

Hello all,

I have a blog on the Dutch radio 4, with this month a recording of Jos d'Hondt playing Mozart's clarinet concerto

http://www.radio4.nl/page/blog/6053/40

The mp3's are at the bottom

For those who can't read Dutch...
Here is my English version:

Sometimes you find a record and you think, who was this player? Where did he came from... Well:
Jos d'Hondt was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1907. Early on, he had
a keen interest in music. Although he was a prodigy, from the hands of
king Albert I he received a gold medal for his playing in 1926,
his father insisted he should also learn a "proper job", and therefore
simultaneously schooled him in the family business, tailoring...
Jos d'Hondt replaced his teacher at the French opera in the Bourla theatre
in Antwerp, but when this company was closed down in 1933, he followed Paul Godwin
to the Netherlands, and played clarinet in his orchestra. During the war,
his ID (persoonsbewijs) indicating he was a "stranger",
he went in to hiding in Amsterdam. After the war he met his, Dutch, wife, and
stayed in the Netherlands, becoming the principal clarinetist at the Dutch
Radio Philharmonic orchestra, then conducted by figures as Paul van Kempen and
Bernard Haitink. During the next years, he became the most influential clarinet teacher
in the Netherlands. There was hardly any orchestra in the Netherlands during the
'60s and '70's that hadn't a Jos d'Hondt pupil in it's wind section. He was so
involved in education, that when ever he went to the toilet, orchestra members
would remark, "Jos is probably giving clarinet lessons again.... "

Among his students were George Pieterson (his nephew, Concertgebouworchestra),
Leo van Tol (Limburg symphony orchestra) and Henk de Graaf (Rotterdam Philharmonic
orchestra). Henk de Graaf remembers about his lessons with Jos d'Hondt:

In my first year at the Utrecht Conservatory,
I entered in class of Jos d'Hondt. He was
very strict and I had to unlearn certain things,
like the way I played staccato.
I always did it my own way, very rapid, and there was never anything
said about it. Jos d'Hondt was able to pinpoint exactly
what you had to do to sound the staccato right.
He never educated scholastic, but in a good professional way.
Most of the time he gave his lessons
at home in Hilversum. That was the easy for him,
so close to the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra
where he was solo clarinet player.
He taught at his attic and if you rang the doorbell in the morning,
the first thing he always asked was,
'Have you studied well this week?'
and if you then said 'Yes' and it was' No ',
and then played lousy, you could go again...
I never dared to say 'No', always said 'Yes',
and then tried to make the best of it.
Fortunately I was never send away.

He was often very direct in his verdict.
For example, if I played an accent
in the wrong place, he told me:
'Man, that must be quite different! "
In the lessons he always demonstrated a phrase
in a sublime way, I have learned a lot from that.
Jos was someone I look up to.
Once he gave a concert on television with the Radio
Philharmonic Sextet - wind quintet and piano.
I was waiting before the television for hours,
that's how I looked upon him.

We always started a half hour long with scales.
Everything from memory and in various ways
such as: two bound, two striked, dom7 chords.
Everything in the whole range of the clarinet
until you reached the difficult sharp and flat notes came.
After that came the etudes or scales of
Jeanjean, Cavallini, Perier and Baermann.
Then the elementary repertoire, with the same intention.
It was always two hours of hard labour,
but I never really dreaded those long lessons.
Everything was perfect. When that was not the case,
well, study a week at home then.
He simply demanded that everything was ok at the end.

Jos d'hondt taught in the conservatories of Utrecht, Amsterdam and Tilburg.
Just after he retired in 1973 he passed away...


Greetings,
Rolf

Mark G. Simon

Thank you for letting us hear this fine clarinettist who is not known in the US. He must have been a very good teacher. He does indeed have a very nice-sounding staccato, and he manages seamlessly those passages where Mozart takes the player just past the upper break and then back again (meas. 183 in the first movement). To my ears there is too much of a "pop" when he places his finger on a tone hole during a legato passage, though I know some players like this. He ought to have demanded a retake of the passage at meas. 84 in the last movement where there's a bit of a finger glitch.