this is the 2nd movement. I can believe I found this video of him playing this, since it was originaly written for him. Its great!!! Poulenc it great at the piano too!!
Probably not true, unless the note was rather isolated, or it was just a gimmick. It would throw the scale out excrutiatingly. The interval between the second C# and second octave D would be not a semitone, but 1 1/2 semitones.
Pulling out at the headjoint has been for years the choice of many soloists.
If done correctly it does not affect the rest of the scale.
For years, there were no b foot flutes available and soloists had to make due.
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The use of vibrato here seems to be to cover terrible breathing. Really boring performance. Why can't wind players from back then compete with their string/piano/voice counterparts?
there were b-foot flutes back then, just check the Dayton C Miller collection at the Smithsonian, they are just not so popular, especially earlier on, and to some extant, still in europe...
Rampal played beautifully when in his prime, rarely will we see such an artist again..look for his vintage recordings on itunes and amazon, they are a real treat..
anyway, Rampal didn't play the flute, he used it to express himself..
"Pulling out at the headjoint has been for years the choice of many soloists. If done correctly it does not affect the rest of the scale. "
Oh, come on! That flies totally in the face of acoustic science and the experience of any player I know. The scale is fixed by the placement of the tone holes relative to the location of the embouchure hole (and a number of other factors). You cannot change those proportions that much without drastically messing up the scale. It is the equivalent of moving a guitar or violin bridge a couple of cm out of position!
Please explain yourself better, or give references or links. Especially for what you mean by "done correctly".
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Or is it,Haisley, that you did not realise that this is about pulling the head out so far - almost right out - to change low C into B?
Micron, explain to us about those extenders for low B I see some using...I agree with you, I have not heard of that, one just substitutes a note other than low B to fit into the harmony of the piece
"So my friend leads me backstage to meet Rampal and there he was... chatting with the concertmaster. After a few banalities, I asked him about his flute and why he didn't use a B-foot. I don't remember his exact words but it was something along the lines of "real flutes have C-foots and those other B-foots are some kind of American contraption". So then I asked him how he was going to negotiate the low B's in the second movement in the Khatchaturian? His response... "I just pull out the headjoint and transpose". At the time, I didn't take that seriously.
But surely enough, in the rests before the section of the slow movement with the low B's, he pulls the headjoint out of the flute and shakes out a bunch of spit. Then when he puts it back in the instrument, it's clear that it's not where it normally would be and the whole flute is a couple of inches longer than it should be. He then proceeds to play the next section of that movement transposed up a half step. The intonation was perfect. At the next long rest, he repeated the procedure and put the headjoint back to its original position and finished the concerto.
The guy certainly was amazing.
Evan G. Bauman"
taken from a tribute to Rampal, http://www.larrykrantz.com/fluteweb/rampal.htm & I also remember reading in a few books, but I would have to go upstairs and dig them out and search through them to give you page numbers, etc. So I would seem to think he did it on a semi-regular basis, if he had a low b to play in a piece or movement.
thats prob a true story, but I also know he had a bfoot sent to him by Haynes to record something, then sent it back when the recording was completed...
If the story was true, then he would have had to do some extreme lipping (up or down) to get other notes in tune. That would be impossible in a faster movement, or by relatively unaccomplished player.
"...Micron, explain to us about those extenders for low B I see some using..."
Patrick, I have not seen what is probably an overpriced marketing thing, but once when I needed low B, I just slid some plastic tubing over the end to convert C to B. I lost C, but I guess not much low B music would have a low C. It made C# flat, but I was easily able to lip it up.
searching...
