Reginald Kell
Encyclopedia
Reginald Clifford Kell was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 clarinetist.

Career

Born in York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, Kell was the first prominent player to apply vibrato consciously and consistently to his tone, in which respect he modelled himself on his colleague the oboist Léon Goossens
Léon Goossens
Léon Jean Goossens CBE, FRCM was a British oboist.He was born in Liverpool and studied at the Royal College of Music...

. (Jack Brymer
Jack Brymer
John Alexander Brymer OBE , was a British clarinettist, born in South Shields.-Biography:The son of a builder, Jack Brymer started his working life as a teacher, being at Heath Clark School, Thornton Heath, Surrey in the late 1940s...

 was another pioneer of vibrato, but came to prominence later than Kell.) Inspired by the great singers with whom he came in contact, notably Kirsten Flagstad
Kirsten Flagstad
Kirsten Målfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer and a highly regarded Wagnerian soprano...

, Kell sought to emulate their warm expressive sounds on the clarinet.

Kell was awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy of Music
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...

 in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 in 1929. After graduation he was Sir Thomas Beecham's
Thomas Beecham
Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet CH was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras...

 choice as first clarinet for the London Philharmonic before the Second World War and the Royal Philharmonic after it. He was succeeded in the LPO by Bernard Walton
Bernard Walton
Bernard Walton was a British classical clarinetist.Walton was born into a musical family. His grandfather was a cellist with the Hallé Orchestra under the eponymous founder Charles Hallé, and his father played in the Queen's Hall Orchestra...

 and in the RPO by Jack Brymer. He was Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...

's principal clarinettist in the Lucerne
Lucerne
Lucerne is a city in north-central Switzerland, in the German-speaking portion of that country. Lucerne is the capital of the Canton of Lucerne and the capital of the district of the same name. With a population of about 76,200 people, Lucerne is the most populous city in Central Switzerland, and...

 Festival Orchestra, and was invited, but declined, to take the same position in Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra
NBC Symphony Orchestra
The NBC Symphony Orchestra was a radio orchestra established by David Sarnoff of the National Broadcasting Company especially for conductor Arturo Toscanini...

 in 1939.

His solo repertoire extended from Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli was an Italian violinist and composer of Baroque music.-Biography:Corelli was born at Fusignano, in the current-day province of Ravenna, although at the time it was in the province of Ferrara. Little is known about his early life...

 and earlier to twentieth century works.

Kell emigrated to the USA in 1947, where he made a successful concert and recording career. He was also a noted teacher, his best-known pupil being Benny Goodman
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David “Benny” Goodman was an American jazz and swing musician, clarinetist and bandleader; widely known as the "King of Swing".In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman led one of the most popular musical groups in America...

, who approached him for lessons in 1948/49. Kell initially refused, considering that any necessary changes would have an initial, temporary backwards effect on Goodman's playing; he did not want the American public to view him as "the man who ruined our Benny Goodman." Goodman persisted and Kell accepted him as a student in 1952 and taught him until his return to England. His other pupils included the soloist and conductor Alan Hacker.

Kell returned to England in 1958, taking up an appointment at the Royal Academy of Music. He retired from playing in his early fifties, and returned to the USA in 1959, where he had a technical post for the local distributors of Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes
Boosey & Hawkes is a British music publisher purported to be the largest specialist classical music publisher in the world. Until 2003, it was also a major manufacturer of brass, string and wind musical instruments....

 instruments. He retired in 1966 and died in Frankfort
Frankfort, Kentucky
Frankfort is a city in Kentucky that serves as the state capital and the county seat of Franklin County. The population was 27,741 at the 2000 census; by population it is the 5th smallest state capital in the United States...

, Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

, USA in 1981.

In 2007, the Deutsche Grammophon
Deutsche Grammophon
Deutsche Grammophon is a German classical record label which was the foundation of the future corporation to be known as PolyGram. It is now part of Universal Music Group since its acquisition and absorption of PolyGram in 1999, and it is also UMG's oldest active label...

 label issued a multi-CD box set of all of Kell's recordings for the American Decca
Decca Records
Decca Records began as a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934; however, owing to World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades....

company (CD set 477 5280). These, and many of Kell's other recordings may also be found on iTunes.
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